Anticosti to our north, and in the course of the following morning were fairly in the vast river St. Lawrence itself.

"Good morning, sir!" exclaimed a passenger with a frightful twang, with whom I had talked before and taken for an American, though he was a Canadian, and who challenged me the moment I came on deck -"good morning, sir!" he twanged out with great offhand rapidity. "Too late, too late; lost all the best of the scenery."

"Lost it all? Where and what was it all, then?" "About fifteen miles down stream."

"Was it very fine?"

"Don't know at all, sir; didn't see it myself."

This is the way so many of them talk. I am well persuaded nobody had said a word to him on the subject.

The St. Lawrence was now fairly before me, and we were sailing up that noble breast of water, the grand entrance to Canada, and the outlet to all the six vast lakes above, which contain the greatest body of fresh water in the world.

And this is the splendid St. Lawrence. In what does its splendour consist? It mainly consists in the breadth and volume of its own magnificent bosom ; and not only so, but in the bright, clear sparkle of its continuous mighty stream-no taint, no stain; all crystal. But this very breadth of water has an opposing effect. It serves to minimize the scenery of the banks-features so vital to the beauties of a

river. The hills are not, for the most part, particularly high, and they are some miles away from you. From the real entrance to the river proper, which is marked as ending between Pointe des Monts and Cape Chat, up to Quebec, the width of the stream is said to vary from ten to thirty miles, that distance being about six hundred. And here, again, one is wonderfully impressed with the reflection that the great steamer you are sailing on can not only reach Quebec, but steam up to Montreal, some two hundred miles above. Virgil had not seen the St. Lawrence when he wrote "Fluviorum Rex Eridanus."

To say that there is comparatively nothing to see on either side of you would be to exaggerate in an opposite direction from those who descant too largely in the usual style of scene-describing sentences. But if any one who had beheld the Columbia and Hudson were led to expect the same class of beauty on both sides of the St. Lawrence, proportionate with the huge waters, he would be disappointed, and would be looking in the wrong direction for the really grand feature of the scene.

But apart from all these considerations, and above them, are the sensations of the beholder, "for the first time," in finding himself, after many days of blank ocean, gazing on all about him in a still really New World, far distant from the old familiar nest of European countries, and occupied in all its vastness by one people under one crown. All is distant, all is new, all is vast, and all feels free.

It was early on the morning of Sunday, June the 20th, that the well-known Cape Diamond, rising 340 feet above the river, gradually rode out into the view, and formed the great centre object in the perspective. Looking towards its towering and increasing form as we moved along between the banks, the effect was grand. Surmounted by the citadel of Quebec, it stood over Quebec itself, which with its upper and lower towns spread down to the water's edge below, and occupied with its wharfs the point that is there formed by the confluence of the St. Charles with the St. Lawrence. Familiar history, and a well-known painting (rather more fanciful than historical), came to the mind simultaneously with this great object to the eye; and it seemed to me that such associations could be more readily evoked while gazing on the whole at this distance than by wandering over the actual ground with every evidence that all had been long since changed. Bold shores surround, and the Isle of Orleans, which divides the stream, enhances the beauty of the scene, and forces your vessel to take a course which best serves to display its varied and impressive attractions.

CHAPTER III.

QUEBEC TO NIAGARA.

So here we are in Canada. And on landing at Quebec, you at once realize what you have to pay for the pleasure of gazing on a noble rock. The Colonels, the Divine, and the non-Divine, we all clambered up through dust, and certainly not much architectural beauty, to the St. Louis Hotel. It owns a good entrance-hall, but we all know what oldfashioned buildings in cities like Quebec must be ; the rooms are necessarily all small, and some of them curiously shaped, but we fared very well altogether. One article we experienced in overflowing abundance -that utterly intolerable and unclean nuisance called the house-fly. This was inside the house, while on the outside, immediately at the entrance, was another -the fly-men. They all want you to be always wanting a fly. You go across the street for something and come back-twice you are tormented; so that I came to say, at last, that I knew not which were the greatest nuisance, the fly-men or the flies.

At the landing I somehow managed to be behind

C

my friends, and was nearly lost with my driver there. The province of Quebec is mainly French— the numbers given are 1,200,000 against 300,000 in a population of a million and a half-but not one word, or perhaps just one, could I understand among the many that crowded round me and my portmanteau to engage me for the hotel. Though rather irritating, the glorious babel was, nevertheless, grotesquely entertaining, and it was not till I came to talk at the post-office and other recognized centres that I was able really to understand why the people are called French. However, there is, of course, a good deal of English, good, bad, and indifferent, spoken all around. The nominal charge for board and lodging at the hotel was four dollars a day, but the extras were almost as tiresome as the flies.

On the following morning the Colonels invited me to accompany them on a visit to Colonel Turnbull, commanding the cavalry, and we afterwards lunched with Colonel Duchesne and the officers of the Quebec garrison. The forenoon was occupied in driving over the heights, under Colonel Turnbull's most courteous guidance, and in realizing some of the extensive views of the river and country round. The chief characteristic of the scenery appeared to me to be its vast extent. While on the heights-the Heights of Abraham-it was again impossible not to recall those events of which they were the scene in 1759, when Wolfe, after a bold and brilliant assault, took and kept possession of them against Montcalm, and died