brown hair and blue or gray eyes, significant that the
aboriginal blood is being gradually diluted. In another generation or
two, there will be little of it left among them. But the correspondents
of the press, who described some of these Indians seen by them at
Quebec, are mistaken in attributing to them an admixture of Irish blood.
Until within eight years past, there were few, if any, Irish to be found
in the neighborhood of Lorette. Since that time, the construction of the
Quebec water-works, which are supplied from Lake St. Charles, has given
employment to hundreds of the Hibernian stock in that neighborhood;
and I know not whether their influence as regards race may not be now
discernible in the features of many pugnacious Huronites of tender
years: but the white element traceable in the lineaments of the present
and passing generations of the settlement is distinctly attributable to
the proximity of the French-Canadian, whose language has been transfused
into them with the blood.

Few, if any, of the older people of Lorette speak English,--Huron and
French being the only languages at their command. Since the building of
the great reservoir, however, many of the rising generation are picking
up the English tongue in its roundest Irish form. Previously, matters
were the reverse. I once noticed a handsome, brown-faced boy there, who
used to come about with a bow and arrows, soliciting coppers, which were
placed one by one in a split stick, shot at, and pocketed by the archer,
if hit,--as they almost always were. He spoke Indian and French, and I
took him for an olive-branch of the tribe; but, on questioning him, he
told me that his name was Bill Coogan, and that he first saw the light,
I think, in Cork, Ireland.

There is one charming feature at Lorette,--a winding, dashing cascade,
which boils and creams down with splendid fury through a deep gorge
fenced with pied and tumbled rocks, and overhung by gnarly-boughed
cedars, pines, and birches. There is, or at least there was, a crumbling
old saw-mill on a ledge of rock nearly half-way up the torrent. It was
in keeping with the scene, and I hope it is there still; but it was very
shaky when I last saw it, and has probably made an _eboulement_ down to
the foot of the fall before now. Some short distance above the head of
the fall, near the bridge by which the two villages are connected,
the scene is pictorially damaged by a stark, staring paper-mill, the
dominant col