Читать книгу The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions онлайн

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Afterwards, but some time afterwards, when the American had left the table, a Scottish Canadian asked me if I had done the Saguenay trip, and when I said that I had not done it, he strongly advised me not to miss it.

'It's the finest trip in Canada. Yes, sir.'

I decided to go. It takes just two days from the start at Quebec to Chicoutimi and back, and you go in a spacious sort of houseboat which paddles along at just the right pace, first on one side of the river then on the other, stopping to load and unload at the little villages along the St. Lawrence. There to the left—a great sheet of silver hung from the cliff—were the Montmorency Falls, which had made that young American tired. A hundred and twenty years ago Queen Victoria's father occupied the Kent house, hard by the Falls, now a hotel. Wolfe lay ill for two weeks in a farm close by; probably on no other sick-bed in the world were plans so big with fate conceived. Then the Ile d'Orléans floats by—that fertile island which Cartier named after the Grape God four hundred years ago, because of the vines that grew there. All this waterway is history, French-Canadian history mostly. With a fine mist hung over the river, concealing the few modern spires and roofs, you can see the country to-day just as Cartier saw it when he came sailing up. Neither four hundred nor four thousand years will serve to modernise the banks of the St. Lawrence. Take that thirty-mile stretch where the Laurentides climb sheer from the water. That is what Cartier saw—nothing different. No houses, no people; only the grey rock growing out of the green trees, and the grey sky overhead. Lower down, with the sun shining as it did for us, Cartier would see, if he came sailing up to-day, all those picturesque French-Canadian villages which have sprung up along the shore—Baie St. Paul, St. Irénée, Murray Bay, Tadousac, with the white farms of the Habitants, and the summer homes of the Quebeckers and Montrealers, and the shining spires of the churches, and the wooden piers jutting far out into the river. Those piers are particularly cheerful places. There are always gangs of porters waiting to run out freight from the hold, and a gathering of ladies in gay frocks who want to greet friends on board, and heaps of little habitants playing about or smoking their pipes. The habitant appears to start his pipe at the age of eight or nine years, judging from those who frequent the piers.