Our encampment this night was the most charming that can be imagined.
Owing to the heavy service the men had gone through in the earlier part
of the day, we took but a short stage for the afternoon, and, having
pulled some seven or eight miles to a spot a short distance below the
"little Butte," we drew in at a beautiful opening among the trees.

The soldiers now made a regular business of encamping, by cutting down a
large tree for their fire and applying themselves to the preparing of a
sufficient quantity of food for their next day's journey, a long
stretch, namely, of twenty-one miles across Winnebago Lake. Our
Frenchmen did the same. The fire caught in the light dry grass by which
we were surrounded, and soon all was blaze and crackle.

Fortunately the wind was sufficient to take the flames all in one
direction, and, besides, there was not enough fuel to have made them a
subject of any alarm. We hopped upon the fallen logs, and dignified the
little circumscribed affair with the name of "a prairie on fire." The
most serious inconvenience was its having consumed all the dry grass,
some armfuls of which, spread under the bear-skin in my tent, I had
found, the night before, a great improvement to my place of repose.

Our supper was truly delightful, at the pleasant sunset hour, under the
tall trees beside the waters that ran murmuring by; and when the bright,
broad moon arose, and shed her flood of light over the scene, so wild
yet so beautiful in its vast solitude, I felt that I might well be an
object of envy to the friends I had left behind.

But all things have an end, and so must at last my enthusiasm for the
beauties around me, and, albeit unwillingly, I closed my tent and took