His wife, a large, mild-eyed, patient young woman of some twenty-six years, kept her hut and children as tidy as circumstances admitted, assisted her husband in preparing the skins, and sometimes accompanied him on his trapping excursions.
On that lonely coast, seldom visited in summer, and wholly cut off from human communication in winter, they might have lived and died with as little recognition from the world as the minks and wildfowl with whom they were tenants in common, but for a circumstance which called into exercise unsuspected qualities of generous courage and heroic self- sacrifice.
The dark, stormy close of November, 1854, found many vessels on Lake Erie, but the fortunes of one alone have special interest for us.

About that time the schooner Conductor, owned by John McLeod, of the Provincial Parliament, a resident of Amherstburg, at the mouth of the Detroit River, entered the lake from that river, bound for Port Dalhousie, at the mouth of the Welland Canal.
She was heavily loaded with grain.

Her crew consisted of Captain Hackett, a Highlander by birth, and a skilful and experienced navigator, and six sailors.

At nightfall, shortly after leaving the head of the lake, one of those terrific storms, with which the late autumnal navigators of that "Sea of the Woods" are all too familiar, overtook them.

The weather was intensely cold for the season; the air was filled with snow and sleet; the chilled water made ice rapidly, encumbering the schooner, and loading down her decks and rigging.