scenery had been quite familiar,--not much unlike that of the
Catskills,--but now there was a change; the birches disappeared, except
now and then a slender white or paper birch, and spruce everywhere
prevailed. A narrow belt on each side of the road had been blasted by
fire, and the dry, white stems of the trees stood stark and stiff. The
road ran pretty straight, skirting the mountains and threading the
valleys, and hour after hour the dark, silent woods wheeled past us.
Swarms of black flies--those insect wolves--waylaid us and hung to us
till a smart spurt of the horse, where the road favored, left them
behind. But a species of large horse-fly, black and vicious, it was not
so easy to get rid of. When they alighted upon the horse, we would
demolish them with the whip or with our felt hats, a proceeding the
horse soon came to understand and appreciate. The white and gray
Laurentian boulders lay along the roadside. The soil seemed as if made
up of decayed and pulverized rock, and doubtless contained very little
vegetable matter. It is so barren that it will never repay clearing and
cultivating.

Our course was an up-grade toward the highlands that separate the
watershed of St. John Lake from that of the St. Lawrence, and as we
proceeded the spruce became smaller and smaller till the trees were
seldom more than eight or ten inches in diameter. Nearly all of them
terminated in a dense tuft at the top, beneath which the stem would be
bare for several feet, giving them the appearance, my friend said, as
they stood sharply defined along the crests of the mountains, of cannon
swabs. Endless, interminable successions of these cannon swabs, each
just like its fellow, came and went, came and went, all day. Sometimes
we could see the road a mile or two ahead, and it was as lonely and
solitary as a path in the desert. Periods of talk and song and jollity
were succeeded by long stretches of silence. A buckboard upon such a
road does not conduce to a continuous flow of animal spirits. A good
brace for the foot and a good hold for the hand is one's main lookout
much of the time. We walked up the steeper hills, one of them nearly a
mile long, then clung grimly to the board during the rapid descent of
the other side.

We occasionally saw a solitary pigeon--in every instance a
cock--leading a forlorn life in the wood, a hermit of his kind, or
more probably a rejected and superfluous male. We came upon two or
three broods of spruce