owd the line into gorges, from which the sun is
banished, and where the moveless firs look like lost souls chained in
the gloom of Eblis. They expand abruptly, suddenly, into swinging
valleys, on whose great flanks the spruce forests look like toy
decorations hanging above floors of shining sapphire--lakes, of course,
but one could not think that any lake could be so blue.

Lakes fretted into lagoons by thin white slivers of shingle; rivers
full of tumbled and dishevelled logs; forests in green, in which the
crimson maple leaf burns brightly; vast amphitheatres of cliff-like
hills; mounds of the stark Laurentine rock pushing up through trees
like bald heads through the sparse covering of departing hair; miles of
blanched trees and black trees standing like skeletons or strewn
all-whither, like billets of stick--acres of murdered stumps, where
evil forest fires have swept along; and we had even an occasional
glimpse of that scourge of Canada seen smoking sullenly in the
distance--all this heaped together, piled together in a reckless
luxuriance makes up the scenery of the Algoma country.

Only rarely does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes
the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a
logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one
cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint
of man and his works.

On a long bridge, over the Montreal river, we made the most of man and
his works. It is a lengthy, curving bridge, built giddily on stilts
above the boulder-strewn bed of a wicked stream. We were admiring it
as a desperate work of engineering, when the train stopped with a
disconcerting bump. It stopped with violence. And when we had picked
ourselves up we looked out of the train and saw nothing--only that
particularly vicious river and those unpleasantly jagged rocks.

When one is on a Canadian bridge this is all one sees--the depth one is
going to drop, and what one is going to drop on. The top of the bridge
is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang
beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb
down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of
the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered
why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places.
And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the
bridge coul