on his 'world-seeking
voyage,' I make no doubt that he as surely knew, by actual
information, of America, as I know that the island of Anticosti is but
200 miles below me. And yet I read in a paper somewhere lately that
some wise dunce had proposed to 'celebrate the fourth centennial of
the discovery of America by Columbus'! That's rich!

"To-night the yacht Champlain is swinging at anchor in the harbor of
Tadousac, and I am writing in her little cabin with a profound
conviction that, a thousand years

BEFORE COLUMBUS WAS BORN,

a little group of men, Basques by name, then living in southern
Europe, a remnant of the old Iberian race, anchored their ships in the
same harbor in the month of August annually. Only half a mile to the
west of me, the Saguenay, whose bottom is one hundred fathoms deeper
down than the bed of the St. Lawrence, pours its gloomy current
between the stupendous cliffs of rock which make for its resistless
passage an awful portal. These monstrous cliffs of bare, gray rock
have not changed in form or color or appearance since some force, next
to that of the Almighty, lifted them from the under world and placed
them to stand eternal sentinels at the entrance to this strange,
impressive, awe-inspiring river--for the wind and wear of unnumbered
centuries have left them cold and bare, soilless and treeless, save
where some stunted shrub, with a single root, has spiked itself into a
crevice, and there stands starved and dying, as it lives its withered
life.

"As it is to-night to eye and ear, so was it centuries ago; and so the
old Basque whalers saw it while yet the great continent to the west
was a trackless wilderness from ocean to ocean and gulf to gulf. And
Columbus and Jacques Cartier and Champlain were not, by five hundred
years, yet born.

"The harbor of Tadousac is a basin shaped like a sickle. On the west
the mountain wall of the Saguenay protects it. The eastern curve is
sheltered by vast sand lanes, scoured from the sea bottom and whirled
upward by some mighty eddy in geologic ages. To the north are
mountains of stone, their gray surface flecked here and there by
stunted fir and cedar or dwarfed birches. Between these mountains of
rock and the water of the harbor or basin is a short, narrow plateau,
lifted some fifty feet above the water line, every foot of which is
historic to a degree. On no other bit of ground of equal size on the
American continent has so much been done and suff