snow-ploughs conveniently shunted, ready for use at a moment's notice.
The snowsheds are a permanent institution on the Intercolonial Railway.
The train passes through them sometimes for the length of half a mile.
They are simply wooden erections like a box, built in parts of the line
where the snow is likely to drift. Passing swiftly through them just now
you catch glimmers of light through the crevices. Presently, when the
snow comes, these will be effectually closed up. Snow will lie a hundred
feet thick on either side, to the full height of the shed, and the
train, as watched from the line, will seem to vanish in an illimitable
snow mound.

This is as yet in the future. At present the landscape has all the
beauty that snow can give without the monotony of the unrelieved waste
of white. Mounds of brown earth, tufts of grass, bits of road, roofs of
houses, and belts of pine showing above the sprinkling of snow, give
colour to the landscape. One divines already why Canadians, in building
their houses, paint a door, or a side of a chimney, or a gable-end, red
or chocolate, whilst all the rest is white. This looks strange in the
summer, or in the bleak interregnum when neither the sun nor the
north-east wind can be said absolutely to reign. But in the winter, when
far as the eye can roam it is wearied with sight of the everlasting
snow, a patch of red or of warm brown on the scarcely less white houses
is a surprising relief.

The country in the neighbourhood of Riviere du Loup, where the Grand
Trunk finishes and the Intercolonial begins, is filled with comfortable
homesteads. The line runs through a valley between two ranges of hills.
All about the slopes on the river side stand snug little houses, each
within its own grounds, each having a peaked roof, which strives more or
less effectually to rival the steepness of its neighbour. The houses
straggle for miles down the line, as if they had started out from Quebec
with the intention of founding a town for themselves, and had stopped on
the way, beguiled by the beauty of the situation. Sometimes a little
group stand together, when be sure you shall find a church, curiously
small but exceedingly ornate in its architecture. The spires are coated
with a glazed tile, which catches whatever sunlight there may be about,
and glistens strangely in the landscape.

The first day following the first night of our journey closed in a
manner befitting its rare beauty. The sun went do