a picturesque gorge, and winds through many pleasant meadows, in
its course of some twenty miles from Lake St. Charles away up in the
hills to the St. Roch suburb of Quebec. Here it assumes the character of
a deep, tortuous dock, incumbered with the _debris_ of many ship-yards,
and reflecting the skeleton shapes of big-ribbed merchantmen on the
stocks. Here, too, it is generally called the Little River; probably to
distinguish it from the great River St. Lawrence, into which it oozes at
this point.

But higher up, as I have said, the St. Charles is romantic and rushes
on its fate. At Lorette, it divides the village in twain: a western
section, for the most part peopled by French-Canadian _habitans_; an
eastern one, inhabited by half-breed Indians, a remnant of the once
powerful Hurons of old.

These Canadian Hurons are not, in their present condition, corroborative
of the Cooper specifications of Indian life: rather the contrary, in
fact. There is a wing of them--a wing without feathers, indeed--settled
down at Amherstburgh, on the far western marge of Lake Erie, in Canada,
quite six hundred miles away from their brethren of Lorette. When
shooting woodcock once in that district, I entered the comfortable log
farm-house of the chief of the settlement, whose name was Martin. He
was a fat, rather Dutch-looking Indian, but still active and
industrious,--for a man who is an Indian and fat. I asked Mr. Martin if
he hunted much; to which he replied, No, he did not,--adding, that he
never was far into the woods but once in his life, and that was on
his own lot of a hundred acres of bush, in which he was lost, on that
occasion, for two days.

Among the Hurons of Lorette there are a few young men who hunt moose and
caribou in the proper season; but the men, generally speaking, as
well as the women, are engaged in the manufacture of snow-shoes and
moccasons,--articles for which there is a great demand in Lower Canada.
Philippe Vincent, a chieftain and shoemaker of the tribe, told me that
he had disposed of twelve hundred dollars' worth of these articles, on
a trip to Montreal, from which he had just returned. Many articles of
Indian fancy-work are also manufactured by them: beaded pouches for
tobacco, bark-work knick-knacks, and curious racks made of the hoofs of
the moose, and hung upon the wall to stick small articles into.

On the profits of this work many of them live in comfort,--nay, in
luxury. Paul Vincent, a cousin of