HIS FIRST JOURNEY ACROSS THE PRAIRIES 49 



had time to go ashore and most of us hurried off for a ramble 

 along the beach, or for a swim, or to climb one of the wooded rocky 

 heights. The beach was covered with the maritime vetch or wild 

 pea in flower, and beach grasses of various kinds. When the 

 Botanist came down to the shore he was in raptures over sundry 

 rare mosses, and beautiful specimens oiAspidium fragrans, Woodsia 

 hyperborea, Cystopteris montana and other rare ferns that he had 

 gathered. The view from the summit away to the north, he 

 described as a sea of rugged Laurentian hills covered with thick 

 woods. In the meantime some of the passengers went off with 

 the Botanist to collect ferns and mosses. He led them a rare 

 chase over rocks and through woods, being always on the 

 lookout for the places that promised the rarest kinds, quite in- 

 different to the toil or danger. The sight of a perpendicular face 

 of rock, either dry or dripping with moisture, drew him like a 

 magnet, and, with yells of triumph, he would summon the others 

 to come and behold the trifle he had lit upon. Scrambling, pant- 

 ing, rubbing their shins against the rocks, and half breaking their 

 necks, they toiled painfully after him, only to find him on his 

 knees before some "thing of beauty" that seemed to us little 

 different from what we had passed by with indifference thousands 

 of times. But, if they could not honestly admire the moss, or 

 believe it was worth going through so much to get so little, they 

 admired the enthusiasm, and it proved so infectious that, before 

 many days, almost everyone of the passengers was so bitten with 

 "the grass mania" or "hay fever" they had begun to form collec- 

 tions." 



On July 22nd, we arrived early in the morning at Prince 

 Arthur's Landing (Port Arthur) and landed at the commence- 

 ment of the Dawson Route which was being started when I was 

 there in 1869. We halted only a very short time there as pre- 

 parations had been made for us and we almost immediately start- 

 ed for Lake Shebondowan, forty-five miles distant. We travelled 

 in wagons up this road and found it very good indeed after what 

 I had seen three years before. 



At Lake Shebondowan we took a water route to the North 

 West Angle. At this stage I may mention how the party was 



