ung!" The
Hudson must take a back seat now, and a good way back. One of the two
or three great watercourses of the globe is before you. No other river,
I imagine, carries such a volume of pure cold water to the sea. Nearly
all its feeders are trout and salmon streams, and what an airing and
what a bleaching it gets on its course! Its history, its antecedents,
are unparalleled. The great lakes are its camping-grounds; here its
hosts repose under the sun and stars in areas like that of states and
kingdoms, and it is its waters that shake the earth at Niagara. Where
it receives the Saguenay it is twenty miles wide, and when it debouches
into the Gulf it is a hundred. Indeed, it is a chain of Homeric
sublimities from beginning to end. The great cataract is a fit sequel
to the great lakes; the spirit that is born in vast and tempestuous
Superior takes its full glut of power in that fearful chasm. If
paradise is hinted in the Thousand Islands, hell is unveiled in that
pit of terrors.

Its last escapade is the great rapids above Montreal, down which the
steamer shoots with its breathless passengers, after which, inhaling
and exhaling its mighty tides, it flows calmly to the sea.

The St. Lawrence is the type of nearly all the Canadian rivers, which
are strung with lakes and rapids and cataracts, and are full of peril
and adventure.

Here we reach the oldest part of the continent, geologists tell us; and
here we encounter a fragment of the Old World civilization. Quebec
presents the anomaly of a mediaeval European city in the midst of the
American landscape. This air, this sky, these clouds, these trees, the
look of these fields, are what we have always known; but the houses,
and streets, and vehicles, and language, and physiognomy are strange.
As I walked upon the grand terrace I saw the robin and kingbird and
song sparrow, and there in the tree, by the Wolfe Monument, our summer
warbler was at home. I presently saw, also, that our republican crow
was a British subject, and that he behaved here more like his European
brother than he does in the States, being less wild and suspicious. On
the Plains of Abraham excellent timothy grass was growing and cattle
were grazing. We found a path through the meadow, and, with the
exception of a very abundant weed with a blue flower, saw nothing new
or strange,--nothing but the steep tin roofs of the city and its
frowning wall and citadel. Sweeping around the far southern horizon, we
co