igh water marks. At such a time how many a
hapless small craft, left incautiously too near the shore, has been
hammered to pieces between waves and rocks!

Tired wayfarers surveying this remote and lovely scene have fancied
themselves pioneers in something like a new world. In reality, here is
the oldest of old worlds, in which pigmy man is not even of yesterday,
but only of to-day. This majestic river, the mountains clothed in
perennial green, the blue and purple tints so delicate and transient as
the light changes, have occupied this scene for thousands of centuries.
No other part of our mother earth is more ancient. The Laurentian
Mountains reared their heads, it may be, long before life appeared
anywhere on this peopled earth; no fossil is found in all their huge
mass. In some mighty eruption of fire their strata have been strangely
twisted. Since then sea and river, frost and ice, have held high
carnival. Huge boulders, alien in formation to the rocks about them,
have been dropped high up on the mountain sides by mighty glaciers, and
lie to-day, a source of unfailing wonder to the unlearned as to how they
came to be there.

Man appeared at last upon the scene; the Indian, and then, long after,
the European. In 1535, Jacques Cartier, the first European, as far as we
know, to ascend the St. Lawrence, creeping slowly from the Saguenay up
towards the Indian village of Stadacona, on the spot where now is
Quebec, must have noted the wide gap in the mountains which makes the
Malbaie valley. Not far from Malbaie, he saw the so-called "porpoises,"
or white whales, (beluga, French, _marsouin_) that still disport
themselves in great numbers in these waters, come puffing to the surface
and writhe their whole length into view like miniature sea-serpents.
They have heads, Cartier says, with no very great accuracy, "of the
style of a greyhound," they are of spotless white and are found, he was
told (incorrectly) only here in all the world. He anchored at Isle aux
Coudres where he saw "an incalculable number of huge turtles." He
admired its great and fair trees, now gone, alas, and gave the island
its name--"the Isle of Hazel Nuts"--which we still use. For long years
after Cartier, Malbaie remained a resort of its native savages only.
Perhaps an occasional trader came to give these primitive people, in
exchange for their valuable furs, European commodities, generally of
little worth. In time the Europeans learned the great value