wide, and which up to Montreal is navigable for vessels of a large size. The vast extent of country over which the eye ranges in every direction has the same general character as that seen from the heights of Queenstown. It is everywhere richly wooded, and although the mountains which vary this landscape are not broken or picturesque in surface, they have fine and flowing outlines, with long and habitable slopes.

It was with no small pleasure that I made the acquaintance of that distinguished man, Principal Dawson, of McGill College, with whose writings on Canadian geology I had been long familiar, and over whose most interesting collections I had time only to cast a very hasty glance.

Of Quebec I need not speak. Its peculiar situation is so well known, and the beauty of the view from its citadel has been so often described, that one's expectations are in very close correspondence with what one finds. The St. Lawrence, however, at Quebec is no longer a river, but an estuary—a very fine estuary certainly, but in point of picturesqueness by no means so beautiful as the estuary of the Clyde, or even of the Forth. Like all the other fine prospects which I saw in the New World, its loveliness is in the vastness of the surfaces over which the view extends-in its immense vanishing distances of water and of land. The peculiar steeples of the French Canadian churches alone remind one of the Old World. In every thing else the view has all the characteristic features of the American Continent. The great range of the Laurentian Hills, which rise below Quebec on the Canadian shore, are by no means impressive. In that immense horizon, and in that clear atmosphere, they have not the effect of mountains, but of a series of low rounded swelling hills, without any broken outlines or rocky surfaces, and wholly covered with wood, very uniform in size and color. They fall toward the St. Lawrence in long and gentle slopes, dotted with farms and villages, except when in the farthest distance the view is bounded by a somewhat steeper headland. The surface over which one looks is more beautiful on the opposite side of the river to the south and south-west, NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXI., No. 2.

that is, toward the distant boundary of the United States. In that direction the eye ranges over a great extent of country rising to very distant uplands, and with the intervening spaces well marked by the perspective of low-wooded points, knolls, and ridges. To look from the height of some three hundred feet down on such an estuary, covered with ships and boats of all sorts and sizes, and with such a prospect beyond, all bathed in sunlight, shining through the fine clear air of Canada, must always be exhilarating. But at Quebec this great pleasure is heightened by the inseparable associations of the place-the memory of Wolfe and of Montcalm.

The hollows and recesses of the Laurentian Hills in the neighborhood of Quebec are often occupied by small lakes. An expedition to one of these— the lake of Beauport-enabled me to see in detail the character of the range and of the forests which clothe it. The drive led us through an open country full of comfortable farms and villas. As we approached the lower slopes of the hills, I was delighted to see the characteristic rocks of that oldest of all the sedimentary deposits of the globe, which from this range of hills has been called the Laurentian gneiss. The mineral aspect of rocks is by no means always a safe guide to their geological position. There are sandstones and limestones and slates and quartzites of all ages, and one of these is often so very like another as to be hardly distinguishable even by a practised eye. But the mineral aspect of the Laurentian gneiss is an aspect which, to those who are familiar with it, can never be mistaken. In the loose blocks which lay scattered in profusion upon the ground on either side of the road, and in all the walls and dikes which had been built for fences near it, I recognized in a moment the fine crystals of hornblende and of feldspar, with which I was familiar in the Island of Tyree, one of the Hebrides, and on the west coast of Sutherland. The rock, wherever it was visible in situ, presented surfaces rounded and smoothed by the passage of floating ice. It was pleasant, too, to pass a real little "burn," a fastrunning little stream, making its way in trouty pools and ripples over stones and gravel. Presently we were among the

II

woods-such delicious woods of aspen and white birch and maple, with only just a little mixture of spruce and balsam fir. The aspen in Canada is very often the exclusive growth which comes up after the pine forests have been burnt. The bark is of a rich creamy white, and its leaves have a very soft and tender green. Mosses of great beauty attracted my attention, as handsomer than any of the same family with which I was acquainted at home. A few grassy clearings in a rolling country, otherwise entirely covered with thin shaggy wood, led us gradually into a glen with the sound of waterfalls, and this glen opened into an amphitheatre of hills, from five hundred to eight hundred feet high, very steep, and entirely covered with heavier timber, both evergreen and deciduous. Pines predominated toward the top, although even here they by no means stood alone. But the sides of the hills, often so steep as to be almost precipitous, were covered with elm and ash, and the black birch, a very handsome tree, not unlike the wych elm in habit of growth. Embosomed in these lovely woods and hills lay the little lake of Beauport, with its gleaming waters of azure blue, the tall forest trees rising from the edges of the lake in every variety of size and foliage. The fish were shy, and if we had depended on the success of my fly fishing, our means of refreshment would have been but scanty. But in the pleasant little inn, log-built and verandaed, we found an excellent supply of the finest trout, and methods of cooking them which left nothing to be desired.

A very pleasant cruise in the steamer Druid began with a run for some thirty miles up the Saguenay River. This enabled me still more perfectly to appreciate the general appearance of the forests of the Laurentian Hills. The Saguenay is a very remarkable feature in the scenes and in the geology of Canada. It is a deep cleft or crack cutting through the range-probably due originally to some great "fault" in the stratification, but no doubt subsequently deepened by that agent of erosion which was at its maximum of power during the glacial period. So profound is this cleft that for the distance of about fifty or sixty miles the soundings are upward of one hundred

fathoms, so that, except in a few bays where small streams have brought down deposits, and round the shores of a few islands, there are no anchorages for vessels. The scenery is undoubtedly very peculiar and very pretty, but it is far less impressive than I expected. The hills are too uniformly covered with forest, there are very few fine precipices or rock surfaces exposed to view, there are no peaks rising high above the general level, and the outlines are rounded and monotonous. There is, however, great beauty of detail, both in some portions of the forest scenery and in features still more minute. On one of the few bare rocky points which lay in our way we landed, and I was much struck by the lovely vegetation which was growing among the rounded surfaces of stone. Besides a profusion of bilberry and cranberry plants in full flower, there was a perfect garden of the most lovely lichens and mosses. Some of these presented the most exquisite dendritic forms in diverse tints of silver-gray, of a delicate green, and of efflorescent white, which it would be very difficult to paint, and which it is impossible to describe. Any attempt to preserve them was futile. On being handled, they immediately crumbled into fine powder. But that rocky point was a very paradise of cryptogamic botany.

I cannot pass from the lower St. Lawrence and the Saguenay without mentioning one very great peculiarity of its scenery, and that is the population of white porpoises which inhabit these waters. These curious creatures are as pure white as a kid glove, and when seen opposite to the light and against the blue water, they are as beautiful as they are peculiar. They seemed to be very numerous-tumbling about on all sides of the vessel, especially toward the mouth of the Saguenay, where we spent a delicious evening amid the glories of a Canadian sunset in the height of summer.

A fishing excursion to the Restigouche River, which is the boundary stream between the Provinces of Canada and New Brunswick, took us by the Intercolonial Line of railway across the broad belt of land which lies between the shores of the St. Lawrence and those of the Bay of Chaleur. It was in passing through this belt of country, between Rivière du Loup, on the southern bank of the St.

Lawrence, and Metapediac, at the head of the Chaleur Bay, that I first gained what I supposed to be a fairly adequate idea of the primeval forests of North America. Strictly speaking, it is not in its primeval condition, because throughout the whole, or nearly the whole, of this great extent of country the one most valuable pine for purposes of commerce has been lumbered out." That pine is the white pine of the markets-the Pinus Strobus-commonly called in England the Weymouth or New England pine. But all the other trees have been allowed to remain, and where the white pine did not grow abundantly, the forests are in a state of nature. For some miles from the St. Lawrence the country is settled, and clearings which we saw in progress show that even soil which is so heavily encumbered, and which looked by no means rich, is nevertheless capable of rewarding agricultural industry. But the interior is one vast and continuous forest, in part of which a great fire was raging, and in another part of which it had done its work in leaving a large area covered with nothing but the scorched and blackened stems. Huge volumes of yellow smoke were rolling over the large Metapediac Lake, the waters of which, with their islands covered with pine and cedar, seen through the thick and stifling air, had a most weird effect. As the train rushed through these forests, I saw only one specimen of the white pine, of great size, to show what the tree can be in its native habitat. In England and in Scotland it is seldom a handsome tree, though I have in my own woods some favorable examples. But the one specimen I saw in this forest was a splendid stick,' growing clean and straight to a great height, without, however, having any very fine head.

64

Of the Restigouche as a salmon river it is impossible to say too much. It is a noble and at the same time a lovely stream. The breadth of its channel, the sweep of its current, the perfect crystal of its water, are all enchanting to an angler's eye. It winds among steep hills covered with forest, but with forest which has been more or less renewed by the various after-growths which follow conflagrations. There are very few rocks, and no rapids which cannot be success

66

fully breasted by horses towing boats or barges along the shore. The current is quick without being violent, seldom gurgling in foaming waterstreak," but often "loitering in glassy pool." Almost everywhere there is a gentle slope of slaty gravel between the water and the edge of the forest, which is so even in its width, and so smooth on its surface, that at first it looks as if it had been made artificially as a towing path. It is very difficult in a hot day in June to realize the true cause of this peculiar feature of the scene. But in winter the whole of this great stream is deeply frozen, so that horses can travel upon it, and it is the action of the ice every year, in breaking up, which cuts and keeps. clean this most convenient road on both banks. When it fails on one side, it is. almost always perfect on the other; and if the stream at any such point is too deep to be waded, the horses employed. to tow get on board the barge, which is punted over to the other side, and there the labor is resumed. It is needless to say that a river of this character is nearly perfect as a breeding ground for salmon. The fine streams of Norway are. generally, if not always, much more rocky, and many of them, from the nature of the water-shed from which they came, have necessarily a very short: course before they are interrupted by impassable waterfalls. But the Resti-gouche, and almost all the rivers of our North American Provinces, are gathered on the slopes of hills of comparatively small elevation. Their course is long, and generally uninterrupted by any impassable barriers. The Restigouche and some of its tributary streams, such as the Patapediac River, is. one vast and continuous spawning bed,. which, if carefully protected and attended: to, is capable of affording an inexhaustible supply of the finest salmon. I was glad to find that the Government of the Dominion has become awake to the im-portance of attending closely to this very important matter. The rivers in the ad-jacent States of the American Union. have been almost, if not altogether,, completely destroyed as salmon rivers by: the neglect of the necessary laws and regulations to keep the streams free from pollution by mills and other works, and from impassable barriers in the way of

the ascent of the fish. But most of the rivers in the British Provinces of North America are still running as pure as ever through forests which are either wholly unoccupied or have been only cleared in a few spots for the purposes of agriculture. The richer lands of the far West are attracting those who now migrate from the Old World, and, in all probability, it will be centuries before the steep and poor and heavily wooded lands through which these rivers flow are occupied for the purposes of settlement. Although the forests to the south of the St. Lawrence have been generally denuded of the white pine, there is still an almost inexhaustible supply of the spruce fir, and of the black birch, which is a very beautiful wood for the purpose of making furniture. Saw-mills will, no doubt, be erected in course of time, to cut up this timber; but care should be taken that this be done under such regulations as to keep the rivers clear of sawdust, which is most destructive to salmon. Under the care which has within a few years been bestowed upon the protection of the river during the spawning season, and upon the artificial breeding of the fish, a great effect has already been produced in the returns of salmon caught in the estuary and in the Bay of Chaleur. The rod-fishing alone might be made an important source of revenue to the Dominion. It has hitherto been let at rents which are almost nominal; and considering that no salmon fishing to be compared with that of the Canadian rivers can now be got in any part of the world, they would undoubtedly, if judiciously divided and allotted, command a very high price indeed. In the first half hour of my fishing in the Restigouche, I killed two salmon of 23 lbs. and 24 lbs. respectively, and some of our party, with no previous experience of fishing, killed salmon of larger size and weight, up to 31 lbs. On the Cascapediac River, another magnificent stream, which falls farther down into the same Bay of Chaleur, I saw a salmon of 40 lbs., which had been caught the previous day; and I learned that many such had rewarded the labors of the party of Englishmen who had the fishing of that river for the season.

64

In no

ure of canoeing on these rivers. other kind of boat is one so conscious of the delightful sensation of floating. In larger and heavier boats the very solidity of the structure takes off from the sensation; but sitting in a canoe with a very slight basket-like frame, with nothing but birch bark between one and the water, the mobility and the liquidity and the instability and the delicate balancing of the supporting medium are all transmitted directly to the nerves of sensation. At first the feeling of instability is rather alarming; but the admirable skill with which these beautiful little "barks" are managed by the half-breed Indians very soon gives one confidence. Up the stream they are propelled by poling" along the banks-and wonderful it is to see and feel the way in which they are shoved up" the sharper rapids. On the other hand, there is no more delicious motion in the world than that of a canoe descending such rivers as the Restigouche, gliding swiftly and silently with the glancing water through reaches of liquid crystal, winding among steep hills of the most varied forest. Some of the banks are mainly pineothers birch and aspen-others black birch and maple. Everywhere there is the impression of boundless spaces of natural woods, and the air is laden with aromatic odors from the balsam pine and the balsam poplar. On the sides of one of the hills a bear was seen feeding almost every day, and I picked up on the bank a branch of a tree bearing the marks of the chisel-teeth of the beaver.

64

THE saying of the French lady about the philosopher Hume, whose conversation had disappointed her, Le pauvre homme! il a mis tout dans ses livres, could not be applied to Charles Dickens. Wherever he went, thousands pressed forward to shake him by the hand, and thank him for the rays of brightness which his books had shed into their lives, but he was in his own person as much a centre of joyful radiance as his books. It is not in man to be always radiant; even Macaulay had his flashes of silence, and Dickens in mixed society, where he was not altogether at his ease, may sometimes have been dull and disappointing as Hume was to the gay admirer of his philosophy. But among his intimates he was the very soul of mirth, the incarnation of high spirits, the leader of high jinks when high jinks were going forward, the man whose entrance could raise the temperature of a company and make every pulse beat quicker. How inspiring a presence he must have been the world already knows from Mr. Forster's biography, where we learn how gleefully he threw off the yoke of work-no man ever worked harderhow breezy was his challenge to friends to spend an idle interval; how boylike he was in his earnestness as a master of the revels among his children. We get a still more vivid sense of this buoyancy and exuberance of temperament from the two volumes of letters which have just been published, edited with pious care by his eldest daughter and his sister-in-law, Miss Hogarth, of whom he makes mention in his will as "the best and truest friend man ever had." The editors have wisely refrained from burdening the text with commentary and explanation. Their great desire, they say, has been "to give to the public another book from Charles Dickens's own hands as it were a portrait of himself by himself." No formal portrait could be half so vivid. In this book, which was never intended to be a book, we come nearer to the man as he was than any biographer could have brought

us.

It has sometimes been imputed to Dickens as a defect in his private character that he was self-conscious, that he was always behaving as if the eye of the world were upon him, that he was never natural, but always posing for effect, showing himself aware that his smallest action would be handed down to posterity. His expression to Mr. Forster, "Put that in my biography"-after telling him how he jumped out of bed one night to practise a step which he had been learning in view of festivities on the birthday of one of his children

has often been quoted in proof of this unbecoming immodesty. I must say that I can never hear such folly talked without feeling inclined to repeat Charles Lamb's frantic pantomime of surprise when a respectable gentleman asked him whether he did not after all consider that Milton was a poet. How could Dickens have been otherwise than conscious of what was proclaimed by the universal voice? How could he have ignored the fact that his smallest action was noted with interest, when he had seen an audience scrambling for the petals of a flower which had dropped from his button-hole? Probably no human being was ever put in so trying a position as Charles Dickens when he was suddenly lifted from drudging obscurity into an unparalleled-absolutely unparalleled-blaze of fame, and found himself received everywhere with the honors usually reserved for royal personages, popular ministers, or great generais after glorious victory. He could not take refuge in state ceremonial, for no awe was mingled with the enthusiasm of the multitude; the creator of Pickwick and Sam Weller was not a being to be gazed at with distant respect, but a man and a brother to be mobbed, huzzaed, welcomed with affectionate smiles and broad grins of sympathy. It was a trying position, and no man could have borne his honors with more manly and unaffected simplicity than Dickens did. He frankly accepted the situation, and never sought to disguise his delight in his fame. He did not allow it to overpower