CHARLES GUYON. 179 



I shot more than twenty plugs at him, and I don't know 

 how I would have got out of this brush if you hadn't 

 come." 



The story was too good to keep. He didn't hear the 

 last of it for some time. 



Bill Patterson said: "Charley, that venison was very 

 good, but there was a taste of wood about it. How do 

 you suppose it got that flavor?" 



Joe Hall hailed him with: "Hey, Charley! That ven- 

 ison tasted as if he had broken into Darcy's shop and had 

 eaten his shoe pegs. What d' ye s'pose he'd been feedin' 

 on?" 



The multitude of islands between Wisconsin and 

 Iowa at this point renders it difficult to tell where Grant 

 River ends or loses itself in the Father of Waters. It is 

 several miles from shore to shore, and channels of many 

 depths and widths separate the islands. These water- 

 ways, the "kills" of New York and the "bayous" of the 

 lower Mississippi, are here called sloughs, pronounced 

 sloo. One of the beauties of our language is that this 

 word may be pronounced sluff, slouw or sloo, each hav- 

 ing a different meaning. In a recent letter from Mr. 

 Seaton he says, Jn reply to a question : "The inland island 

 waters, most of which go dry in summer, I think, are 

 properly called sloughs, and the name is not a provincial- 

 ism peculiar to this part of the Mississippi valley. Web- 

 ster gives the pronunciation 'slou,' and here it is spelled 

 sloo, and means a sink or depression in the islands in 

 which the water gathers and in some cases remains all the 

 time, and in others it signifies channels or sluiceways in 

 which part of the waters pass from one stream to the 

 other, i. e., the over-swollen Mississippi to the depressed 

 Grant River and vice versa-, hence we have 'Swift sloo,' 

 'Hay sloo' and several others known to the fishers and 



