Page:Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America.djvu/257

Rh marvellous report, current among the natives, of an approaching change in the order of nature. Among other prodigies, a race of men had sprung up from the earth whose eyes and mouths were placed in their breasts. These monsters practised an unbounded hospitality, having always on the fire a gigantic copper cauldron, containing the carcases of five moosedeer! and the appropriate scene of this wild tale was the Horn Mountains, on the west side of Great Slave Lake. The whole story afterwards turned out to have originated in a dream.

On the 25th the people despatched with our February express returned from Fort Simpson, having performed the journey in nineteen days. They brought us our letters from home, together with intelligence of the demise of his Majesty William the Fourth, and the accession of our gracious sovereign Queen Victoria; which news had reached the Hudson's Bay ships before they sailed from the Hebrides, in July. We at the same time received a distressing account of the fatal ravages of the small-pox among the Assiniboines of the Saskatchewan. Thirty men of that tribe had crossed the plains to the banks of the Missouri in the summer of 1837, with the view of stealing horses. They found the unfortunate natives of the Missouri dying by hundreds of Q 2