e left it."

"Well, that's encouragin'. But I say, Markham, how do you get down there
in the winter?"

"Oh! very easily. Simplest thing in the world. Lots of fellows in the
lumber trade do it all winter long. Do it by sleigh from St. Anne's,
about twenty miles below Quebec--from Quebec you have your choice of
train or sleigh. But I prefer to make a clean thing of it, and do it all
by sleigh. I take it by easy stages, and so I take the long route: there
is a short cut, but the stops are far between. You make your twenty
miles to St. Anne from Quebec one day; eighteen to St. Joachim, the
next; thirty-nine to Baie St. Paul, the next; twenty to Malbaie, the
next; then forty to Tadoussac; then eighteen to Riviere Marguerite. You
can do something every day at that rate, even in the new snow; but on
the ice of the Saguenay, to Haha Bay, there's a pull of sixty miles;
you're at Chicoutimi, eleven miles farther, before you know it. Good
feed, and good beds, all along. You wrap up, and you don't mind. Of
course," Markham concluded, "it isn't the climate of Stanstead," as if
the climate of Stanstead were something like that of St. Augustine.

"Well, it sounds a mere bagatelle," said the more talkative of the other
two, "but it takes a week of steady travel."

"What is a week on the way to Golconda, if Golconda's yours when you get
there?" said Markham. "Why, Watkins, the young spruce and poplar alone
on that tract are worth twice the price I ask for the whole. A
pulp-mill, which you could knock together for a few shillings, on one of
those magnificent water-powers, would make you all millionnaires, in a
single summer."

"And what would it do in the winter when your magnificent water-power
was restin'?"

"Work harder than ever, my dear boy, and set an example of industry to
all the lazy _habitans_ in the country. You could get your fuel for the
cost of cutting, and you could feed your spruce and poplar in under your
furnace, and have it come out paper pulp at the other end of the mill."

Watkins and the other listener laughed with loud haw-haws at Markham's
drolling, and Watkins said, "I say, Markham, weren't you born on the
other side of the line?"

"No. But my father was; and I wish he'd stayed there till I came. Then
I'd be going round with all the capitalists of Wall Street fighting for
a chance to put their money into my mine, instead of wearing out the
knees of my trousers before you Canucks, begging you not to slap