It was a rough experience for a beginner, but a wholesome one, and furnished the usual vicissitudes of frontier life.

They were wet, cold, and hungry, or warm, dry, and well fed, by turns.

They slept in a tent, or the huts of the scattered settlers, and oftener still beneath the stars.

They met a war party of Indians, and having plied them with liquor, watched one of their mad dances round the camp-fire.

In another place they came on a straggling settlement of Germans, dull, patient, and illiterate, strangely unfit for the life of the wilderness.