a peak
of the Baie, and one of their chiefs had travelled to Halifax to be
among those who welcomed the son of the Great White Chief.

Campbellton let us into the lovely valley of the Matapedia, an
enchanted spot where the river lolls on a broad bed through a grand
country of grim hills and forests. Now and then, indeed, its channel
is pinched into gorges where its water shines pallidly and angrily amid
the crowded shadows of rock and tree; usually it is the nursemaid of
rich, flat valleys and the friend of the little frame-house hamlets
that are linked across its waters by a spidery bridge of wooden
trestles. At times beneath the hills it is swift and combed by a
thousand stony fingers, and at other times it is an idler in Arcadie, a
dilettante stream that wanders in half a dozen feckless channels over a
desert of white stones, with here and there the green humpback of an
island inviting the camper.

Beyond Matapedia we got the thrill of the run, an abrupt glimpse of the
St. Lawrence, steel-blue and apparently infinite, its thirty miles of
breadth yielding not a glimpse of the farther side. A short distance
on, beyond Mont Joli, a place that might have come out of a sample box
of French villages, the railway keeps the immense river company for the
rest of the journey.

The valley broadened out into an immense flat plain with but few traces
of the wilder hills of New Brunswick. About the line is a belt of
prosperity forty miles deep, all of it worked by the habitant owners of
the narrow farms, all of it so rich that in the whole area from the
border to the city of Quebec there is not a poor farmer.

Before reaching Riviere du Loup we saw the high peaks of the Laurentine
Mountains on the far side of the St. Lawrence, and on our side of the
stream passed a grim little islet called L'Islet au Massacre, where a
party of Micmac Indians, fleeing from the Iroquois in the old days,
were caught as they hid in a deep cave, and killed by a great fire that
their enemies built at the mouth.

We saw a few seals on the rocks of the river, but not a hint of the
numbers that gave Riviere du Loup its name. It is a cameo of a town
with falls sliding down-hill over a chute of jumbled rocks into a
logging pool beneath.

Riviere du Loup is in the last lap of the journey to Quebec. There are
a score or so of little hamlets, the names of which--St. Alexandre, St.
Andre, St. Pascal, St. Pacome, St. Valier and so on--sound like a
r