old
building near the western end of the island, and one of the oldest
sacerdotal edifices in America, has around it a halo of romance and
piety since the fur-trading days, being the last church visited by the
_voyageurs_ and their last glimpse of civilization before facing the
dangers of the pathless wilderness of the West. At its altar these
rough, half-wild men knelt to pray and put themselves under the
protection of their titular _Sainte Anne_.

The Trappists, though rarely seen outside the walls of their retreat,
look precisely as did mediaeval monks of centuries ago, with whose
appearance we are familiar in pictures of Peter the Hermit and other
zealots, who with their fiery eloquence sent the Armies of Christendom
to fight for the Holy Sepulchre. They dress in a coarse brown gown and
cowl, with a girdle of rope, and are under vows of perpetual silence.
They live on frugal meals of vegetables and fruit twice a day, have the
head tonsured, and feet bare in sandals. The continued fasts, severe
flagellations, labours and meditations of those anchorites make the
regulations governing this order exceedingly strict, and recall the
times when kings and emperors, in the same monkish garb, walked barefoot
to knock humbly in penance at monastery gates.

Perhaps the most unique shrine in the province is that of Mount Rigaud,
on the banks of the Ottawa, not far from the spot where Dollard and his
band of Christian knights lay down their lives. The mountain is regarded
with much superstition by the ignorant, on account of its peculiar and
unaccountable natural phenomena, whose origin has puzzled the most
learned scientists to account for. The wooded mountain is crowned by
what is called "The Field of Stones," or "The Devil's Garden," from a
deposit of almost spherical boulders, of so far unmeasured depth, which
cover its surface. Encircled by trees and verdure, this strange
formation of several acres in extent is composed mainly of rock
different from the mass of the mountain, which belongs to the same
family as the igneous mountains of the neighbouring region. What were
the causes and conditions which carried this strange material to the top
of this elevation will, when they are explained, be of intense interest.
It is said that the only other deposit similar, though smaller in
extent, is in Switzerland. Perhaps some ancient glacier, through eons of
time, gradually melted here, and slowly deposited the drift it had borne
f