Excursions, and Poems
by Henry David Thoreau · English · Gutenberg #42553 · 672,798 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Excursions, and Poems
Author: Henry David Thoreau
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The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
In Twenty Volumes
VOLUME V
Manuscript Edition
Limited to Six Hundred Copies
Number ----
[Illustration: _Apple Blossoms (page 294)_]
[Illustration: _Wild Apple Tree_]
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
EXCURSIONS AND POEMS
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin and Company
MDCCCCVI
Copyright 1865 and 1866 by Ticknor and Fields
Copyright 1893 and 1906 by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY NOTE xi
EXCURSIONS
A YANKEE IN CANADA
I. CONCORD TO MONTREAL 3
II. QUEBEC AND MONTMORENCI 20
III. ST. ANNE 40
IV. THE WALLS OF QUEBEC 69
V. THE SCENERY OF QUEBEC; AND THE
RIVER ST. LAWRENCE 85
NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 103
A WALK TO WACHUSETT 133
THE LANDLORD 153
A WINTER WALK 163
THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 184
WALKING 205
AUTUMNAL TINTS 249
WILD APPLES 290
NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 323
TRANSLATIONS
THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ÆSCHYLUS 337
TRANSLATIONS FROM PINDAR 375
POEMS
NATURE 395
INSPIRATION 396
THE AURORA OF GUIDO 399
TO THE MAIDEN IN THE EAST 400
TO MY BROTHER 403
GREECE 404
THE FUNERAL BELL 405
THE MOON 406
THE FALL OF THE LEAF 407
THE THAW 409
A WINTER SCENE 410
TO A STRAY FOWL 411
POVERTY 412
PILGRIMS 413
THE DEPARTURE 414
INDEPENDENCE 415
DING DONG 417
OMNIPRESENCE 417
INSPIRATION (QUATRAIN) 418
MISSION 418
DELAY 418
PRAYER 418
A LIST OF THE POEMS AND BITS OF VERSE
SCATTERED AMONG THOREAU'S PROSE
WRITINGS EXCLUSIVE OF THE JOURNAL 420
INDEX 423
ILLUSTRATIONS
APPLE BLOSSOMS, _Carbon photograph (page 294)_ _Frontispiece_
WILD APPLE TREE, _Colored plate_
MONTREAL FROM MOUNT ROYAL 98
MOUNT WACHUSETT FROM THE WAYLAND HILLS 134
THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD 214
FALLEN LEAVES 270
WILD APPLE TREE 300
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The "Excursions" of the present volume follow the arrangement of the
volume bearing that title in the Riverside Edition, which differed
somewhat as to contents from the "Excursions" collected by Thoreau's
sister after his death, and published in 1863 by Messrs. Ticknor &
Fields. The Biographical Sketch by Emerson which prefaced the latter
appears in the first volume of the present edition.
"A Yankee in Canada," which here, as in the Riverside Edition, is made
the first of the series of Excursions, was formerly published in a
volume with "Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers." Thoreau made this
excursion to Canada with his friend Ellery Channing, and sent his
narrative to Mr. Greeley, who wrote him regarding it, March 18, 1852:
"I shall get you some money for the articles you sent me, though not
immediately. As to your long account of a Canadian tour, I don't know.
It looks unmanageable. Can't you cut it into three or four, and omit
all that relates to time? The cities are described to death, but I
know you are at home with Nature, and that _she_ rarely and slowly
changes. Break this up, if you can, and I will try to have it
swallowed and digested." Thoreau appears to have taken Greeley's
advice, and the narrative was divided into chapters. But after it had
been begun in _Putnam's_ in January, 1853, where it was entitled
"Excursion to Canada," the author and the editor, who appears from
the following letter to have been Mr. G. W. Curtis, disagreed
regarding the expediency of including certain passages, and Thoreau
withdrew all after the third chapter. The letter is as follows:--
NEW YORK, January 2, 1853.
FRIEND THOREAU.... I am sorry you and C. cannot agree so as to
have your whole MS. printed. It will be worth nothing
elsewhere after having partly appeared in _Putnam's_. I think
it is a mistake to conceal the authorship of the several
articles, making them all (so to speak) _editorial_; but _if_
that is done, don't you see that the elimination of very
flagrant heresies (like your defiant Pantheism) becomes a
necessity? If you had withdrawn your MS. on account of the
abominable misprints in the first number, your ground would
have been far more tenable. However, do what you will. Yours,
HORACE GREELEY.
"Natural History of Massachusetts" was contributed to _The Dial_,
July, 1842, nominally as a review of some recent State reports. "A
Walk to Wachusett" was printed in _The Boston Miscellany_, 1843. Mr.
Sanborn, in his volume on Thoreau, prints a very interesting letter
written by Margaret Fuller in 1841, in criticism of the verses which
stand near the beginning of the paper, offered at that time for
publication in _The Dial_. "The Landlord" was printed in _The
Democratic Review_ for October, 1843. "A Winter Walk" appeared in _The
Dial_ in the same month and year. Emerson in a letter to Thoreau,
September 8, 1843, says: "I mean to send the 'Winter's Walk' to the
printer to-morrow for _The Dial_. I had some hesitation about it,
notwithstanding its faithful observation and its fine sketches of the
pickerel-fisher and of the woodchopper, on account of _mannerism_, an
old charge of mine,--as if, by attention, one could get the trick of
the rhetoric; for example, to call a cold place sultry, a solitude
public, a wilderness _domestic_ (a favorite word), and in the woods to
insult over cities, armies, etc. By pretty free omissions, however, I
have removed my principal objections." The address "The Succession of
Forest Trees" was printed first in _The New York Tribune_, October 6,
1860, and was perhaps the latest of his writings which Thoreau saw in
print.
After his death the interest which had already been growing was
quickened by the successive publication in _The Atlantic Monthly_ of
"Autumnal Tints" and "Wild Apples" in October and November, 1862, and
"Night and Moonlight" November, 1863. The last named appeared just
before the publication of the volume "Excursions," which collected the
several papers.
"May Days" and "Days and Nights in Concord," which were printed in the
Riverside Edition, are now omitted as consisting merely of extracts
from Thoreau's Journal and therefore superseded by the publication of
the latter in its complete form.
* * * * *
A few of Thoreau's poems, taken from the "Week" and elsewhere, were
added by Mr. Emerson to the volume entitled "Letters to Various
Persons" which he brought out in 1865, but it was not till the volume
of "Miscellanies" was issued in the Riverside Edition that the
otherwise unpublished verse of his that had appeared in _The Dial_ was
gathered into a single volume. Besides the _Dial_ contributions, the
Riverside "Miscellanies" contained a few poems that first found
publication in Mr. Sanborn's Life of Thoreau. But the collection was
not intended to be complete.
Many of Thoreau's poems, including his translations from the
Anacreontics, are imbedded in the "Week," "Walden," and "Excursions,"
and it seemed best not to reproduce them in another volume. In 1895,
shortly after the publication of the Riverside Thoreau, Mr. Henry S.
Salt and Mr. Frank B. Sanborn brought out a book entitled "Poems of
Nature by Henry David Thoreau," in which were collected "perhaps two
thirds of [the poems] which Thoreau preserved." "Many of them," says
the Introduction to that volume, "were printed by him, in whole or in
part, among his early contributions to Emerson's _Dial_, or in his own
two volumes, the _Week_ and _Walden_.... Others were given to Mr.
Sanborn for publication, by Sophia Thoreau, the year after her
brother's death (several appeared in the _Boston Commonwealth_ in
1863); or have been furnished from time to time by Mr. Blake, his
literary executor." This volume contained a number of poems which had
not before appeared in any of Thoreau's published books. Such poems
are now added to those of the Riverside Edition. The present
collection, however, no more than its predecessors pretends to
completeness. It includes only those of Thoreau's poems which have
been previously published and which are not contained in other volumes
of this series. A list of the poems and scattered bits of verse
printed in the other volumes will be found in an Appendix. The Journal
also contains, especially in the early part, a number of heretofore
unpublished poems which it seems best to retain in their original
setting.
EXCURSIONS
A YANKEE IN CANADA
New England is by some affirmed to be an island, bounded on the north
with the River Canada (so called from Monsieur Cane).--JOSSELYN'S
RARITIES.
And still older, in Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan," published in
1632, it is said, on page 97, "From this Lake [Erocoise] Northwards is
derived the famous River of Canada, so named, of Monsier de Cane, a
French Lord, who first planted a colony of French in America."
A YANKEE IN CANADA
CHAPTER I
CONCORD TO MONTREAL
I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen
much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold. I left Concord,
Massachusetts, Wednesday morning, September 25th, 1850, for Quebec.
Fare, seven dollars there and back; distance from Boston, five hundred
and ten miles; being obliged to leave Montreal on the return as soon
as Friday, October 4th, or within ten days. I will not stop to tell
the reader the names of my fellow-travelers; there were said to be
fifteen hundred of them. I wished only to be set down in Canada, and
take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an
afternoon.
The country was new to me beyond Fitchburg. In Ashburnham and
afterward, as we were whirled rapidly along, I noticed the woodbine
(_Ampelopsis quinquefolia_), its leaves now changed, for the most part
on dead trees, draping them like a red scarf. It was a little
exciting, suggesting bloodshed, or at least a military life, like an
epaulet or sash, as if it were dyed with the blood of the trees whose
wounds it was inadequate to stanch. For now the bloody autumn was
come, and an Indian warfare was waged through the forest. These
military trees appeared very numerous, for our rapid progress
connected those that were even some miles apart. Does the woodbine
prefer the elm? The first view of Monadnock was obtained five or six
miles this side of Fitzwilliam, but nearest and best at Troy and
beyond. Then there were the Troy cuts and embankments. Keene Street
strikes the traveler favorably, it is so wide, level, straight, and
long. I have heard one of my relatives, who was born and bred there,
say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off. I have also
been told that when this town was settled they laid out a street four
rods wide, but at a subsequent meeting of the proprietors one rose and
remarked, "We have plenty of land, why not make the street eight rods
wide?" and so they voted that it should be eight rods wide, and the
town is known far and near for its handsome street. It was a cheap way
of securing comfort, as well as fame, and I wish that all new towns
would take pattern from this. It is best to lay our plans widely in
youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our
views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks,
that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose
mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared
for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when
those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be
realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out
a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide. I know one such
Washington city of a man, whose lots as yet are only surveyed and
staked out, and, except a cluster of shanties here and there, only the
Capitol stands there for all structures, and any day you may see from
afar his princely idea borne coachwise along the spacious but yet
empty avenues. Keene is built on a remarkably large and level
interval, like the bed of a lake, and the surrounding hills, which are
remote from its street, must afford some good walks. The scenery of
mountain towns is commonly too much crowded. A town which is built on
a plain of some extent, with an open horizon, and surrounded by hills
at a distance, affords the best walks and views.
As we travel northwest up the country, sugar maples, beeches, birches,
hemlocks, spruce, butternuts, and ash trees prevail more and more. To
the rapid traveler the number of elms in a town is the measure of its
civility. One man in the cars has a bottle full of some liquor. The
whole company smile whenever it is exhibited. I find no difficulty in
containing myself. The Westmoreland country looked attractive. I heard
a passenger giving the very obvious derivation of this name,
Westmore-land, as if it were purely American, and he had made a
discovery; but I thought of "my cousin Westmoreland" in England. Every
one will remember the approach to Bellows Falls, under a high cliff
which rises from the Connecticut. I was disappointed in the size of
the river here; it appeared shrunk to a mere mountain-stream. The
water was evidently very low. The rivers which we had crossed this
forenoon possessed more of the character of mountain-streams than
those in the vicinity of Concord, and I was surprised to see
everywhere traces of recent freshets, which had carried away bridges
and injured the railroad, though I had heard nothing of it. In
Ludlow, Mount Holly, and beyond, there is interesting mountain
scenery, not rugged and stupendous, but such as you could easily
ramble over,--long, narrow, mountain vales through which to see the
horizon. You are in the midst of the Green Mountains. A few more
elevated blue peaks are seen from the neighborhood of Mount Holly;
perhaps Killington Peak is one. Sometimes, as on the Western Railroad,
you are whirled over mountainous embankments, from which the scared
horses in the valleys appear diminished to hounds. All the hills
blush; I think that autumn must be the best season to journey over
even the _Green_ Mountains. You frequently exclaim to yourself, What
_red_ maples! The sugar maple is not so red. You see some of the
latter with rosy spots or cheeks only, blushing on one side like
fruit, while all the rest of the tree is green, proving either some
partiality in the light or frosts or some prematurity in particular
branches. Tall and slender ash trees, whose foliage is turned to a
dark mulberry color, are frequent. The butternut, which is a
remarkably spreading tree, is turned completely yellow, thus proving
its relation to the hickories. I was also struck by the bright yellow
tints of the yellow birch. The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean
ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their
branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from
the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that
you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy
canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.
As you approach Lake Champlain you begin to see the New York
mountains. The first view of the lake at Vergennes is impressive, but
rather from association than from any peculiarity in the scenery. It
lies there so small (not appearing in that proportion to the width of
the State that it does on the map), but beautifully quiet, like a
picture of the Lake of Lucerne on a music-box, where you trace the
name of Lucerne among the foliage; far more ideal than ever it looked
on the map. It does not say, "Here I am, Lake Champlain," as the
conductor might for it, but having studied the geography thirty years,
you crossed over a hill one afternoon and beheld it. But it is only a
glimpse that you get here. At Burlington you rush to a wharf and go on
board a steamboat, two hundred and thirty-two miles from Boston. We
left Concord at twenty minutes before eight in the morning, and were
in Burlington about six at night, but too late to see the lake. We got
our first fair view of the lake at dawn, just before reaching
Plattsburg, and saw blue ranges of mountains on either hand, in New
York and in Vermont, the former especially grand. A few white
schooners, like gulls, were seen in the distance, for it is not waste
and solitary like a lake in Tartary; but it was such a view as leaves
not much to be said; indeed, I have postponed Lake Champlain to
another day.
The oldest reference to these waters that I have yet seen is in the
account of Cartier's discovery and exploration of the St. Lawrence in
1535. Samuel Champlain actually discovered and paddled up the lake in
July, 1609, eleven years before the settlement of Plymouth,
accompanying a war-party of the Canadian Indians against the
Iroquois. He describes the islands in it as not inhabited, although
they are pleasant,--on account of the continual wars of the Indians,
in consequence of which they withdraw from the rivers and lakes into
the depths of the land, that they may not be surprised. "Continuing
our course," says he, "in this lake, on the western side, viewing the
country, I saw on the eastern side very high mountains, where there
was snow on the summit. I inquired of the savages if those places were
inhabited. They replied that they were, and that they were Iroquois,
and that in those places there were beautiful valleys and plains
fertile in corn, such as I have eaten in this country, with an
infinity of other fruits." This is the earliest account of what is now
Vermont.
The number of French-Canadian gentlemen and ladies among the
passengers, and the sound of the French language, advertised us by
this time that we were being whirled towards some foreign vortex. And
now we have left Rouse's Point, and entered the Sorel River, and
passed the invisible barrier between the States and Canada. The shores
of the Sorel, Richelieu, or St. John's River are flat and reedy, where
I had expected something more rough and mountainous for a natural
boundary between two nations. Yet I saw a difference at once, in the
few huts, in the pirogues on the shore, and as it were, in the shore
itself. This was an interesting scenery to me, and the very reeds or
rushes in the shallow water and the tree-tops in the swamps have left
a pleasing impression. We had still a distant view behind us of two or
three blue mountains in Vermont and New York. About nine o'clock in
the forenoon we reached St. John's, an old frontier post three hundred
and six miles from Boston, and twenty-four from Montreal. We now
discovered that we were in a foreign country, in a station-house of
another nation. This building was a barn-like structure, looking as if
it were the work of the villagers combined, like a log house in a new
settlement. My attention was caught by the double advertisements in
French and English fastened to its posts, by the formality of the
English, and the covert or open reference to their queen and the
British lion. No gentlemanly conductor appeared, none whom you would
know to be the conductor by his dress and demeanor; but ere long we
began to see here and there a solid, red-faced, burly-looking
Englishman, a little pursy perhaps, who made us ashamed of ourselves
and our thin and nervous countrymen,--a grandfatherly personage, at
home in his greatcoat, who looked as if he might be a stage
proprietor, certainly a railroad director, and knew, or had a right to
know, when the cars did start. Then there were two or three
pale-faced, black-eyed, loquacious Canadian-French gentlemen there,
shrugging their shoulders; pitted as if they had all had the
small-pox. In the meanwhile some soldiers, redcoats, belonging to the
barracks near by, were turned out to be drilled. At every important
point in our route the soldiers showed themselves ready for us; though
they were evidently rather raw recruits here, they manœuvred far
better than our soldiers; yet, as usual, I heard some Yankees talk as
if they were no great shakes, and they had seen the Acton Blues
manœuvre as well. The officers spoke sharply to them, and appeared
to be doing their part thoroughly. I heard one suddenly coming to the
rear, exclaim, "Michael Donouy, take his name!" though I could not see
what the latter did or omitted to do. It was whispered that Michael
Donouy would have to suffer for that. I heard some of our party
discussing the possibility of their driving these troops off the field
with their umbrellas. I thought that the Yankee, though undisciplined,
had this advantage at least, that he especially is a man who,
everywhere and under all circumstances, is fully resolved to better
his condition essentially, and therefore he could afford to be beaten
at first; while the virtue of the Irishman, and to a great extent the
Englishman, consists in merely maintaining his ground or condition.
The Canadians here, a rather poor-looking race, clad in gray homespun,
which gave them the appearance of being covered with dust, were riding
about in caleches and small one-horse carts called charettes. The
Yankees assumed that all the riders were racing, or at least
exhibiting the paces of their horses, and saluted them accordingly. We
saw but little of the village here, for nobody could tell us when the
cars would start; that was kept a profound secret, perhaps for
political reasons; and therefore we were tied to our seats. The
inhabitants of St. John's and vicinity are described by an English
traveler as "singularly unprepossessing," and before completing his
period he adds, "besides, they are generally very much disaffected to
the British crown." I suspect that that "besides" should have been a
because.
At length, about noon, the cars began to roll towards La Prairie. The
whole distance of fifteen miles was over a remarkably level country,
resembling a Western prairie, with the mountains about Chambly visible
in the northeast. This novel but monotonous scenery was exciting. At
La Prairie we first took notice of the tinned roofs, but above all of
the St. Lawrence, which looked like a lake; in fact it is considerably
expanded here; it was nine miles across diagonally to Montreal. Mount
Royal in the rear of the city, and the island of St. Helen's opposite
to it, were now conspicuous. We could also see the Sault St. Louis
about five miles up the river, and the Sault Norman still farther
eastward. The former are described as the most considerable rapids in
the St. Lawrence; but we could see merely a gleam of light there as
from a cobweb in the sun. Soon the city of Montreal was discovered
with its tin roofs shining afar. Their reflections fell on the eye
like a clash of cymbals on the ear. Above all the church of Notre Dame
was conspicuous, and anon the Bonsecours market-house, occupying a
commanding position on the quay, in the rear of the shipping. This
city makes the more favorable impression from being approached by
water, and also being built of stone, a gray limestone found on the
island. Here, after traveling directly inland the whole breadth of New
England, we had struck upon a city's harbor,--it made on me the
impression of a seaport,--to which ships of six hundred tons can
ascend, and where vessels drawing fifteen feet lie close to the wharf,
five hundred and forty miles from the Gulf, the St. Lawrence being
here two miles wide. There was a great crowd assembled on the
ferry-boat wharf and on the quay to receive the Yankees, and flags of
all colors were streaming from the vessels to celebrate their arrival.
When the gun was fired, the gentry hurrahed again and again, and then
the Canadian caleche-drivers, who were most interested in the matter,
and who, I perceived, were separated from the former by a fence,
hurrahed their welcome; first the broadcloth, then the homespun.
It was early in the afternoon when we stepped ashore. With a single
companion, I soon found my way to the church of Notre Dame. I saw that
it was of great size and signified something. It is said to be the
largest ecclesiastical structure in North America, and can seat ten
thousand. It is two hundred and fifty-five and a half feet long, and
the groined ceiling is eighty feet above your head. The Catholic are
the only churches which I have seen worth remembering, which are not
almost wholly profane. I do not speak only of the rich and splendid
like this, but of the humblest of them as well. Coming from the
hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed aside the listed
door of this church, and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere
which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any. There
sat one or two women who had stolen a moment from the concerns of the
day, as they were passing; but, if there had been fifty people there,
it would still have been the most solitary place imaginable. They did
not look up at us, nor did one regard another. We walked softly down
the broad aisle with our hats in our hands. Presently came in a troop
of Canadians, in their homespun, who had come to the city in the boat
with us, and one and all kneeled down in the aisle before the high
altar to their devotions, somewhat awkwardly, as cattle prepare to lie
down, and there we left them. As if you were to catch some farmer's
sons from Marlborough, come to cattle-show, silently kneeling in
Concord meeting-house some Wednesday! Would there not soon be a mob
peeping in at the windows? It is true, these Roman Catholics, priests
and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the
significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a
church and were trying to bethink himself. Nevertheless, they are
capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this
sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink
ourselves even as oxen. I did not mind the pictures nor the candles,
whether tallow or tin. Those of the former which I looked at appeared
tawdry. It matters little to me whether the pictures are by a neophyte
of the Algonquin or the Italian tribe. But I was impressed by the
quiet, religious atmosphere of the place. It was a great cave in the
midst of a city; and what were the altars and the tinsel but the
sparkling stalactites, into which you entered in a moment, and where
the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and
profitable thought? Such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day,
is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays,
hardly long enough for an airing, and then filled with a bustling
congregation,--a church where the priest is the least part, where you
do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be
heard. I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable
one if the priest were quite omitted. I think that I might go to
church myself some Monday, if I lived in a city where there was such a
one to go to. In Concord, to be sure, we do not need such. Our forests
are such a church, far grander and more sacred. We dare not leave
_our_ meeting-houses open for fear they would be profaned. Such a
cave, such a shrine, in one of our groves, for instance, how long
would it be respected? for what purposes would it be entered, by such
baboons as we are? I think of its value not only to religion, but to
philosophy and to poetry; besides a reading-room, to have a
thinking-room in every city! Perchance the time will come when every
house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, and dining-room, and
talking-room or parlor, but its thinking-room also, and the architects
will put it into their plans. Let it be furnished and ornamented with
whatever conduces to serious and creative thought. I should not object
to the holy water, or any other simple symbol, if it were consecrated
by the imagination of the worshipers.
I heard that some Yankees bet that the candles were not wax, but tin.
A European assured them that they were wax; but, inquiring of the
sexton, he was surprised to learn that they were tin filled with oil.
The church was too poor to afford wax. As for the Protestant churches,
here or elsewhere, they did not interest me, for it is only as caves
that churches interest me at all, and in that respect they were
inferior.
Montreal makes the impression of a larger city than you had expected
to find, though you may have heard that it contains nearly sixty
thousand inhabitants. In the newer parts, it appeared to be growing
fast like a small New York, and to be considerably Americanized. The
names of the squares reminded you of Paris,--the Champ de Mars, the
Place d'Armes, and others,--and you felt as if a French revolution
might break out any moment. Glimpses of Mount Royal rising behind the
town, and the names of some streets in that direction, make one think
of Edinburgh. That hill sets off this city wonderfully. I inquired at
a principal bookstore for books published in Montreal. They said that
there were none but school-books and the like; they got their books
from the States. From time to time we met a priest in the streets, for
they are distinguished by their dress, like the _civil_ police. Like
clergymen generally, with or without the gown, they made on us the
impression of effeminacy. We also met some Sisters of Charity, dressed
in black, with Shaker-shaped black bonnets and crosses, and cadaverous
faces, who looked as if they had almost cried their eyes out, their
complexions parboiled with scalding tears; insulting the daylight by
their presence, having taken an oath not to smile. By cadaverous I
mean that their faces were like the faces of those who have been dead
and buried for a year, and then untombed, with the life's grief upon
them, and yet, for some unaccountable reason, the process of decay
arrested.
"Truth never fails her servant, sir, nor leaves him
With the day's shame upon him."
They waited demurely on the sidewalk while a truck laden with raisins
was driven in at the seminary of St. Sulpice, never once lifting their
eyes from the ground.
The soldier here, as everywhere in Canada, appeared to be put forward,
and by his best foot. They were in the proportion of the soldiers to
the laborers in an African ant-hill. The inhabitants evidently rely on
them in a great measure for music and entertainment. You would meet
with them pacing back and forth before some guard-house or
passage-way, guarding, regarding, and disregarding all kinds of law by
turns, apparently for the sake of the discipline to themselves, and
not because it was important to exclude anybody from entering that
way. They reminded me of the men who are paid for piling up bricks and
then throwing them down again. On every prominent ledge you could see
England's hands holding the Canadas, and I judged by the redness of
her knuckles that she would soon have to let go. In the rear of such a
guard-house, in a large graveled square or parade ground, called the
Champ de Mars, we saw a large body of soldiers being drilled, we being
as yet the only spectators. But they did not appear to notice us any
more than the devotees in the church, but were seemingly as
indifferent to fewness of spectators as the phenomena of nature are,
whatever they might have been thinking under their helmets of the
Yankees that were to come. Each man wore white kid gloves. It was one
of the most interesting sights which I saw in Canada. The problem
appeared to be how to smooth down all individual protuberances or
idiosyncrasies, and make a thousand men move as one man, animated by
one central will; and there was some approach to success. They obeyed
the signals of a commander who stood at a great distance, wand in
hand; and the precision, and promptness, and harmony of their
movements could not easily have been matched. The harmony was far more
remarkable than that of any choir or band, and obtained, no doubt, at
a greater cost. They made on me the impression, not of many
individuals, but of one vast centipede of a man, good for all sorts of
pulling down; and why not then for some kinds of building up? If men
could combine thus earnestly, and patiently, and harmoniously to some
really worthy end, what might they not accomplish? They now put their
hands, and partially perchance their heads together, and the result is
that they are the imperfect tools of an imperfect and tyrannical
government. But if they could put their hands and heads and hearts and
all together, such a coöperation and harmony would be the very end and
success for which government now exists in vain,--a government, as it
were, not only with tools, but stock to trade with.
I was obliged to frame some sentences that sounded like French in
order to deal with the market-women, who, for the most part, cannot
speak English. According to the guidebook the relative population of
this city stands nearly thus: two fifths are French-Canadian; nearly
one fifth British-Canadian; one and a half fifths English, Irish, and
Scotch; somewhat less than one half fifth Germans, United States
people, and others. I saw nothing like pie for sale, and no good cake
to put in my bundle, such as you can easily find in our towns, but
plenty of fair-looking apples, for which Montreal Island is
celebrated, and also pears cheaper and I thought better than ours, and
peaches, which, though they were probably brought from the South, were
as cheap as they commonly are with us. So imperative is the law of
demand and supply that, as I have been told, the market of Montreal is
sometimes supplied with green apples from the State of New York some
weeks even before they are ripe in the latter place. I saw here the
spruce wax which the Canadians chew, done up in little silvered
papers, a penny a roll; also a small and shriveled fruit which they
called _cerises_, mixed with many little stems, somewhat like raisins,
but I soon returned what I had bought, finding them rather insipid,
only putting a sample in my pocket. Since my return, I find on
comparison that it is the fruit of the sweet viburnum (_Viburnum
Lentago_), which with us rarely holds on till it is ripe.
I stood on the deck of the steamer John Munn, late in the afternoon,
when the second and third ferry-boats arrived from La Prairie,
bringing the remainder of the Yankees. I never saw so many caleches,
cabs, charettes, and similar vehicles collected before, and doubt if
New York could easily furnish more. The handsome and substantial stone
quay which stretches a mile along the riverside and protects the
street from the ice was thronged with the citizens who had turned out
on foot and in carriages to welcome or to behold the Yankees. It was
interesting to see the caleche-drivers dash up and down the slope of
the quay with their active little horses. They drive much faster than
in our cities. I have been told that some of them come nine miles into
the city every morning and return every night, without changing their
horses during the day. In the midst of the crowd of carts, I observed
one deep one loaded with sheep with their legs tied together, and
their bodies piled one upon another, as if the driver had forgotten
that they were sheep and not yet mutton,--a sight, I trust, peculiar
to Canada, though I fear that it is not.
CHAPTER II
QUEBEC AND MONTMORENCI
About six o'clock we started for Quebec, one hundred and eighty miles
distant by the river; gliding past Longueuil and Boucherville on the
right, and Pointe aux Trembles, "so called from having been originally
covered with aspens," and Bout de l'Isle, or the end of the island, on
the left. I repeat these names not merely for want of more substantial
facts to record, but because they sounded singularly poetic to my
ears. There certainly was no lie in them. They suggested that some
simple, and, perchance, heroic human life might have transpired there.
There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the
mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a
string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word.
The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least
natural fact, and the allying his life to it. All the world
reiterating this slender truth, that aspens once grew there; and the
swift inference is that men were there to see them. And so it would be
with the names of our native and neighboring villages, if we had not
profaned them.
The daylight now failed us, and we went below; but I endeavored to
console myself for being obliged to make this voyage by night, by
thinking that I did not lose a great deal, the shores being low and
rather unattractive, and that the river itself was much the more
interesting object. I heard something in the night about the boat
being at William Henry, Three Rivers, and in the Richelieu Rapids, but
I was still where I had been when I lost sight of Pointe aux Trembles.
To hear a man who has been waked up at midnight in the cabin of a
steamboat inquiring, "Waiter, where are we now?" is as if, at any
moment of the earth's revolution round the sun, or of the system round
its centre, one were to raise himself up and inquire of one of the
deck hands, "Where are we now?"
I went on deck at daybreak, when we were thirty or forty miles above
Quebec. The banks were now higher and more interesting. There was an
"uninterrupted succession of whitewashed cottages," on each side of
the river. This is what every traveler tells. But it is not to be
taken as an evidence of the populousness of the country in general,
hardly even of the river-banks. They have presented a similar
appearance for a hundred years. The Swedish traveler and naturalist
Kalm, who descended the river in 1749, says, "It could really be
called a village, beginning at Montreal and ending at Quebec, which is
a distance of more than one hundred and eighty miles; for the
farmhouses are never above five arpents, and sometimes but three
asunder, a few places excepted." Even in 1684 Hontan said that the
houses were not more than a gunshot apart at most. Ere long we passed
Cape Rouge, eight miles above Quebec, the mouth of the Chaudière on
the opposite or south side; New Liverpool Cove with its lumber-rafts
and some shipping; then Sillery and Wolfe's Cove and the Heights of
Abraham on the north, with now a view of Cape Diamond, and the citadel
in front. The approach to Quebec was very imposing. It was about six
o'clock in the morning when we arrived. There is but a single street
under the cliff on the south side of the cape, which was made by
blasting the rocks and filling up the river. Three-story houses did
not rise more than one fifth or one sixth the way up the nearly
perpendicular rock, whose summit is three hundred and forty-five feet
above the water. We saw, as we glided past, the sign on the side of
the precipice, part way up, pointing to the spot where Montgomery was
killed in 1775. Formerly it was the custom for those who went to
Quebec for the first time to be ducked, or else pay a fine. Not even
the Governor-General escaped. But we were too many to be ducked, even
if the custom had not been abolished.[1]
Here we were, in the harbor of Quebec, still three hundred and sixty
miles from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in a basin two miles across,
where the greatest depth is twenty-eight fathoms, and though the water
is fresh, the tide rises seventeen to twenty-four feet,--a harbor
"large and deep enough," says a British traveler, "to hold the English
navy." I may as well state that, in 1844, the county of Quebec
contained about forty-five thousand inhabitants (the city and suburbs
having about forty-three thousand),--about twenty-eight thousand being
Canadians of French origin; eight thousand British; over seven
thousand natives of Ireland; one thousand five hundred natives of
England; the rest Scotch and others. Thirty-six thousand belong to the
Church of Rome.
Separating ourselves from the crowd, we walked up a narrow street,
thence ascended by some wooden steps, called the Break-neck Stairs,
into another steep, narrow, and zigzag street, blasted through the
rock, which last led through a low, massive stone portal, called
Prescott Gate, the principal thoroughfare into the Upper Town. This
passage was defended by cannon, with a guard-house over it, a sentinel
at his post, and other soldiers at hand ready to relieve him. I rubbed
my eyes to be sure that I was in the Nineteenth Century, and was not
entering one of those portals which sometimes adorn the frontispieces
of new editions of old black-letter volumes. I thought it would be a
good place to read Froissart's Chronicles. It was such a reminiscence
of the Middle Ages as Scott's novels. Men apparently dwelt there for
security! Peace be unto them! As if the inhabitants of New York were
to go over to Castle William to live! What a place it must be to bring
up children! Being safe through the gate, we naturally took the street
which was steepest, and after a few turns found ourselves on the
Durham Terrace, a wooden platform on the site of the old castle of St.
Louis, still one hundred and fifteen feet below the summit of the
citadel, overlooking the Lower Town, the wharf where we had landed,
the harbor, the Isle of Orleans, and the river and surrounding country
to a great distance. It was literally a _splendid_ view. We could see,
six or seven miles distant, in the northeast, an indentation in the
lofty shore of the northern channel, apparently on one side of the
harbor, which marked the mouth of the Montmorenci, whose celebrated
fall was only a few rods in the rear.
At a shoe-shop, whither we were directed for this purpose, we got some
of our American money changed into English. I found that American hard
money would have answered as well, excepting cents, which fell very
fast before their pennies, it taking two of the former to make one of
the latter, and often the penny, which had cost us two cents, did us
the service of one cent only. Moreover, our robust cents were
compelled to meet on even terms a crew of vile half-penny tokens, and
Bungtown coppers, which had more brass in their composition, and so
perchance made their way in the world. Wishing to get into the
citadel, we were directed to the Jesuits' Barracks,--a good part of
the public buildings here are barracks,--to get a pass of the Town
Major. We did not heed the sentries at the gate, nor did they us, and
what under the sun they were placed there for, unless to hinder a free
circulation of the air, was not apparent. There we saw soldiers eating
their breakfasts in their mess-room, from bare wooden tables in camp
fashion. We were continually meeting with soldiers in the streets,
carrying funny little tin pails of all shapes, even semicircular, as
if made to pack conveniently. I supposed that they contained their
dinners,--so many slices of bread and butter to each, perchance.
Sometimes they were carrying some kind of military chest on a sort of
bier or hand-barrow, with a springy, undulating, military step, all
passengers giving way to them, even the charette-drivers stopping for
them to pass,--as if the battle were being lost from an inadequate
supply of powder. There was a regiment of Highlanders, and, as I
understood, of Royal Irish, in the city; and by this time there was a
regiment of Yankees also. I had already observed, looking up even from
the water, the head and shoulders of some General Poniatowsky, with an
enormous cocked hat and gun, peering over the roof of a house, away up
where the chimney caps commonly are with us, as it were a caricature
of war and military awfulness; but I had not gone far up St. Louis
Street before my riddle was solved, by the apparition of a real live
Highlander under a cocked hat, and with his knees out, standing and
marching sentinel on the ramparts, between St. Louis and St. John's
Gate. (It must be a holy war that is waged there.) We stood close by
without fear and looked at him. His legs were somewhat tanned, and the
hair had begun to grow on them, as some of our wise men predict that
it will in such cases, but I did not think they were remarkable in any
respect. Notwithstanding all his warlike gear, when I inquired of him
the way to the Plains of Abraham, he could not answer me without
betraying some bashfulness through his broad Scotch. Soon after, we
passed another of these creatures standing sentry at the St. Louis
Gate, who let us go by without shooting us, or even demanding the
countersign. We then began to go through the gate, which was so thick
and tunnel-like as to remind me of those lines in Claudian's "Old Man
of Verona," about the getting out of the gate being the greater part
of a journey;--as you might imagine yourself crawling through an
architectural vignette _at the end_ of a black-letter volume. We were
then reminded that we had been in a fortress, from which we emerged by
numerous zigzags in a ditch-like road, going a considerable distance
to advance a few rods, where they could have shot us two or three
times over, if their minds had been disposed as their guns were. The
greatest, or rather the most prominent, part of this city was
constructed with the design to offer the deadest resistance to leaden
and iron missiles that might be cast against it. But it is a
remarkable meteorological and psychological fact, that it is rarely
known to rain lead with much violence, except on places so
constructed. Keeping on about a mile we came to the Plains of
Abraham,--for having got through with the Saints, we came next to the
Patriarchs. Here the Highland regiment was being reviewed, while the
band stood on one side and played--methinks it was _La Claire
Fontaine_, the national air of the Canadian French. This is the site
where a real battle once took place, to commemorate which they have
had a sham fight here almost every day since. The Highlanders
manœuvred very well, and if the precision of their movements was
less remarkable, they did not appear so stiffly erect as the English
or Royal Irish, but had a more elastic and graceful gait, like a herd
of their own red deer, or as if accustomed to stepping down the sides
of mountains. But they made a sad impression on the whole, for it was
obvious that all true manhood was in the process of being drilled out
of them. I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled are, as a class,
peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The officers
appeared like men dressed above their condition. It is impossible to
give the soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His
natural foe is the government that drills him. What would any
philanthropist who felt an interest in these men's welfare naturally
do, but first of all teach them so to respect themselves that they
could not be hired for this work, whatever might be the consequences
to this government or that?--not drill a few, but educate all. I
observed one older man among them, gray as a wharf-rat, and supple as
the devil, marching lock-step with the rest, who would have to pay for
that elastic gait.
We returned to the citadel along the heights, plucking such flowers as
grew there. There was an abundance of succory still in blossom,
broad-leaved goldenrod, buttercups, thorn bushes, Canada thistles, and
ivy, on the very summit of Cape Diamond. I also found the bladder
campion in the neighborhood. We there enjoyed an extensive view, which
I will describe in another place. Our pass, which stated that all the
rules were "to be strictly enforced," as if they were determined to
keep up the semblance of reality to the last gasp, opened to us the
Dalhousie Gate, and we were conducted over the citadel by a
bare-legged Highlander in cocked hat and full regimentals. He told us
that he had been here about three years, and had formerly been
stationed at Gibraltar. As if his regiment, having perchance been
nestled amid the rocks of Edinburgh Castle, must flit from rock to
rock thenceforth over the earth's surface, like a bald eagle, or other
bird of prey, from eyrie to eyrie. As we were going out, we met the
Yankees coming in, in a body headed by a red-coated officer called the
commandant, and escorted by many citizens, both English and
French-Canadian. I therefore immediately fell into the procession, and
went round the citadel again with more intelligent guides, carrying,
as before, all my effects with me. Seeing that nobody walked with the
red-coated commandant, I attached myself to him, and though I was not
what is called well-dressed, he did not know whether to repel me or
not, for I talked like one who was not aware of any deficiency in that
respect. Probably there was not one among all the Yankees who went to
Canada this time, who was not more splendidly dressed than I was. It
would have been a poor story if I had not enjoyed some distinction. I
had on my "bad-weather clothes," like Olaf Trygvesson the Northman,
when he went to the Thing in England, where, by the way, he won his
bride. As we stood by the thirty-two-pounder on the summit of Cape
Diamond, which is fired three times a day, the commandant told me that
it would carry to the Isle of Orleans, four miles distant, and that no
hostile vessel could come round the island. I now saw the subterranean
or rather "casemated" barracks of the soldiers, which I had not
noticed before, though I might have walked over them. They had very
narrow windows, serving as loop-holes for musketry, and small iron
chimneys rising above the ground. There we saw the soldiers at home
and in an undress, splitting wood,--I looked to see whether with
swords or axes,--and in various ways endeavoring to realize that their
nation was now at peace with this part of the world. A part of each
regiment, chiefly officers, are allowed to marry. A grandfatherly,
would-be witty Englishman could give a Yankee whom he was patronizing
no reason for the bare knees of the Highlanders, other than oddity.
The rock within the citadel is a little convex, so that shells falling
on it would roll toward the circumference, where the barracks of the
soldiers and officers are; it has been proposed, therefore, to make it
slightly concave, so that they may roll into the centre, where they
would be comparatively harmless; and it is estimated that to do this
would cost twenty thousand pounds sterling. It may be well to remember
this when I build my next house, and have the roof "all correct" for
bomb-shells.
At mid-afternoon we made haste down Sault-au-Matelot Street, towards
the Falls of Montmorenci, about eight miles down the St. Lawrence, on
the north side, leaving the further examination of Quebec till our
return. On our way, we saw men in the streets sawing logs pit-fashion,
and afterward, with a common wood-saw and horse, cutting the planks
into squares for paving the streets. This looked very shiftless,
especially in a country abounding in water-power, and reminded me that
I was no longer in Yankeeland. I found, on inquiry, that the excuse
for this was that labor was so cheap; and I thought, with some pain,
how cheap men are here! I have since learned that the English traveler
Warburton remarked, soon after landing at Quebec, that everything was
cheap there but men. That must be the difference between going thither
from New and from Old England. I had already observed the dogs
harnessed to their little milk-carts, which contain a single large
can, lying asleep in the gutters regardless of the horses, while they
rested from their labors, at different stages of the ascent in the
Upper Town. I was surprised at the regular and extensive use made of
these animals for drawing not only milk but groceries, wood, etc. It
reminded me that the dog commonly is not put to any use. Cats catch
mice; but dogs only worry the cats. Kalm, a hundred years ago, saw
sledges here for ladies to ride in, drawn by a pair of dogs. He says,
"A middle-sized dog is sufficient to draw a single person, when the
roads are good;" and he was told by old people that horses were very
scarce in their youth, and almost all the land-carriage was then
effected by dogs. They made me think of the Esquimaux, who, in fact,
are the next people on the north. Charlevoix says that the first
horses were introduced in 1665.
We crossed Dorchester Bridge, over the St. Charles, the little river
in which Cartier, the discoverer of the St. Lawrence, put his ships,
and spent the winter of 1535, and found ourselves on an excellent
macadamized road, called Le Chemin de Beauport. We had left Concord
Wednesday morning, and we endeavored to realize that now, Friday
morning, we were taking a walk in Canada, in the Seigniory of
Beauport, a foreign country, which a few days before had seemed
almost as far off as England and France. Instead of rambling to
Flint's Pond or the Sudbury meadows, we found ourselves, after being a
little detained in cars and steamboats,--after spending half a night
at Burlington, and half a day at Montreal,--taking a walk down the
bank of the St. Lawrence to the Falls of Montmorenci and elsewhere.
Well, I thought to myself, here I am in a foreign country; let me have
my eyes about me, and take it all in. It already looked and felt a
good deal colder than it had in New England, as we might have expected
it would. I realized fully that I was four degrees nearer the pole,
and shuddered at the thought; and I wondered if it were possible that
the peaches might not be all gone when I returned. It was an
atmosphere that made me think of the fur-trade, which is so
interesting a department in Canada, for I had for all head-covering a
thin palm-leaf hat without lining, that cost twenty-five cents, and
over my coat one of those unspeakably cheap, as well as thin, brown
linen sacks of the Oak Hall pattern, which every summer appear all
over New England, thick as the leaves upon the trees. It was a
thoroughly Yankee costume, which some of my fellow-travelers wore in
the cars to save their coats a dusting. I wore mine, at first, because
it looked better than the coat it covered, and last, because two coats
were warmer than one, though one was thin and dirty. I never wear my
best coat on a journey, though perchance I could show a certificate to
prove that I have a more costly one, at least, at home, if that were
all that a gentleman required. It is not wise for a traveler to go
dressed. I should no more think of it than of putting on a clean
dicky and blacking my shoes to go a-fishing; as if you were going out
to dine, when, in fact, the genuine traveler is going out to work
hard, and fare harder,--to eat a crust by the wayside whenever he can
get it. Honest traveling is about as dirty work as you can do, and a
man needs a pair of overalls for it. As for blacking my shoes in such
a case, I should as soon think of blacking my face. I carry a piece of
tallow to preserve the leather and keep out the water; that's all; and
many an officious shoe-black, who carried off my shoes when I was
slumbering, mistaking me for a gentleman, has had occasion to repent
it before he produced a gloss on them.
My pack, in fact, was soon made, for I keep a short list of those
articles which, from frequent experience, I have found indispensable
to the foot-traveler; and, when I am about to start, I have only to
consult that, to be sure that nothing is omitted, and, what is more
important, nothing superfluous inserted. Most of my fellow-travelers
carried carpet-bags, or valises. Sometimes one had two or three
ponderous yellow valises in his clutch, at each hitch of the cars, as
if we were going to have another rush for seats; and when there was a
rush in earnest,--and there were not a few,--I would see my man in the
crowd, with two or three affectionate lusty fellows along each side of
his arm, between his shoulder and his valises, which last held them
tight to his back, like the nut on the end of a screw. I could not
help asking in my mind, What so great cause for showing Canada to
those valises, when perhaps your very nieces had to stay at home for
want of an escort? I should have liked to be present when the
custom-house officer came aboard of him, and asked him to declare upon
his honor if he had anything but wearing apparel in them. Even the
elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of
traveling is to travel without baggage. After considerable reflection
and experience, I have concluded that the best bag for the
foot-traveler is made with a handkerchief, or, if he study
appearances, a piece of stiff brown paper, well tied up, with a fresh
piece within to put outside when the first is torn. That is good for
both town and country, and none will know but you are carrying home
the silk for a new gown for your wife, when it may be a dirty shirt. A
bundle which you can carry literally under your arm, and which will
shrink and swell with its contents. I never found the carpet-bag of
equal capacity which was not a bundle of itself. We styled ourselves
the Knights of the Umbrella and the Bundle; for, wherever we went,
whether to Notre Dame or Mount Royal or the Champ de Mars, to the Town
Major's or the Bishop's Palace, to the Citadel, with a bare-legged
Highlander for our escort, or to the Plains of Abraham, to dinner or
to bed, the umbrella and the bundle went with us; for we wished to be
ready to digress at any moment. We made it our home nowhere in
particular, but everywhere where our umbrella and bundle were. It
would have been an amusing circumstance, if the mayor of one of those
cities had politely asked us where we were staying. We could only have
answered that we were staying with his honor for the time being. I was
amused when, after our return, some green ones inquired if we found it
easy to get accommodated; as if we went abroad to get accommodated,
when we can get that at home.
We met with many charettes, bringing wood and stone to the city. The
most ordinary-looking horses traveled faster than ours, or perhaps
they were ordinary-looking because, as I am told, the Canadians do not
use the curry-comb. Moreover, it is said that on the approach of
winter their horses acquire an increased quantity of hair, to protect
them from the cold. If this be true, some of our horses would make you
think winter were approaching, even in midsummer. We soon began to see
women and girls at work in the fields, digging potatoes alone, or
bundling up the grain which the men cut. They appeared in rude health,
with a great deal of color in their cheeks, and, if their occupation
had made them coarse, it impressed me as better in its effects than
making shirts at fourpence apiece, or doing nothing at all--unless it
be chewing slate-pencils--with still smaller results. They were much
more agreeable objects, with their great broad-brimmed hats and
flowing dresses, than the men and boys. We afterwards saw them doing
various other kinds of work; indeed, I thought that we saw more women
at work out of doors than men. On our return, we observed in this town
a girl, with Indian boots nearly two feet high, taking the harness off
a dog.
The purity and transparency of the atmosphere were wonderful. When we
had been walking an hour, we were surprised, on turning round, to see
how near the city, with its glittering tin roofs, still looked. A
village ten miles off did not appear to be more than three or four. I
was convinced that you could see objects distinctly there much
farther than here. It is true the villages are of a dazzling white,
but the dazzle is to be referred, perhaps, to the transparency of the
atmosphere as much as to the whitewash.
We were now fairly in the village of Beauport, though there was still
but one road. The houses stood close upon this, without any front
yards, and at an angle with it, as if they had dropped down, being set
with more reference to the road which the sun travels. It being about
sundown, and the falls not far off, we began to look round for a
lodging, for we preferred to put up at a private house, that we might
see more of the inhabitants. We inquired first at the most
promising-looking houses,--if, indeed, any were promising. When we
knocked, they shouted some French word for come in, perhaps _Entrez_,
and we asked for a lodging in English; but we found, unexpectedly,
that they spoke French only. Then we went along and tried another
house, being generally saluted by a rush of two or three little curs,
which readily distinguished a foreigner, and which we were prepared
now to hear bark in French. Our first question would be "Parlez-vous
Anglais?" but the invariable answer was "Non, monsieur;" and we soon
found that the inhabitants were exclusively French Canadians, and
nobody spoke English at all, any more than in France; that, in fact,
we were in a foreign country, where the inhabitants uttered not one
familiar sound to us. Then we tried by turns to talk French with them,
in which we succeeded sometimes pretty well, but for the most part
pretty ill. "Pouvez-vous nous donner un lit cette nuit?" we would
ask, and then they would answer with French volubility, so that we
could catch only a word here and there. We could understand the women
and children generally better than the men, and they us; and thus,
after a while, we would learn that they had no more beds than they
used.
So we were compelled to inquire, "Y a-t-il une maison publique ici?"
(_auberge_ we should have said, perhaps, for they seemed never to have
heard of the other), and they answered at length that there was no
tavern, unless we could get lodgings at the mill, _le moulin_, which
we had passed; or they would direct us to a grocery, and almost every
house had a small grocery at one end of it. We called on the public
notary or village lawyer, but he had no more beds nor English than the
rest. At one house there was so good a misunderstanding at once
established through the politeness of all parties, that we were
encouraged to walk in and sit down, and ask for a glass of water; and
having drank their water, we thought it was as good as to have tasted
their salt. When our host and his wife spoke of their poor
accommodations, meaning for themselves, we assured them that they were
good enough, for we thought that they were only apologizing for the
poorness of the accommodations they were about to offer us, and we did
not discover our mistake till they took us up a ladder into a loft,
and showed to our eyes what they had been laboring in vain to
communicate to our brains through our ears, that they had but that one
apartment with its few beds for the whole family. We made our _adieus_
forthwith, and with gravity, perceiving the literal signification of
that word. We were finally taken in at a sort of public house, whose
master worked for Patterson, the proprietor of the extensive sawmills
driven by a portion of the Montmorenci stolen from the fall, whose
roar we now heard. We here talked, or murdered, French all the
evening, with the master of the house and his family, and probably had
a more amusing time than if we had completely understood one another.
At length they showed us to a bed in their best chamber, very high to
get into, with a low wooden rail to it. It had no cotton sheets, but
coarse, home-made, dark-colored linen ones. Afterward, we had to do
with sheets still coarser than these, and nearly the color of our
blankets. There was a large open buffet loaded with crockery in one
corner of the room, as if to display their wealth to travelers, and
pictures of Scripture scenes, French, Italian, and Spanish, hung
around. Our hostess came back directly to inquire if we would have
brandy for breakfast. The next morning, when I asked their names, she
took down the temperance pledges of herself and husband and children,
which were hanging against the wall. They were Jean Baptiste Binet and
his wife, Geneviève Binet. Jean Baptiste is the sobriquet of the
French Canadians.
After breakfast we proceeded to the fall, which was within half a
mile, and at this distance its rustling sound, like the wind among the
leaves, filled all the air. We were disappointed to find that we were
in some measure shut out from the west side of the fall by the private
grounds and fences of Patterson, who appropriates not only a part of
the water for his mill, but a still larger part of the prospect, so
that we were obliged to trespass. This gentleman's mansion-house and
grounds were formerly occupied by the Duke of Kent, father to Queen
Victoria. It appeared to me in bad taste for an individual, though he
were the father of Queen Victoria, to obtrude himself with his land
titles, or at least his fences, on so remarkable a natural phenomenon,
which should, in every sense, belong to mankind. Some falls should
even be kept sacred from the intrusion of mills and factories, as
water privileges in another than the millwright's sense. This small
river falls perpendicularly nearly two hundred and fifty feet at one
pitch. The St. Lawrence falls only one hundred and sixty-four feet at
Niagara. It is a very simple and noble fall, and leaves nothing to be
desired; but the most that I could say of it would only have the force
of one other testimony to assure the reader that it is there. We
looked directly down on it from the point of a projecting rock, and
saw far below us, on a low promontory, the grass kept fresh and green
by the perpetual drizzle, looking like moss. The rock is a kind of
slate, in the crevices of which grew ferns and goldenrods. The
prevailing trees on the shores were spruce and arbor-vitæ,--the latter
very large and now full of fruit,--also aspens, alders, and the
mountain-ash with its berries. Every emigrant who arrives in this
country by way of the St. Lawrence, as he opens a point of the Isle of
Orleans, sees the Montmorenci tumbling into the Great River thus
magnificently in a vast white sheet, making its contribution with
emphasis. Roberval's pilot, Jean Alphonse, saw this fall thus, and
described it, in 1542. It is a splendid introduction to the scenery of
Quebec. Instead of an artificial fountain in its square, Quebec has
this magnificent natural waterfall, to adorn one side of its harbor.
Within the mouth of the chasm below, which can be entered only at
ebb-tide, we had a grand view at once of Quebec and of the fall. Kalm
says that the noise of the fall is sometimes heard at Quebec, about
eight miles distant, and is a sign of a northeast wind. The side of
this chasm, of soft and crumbling slate too steep to climb, was among
the memorable features of the scene. In the winter of 1829 the frozen
spray of the fall, descending on the ice of the St. Lawrence, made a
hill one hundred and twenty-six feet high. It is an annual phenomenon
which some think may help explain the formation of glaciers.
In the vicinity of the fall we began to notice what looked like our
red-fruited thorn bushes, grown to the size of ordinary apple trees,
very common, and full of large red or yellow fruit, which the
inhabitants called _pommettes_, but I did not learn that they were put
to any use.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Hierosme Lalemant says in 1648, in his Relation, he being
Superior: "All those who come to New France know well enough the
mountain of Notre Dame, because the pilots and sailors, being arrived
at that part of the Great River which is opposite to those high
mountains, baptize ordinarily for sport the new passengers, if they do
not turn aside by some present the inundation of this baptism which
one makes flow plentifully on their heads."
CHAPTER III
ST. ANNE
By the middle of the forenoon, though it was a rainy day, we were once
more on our way down the north bank of the St. Lawrence, in a
northeasterly direction, toward the Falls of St. Anne, which are about
thirty miles from Quebec. The settled, more level, and fertile portion
of Canada East may be described rudely as a triangle, with its apex
slanting toward the northeast, about one hundred miles wide at its
base, and from two to three or even four hundred miles long, if you
reckon its narrow northeastern extremity; it being the immediate
valley of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, rising by a single or
by successive terraces toward the mountains on either hand. Though the
words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and
unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which might be the colored
portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the
river, which one of those syllables would more than cover. The banks
of the St. Lawrence are rather low from Montreal to the Richelieu
Rapids, about forty miles above Quebec. Thence they rise gradually to
Cape Diamond, or Quebec. Where we now were, eight miles northeast of
Quebec, the mountains which form the northern side of this triangle
were only five or six miles distant from the river, gradually
departing farther and farther from it, on the west, till they reach
the Ottawa, and making haste to meet it on the east, at Cape
Tourmente, now in plain sight about twenty miles distant. So that we
were traveling in a very narrow and sharp triangle between the
mountains and the river, tilted up toward the mountains on the north,
never losing sight of our great fellow-traveler on our right.
According to Bouchette's Topographical Description of the Canadas, we
were in the Seigniory of the Côte de Beaupré, in the county of
Montmorenci, and the district of Quebec,--in that part of Canada which
was the first to be settled, and where the face of the country and the
population have undergone the least change from the beginning, where
the influence of the States and of Europe is least felt, and the
inhabitants see little or nothing of the world over the walls of
Quebec. This Seigniory was granted in 1636, and is now the property of
the Seminary of Quebec. It is the most mountainous one in the
province. There are some half a dozen parishes in it, each containing
a church, parsonage-house, gristmill, and several sawmills. We were
now in the most westerly parish, called Ange Gardien, or the Guardian
Angel, which is bounded on the west by the Montmorenci. The north bank
of the St. Lawrence here is formed on a grand scale. It slopes gently,
either directly from the shore or from the edge of an interval, till,
at the distance of about a mile, it attains the height of four or five
hundred feet. The single road runs along the side of the slope two or
three hundred feet above the river at first, and from a quarter of a
mile to a mile distant from it, and affords fine views of the north
channel, which is about a mile wide, and of the beautiful Isle of
Orleans, about twenty miles long by five wide, where grow the best
apples and plums in the Quebec district.
Though there was but this single road, it was a continuous village for
as far as we walked this day and the next, or about thirty miles down
the river, the houses being as near together all the way as in the
middle of one of our smallest straggling country villages, and we
could never tell by their number when we were on the skirts of a
parish, for the road never ran through the fields or woods. We were
told that it was just six miles from one parish church to another. I
thought that we saw every house in Ange Gardien. Therefore, as it was
a muddy day, we never got out of the mud, nor out of the village,
unless we got over the fence; then, indeed, if it was on the north
side, we were out of the civilized world. There were sometimes a few
more houses near the church, it is true, but we had only to go a
quarter of a mile from the road, to the top of the bank, to find
ourselves on the verge of the uninhabited, and, for the most part,
unexplored wilderness stretching toward Hudson's Bay. The farms
accordingly were extremely long and narrow, each having a frontage on
the river. Bouchette accounts for this peculiar manner of laying out a
village by referring to "the social character of the Canadian peasant,
who is singularly fond of neighborhood," also to the advantage arising
from a concentration of strength in Indian times. Each farm, called
_terre_, he says, is, in nine cases out of ten, three arpents wide by
thirty deep, that is, very nearly thirty-five by three hundred and
forty-nine of our rods; sometimes one half arpent by thirty, or one to
sixty; sometimes, in fact, a few yards by half a mile. Of course it
costs more for fences. A remarkable difference between the Canadian
and the New England character appears from the fact that, in 1745, the
French government were obliged to pass a law forbidding the farmers or
_censitaires_ building on land less than one and a half arpents front
by thirty or forty deep, under a certain penalty, in order to compel
emigration, and bring the seigneur's estates all under cultivation;
and it is thought that they have now less reluctance to leave the
paternal roof than formerly, "removing beyond the sight of the parish
spire, or the sound of the parish bell." But I find that in the
previous or seventeenth century, the complaint, often renewed, was of
a totally opposite character, namely, that the inhabitants dispersed
and exposed themselves to the Iroquois. Accordingly, about 1664, the
king was obliged to order that "they should make no more clearings
except one next to another, and that they should reduce their parishes
to the form of the parishes in France as much as possible." The
Canadians of those days, at least, possessed a roving spirit of
adventure which carried them further, in exposure to hardship and
danger, than ever the New England colonist went, and led them, though
not to clear and colonize the wilderness, yet to range over it as
_coureurs de bois_, or runners of the woods, or, as Hontan prefers to
call them, _coureurs de risques_, runners of risks; to say nothing of
their enterprising priesthood; and Charlevoix thinks that if the
authorities had taken the right steps to prevent the youth from
ranging the woods (_de courir les bois_), they would have had an
excellent militia to fight the Indians and English.
The road in this clayey-looking soil was exceedingly muddy in
consequence of the night's rain. We met an old woman directing her
dog, which was harnessed to a little cart, to the least muddy part of
it. It was a beggarly sight. But harnessed to the cart as he was, we
heard him barking after we had passed, though we looked anywhere but
to the cart to see where the dog was that barked. The houses commonly
fronted the south, whatever angle they might make with the road; and
frequently they had no door nor cheerful window on the road side. Half
the time they stood fifteen to forty rods from the road, and there was
no very obvious passage to them, so that you would suppose that there
must be another road running by them. They were of stone, rather
coarsely mortared, but neatly whitewashed, almost invariably one story
high and long in proportion to their height, with a shingled roof, the
shingles being pointed, for ornament, at the eaves, like the pickets
of a fence, and also one row halfway up the roof. The gables sometimes
projected a foot or two at the ridge-pole only. Yet they were very
humble and unpretending dwellings. They commonly had the date of their
erection on them. The windows opened in the middle, like blinds, and
were frequently provided with solid shutters. Sometimes, when we
walked along the back side of a house which stood near the road, we
observed stout stakes leaning against it, by which the shutters, now
pushed half open, were fastened at night; within, the houses were
neatly ceiled with wood not painted. The oven was commonly out of
doors, built of stone and mortar, frequently on a raised platform of
planks. The cellar was often on the opposite side of the road, in
front of or behind the houses, looking like an ice-house with us, with
a lattice door for summer. The very few mechanics whom we met had an
old-Bettyish look, in their aprons and _bonnets rouges_ like fools'
caps. The men wore commonly the same _bonnet rouge_, or red woolen or
worsted cap, or sometimes blue or gray, looking to us as if they had
got up with their night-caps on, and, in fact, I afterwards found that
they had. Their clothes were of the cloth of the country, _étoffe du
pays_, gray or some other plain color. The women looked stout, with
gowns that stood out stiffly, also, for the most part, apparently of
some home-made stuff. We also saw some specimens of the more
characteristic winter dress of the Canadian, and I have since
frequently detected him in New England by his coarse gray homespun
capote and picturesque red sash, and his well-furred cap, made to
protect his ears against the severity of his climate.
It drizzled all day, so that the roads did not improve. We began now
to meet with wooden crosses frequently, by the roadside, about a dozen
feet high, often old and toppling down, sometimes standing in a square
wooden platform, sometimes in a pile of stones, with a little niche
containing a picture of the Virgin and Child, or of Christ alone,
sometimes with a string of beads, and covered with a piece of glass to
keep out the rain, with the words, _Pour la Vierge_, or INRI, on them.
Frequently, on the cross-bar, there would be quite a collection of
symbolical knickknacks, looking like an Italian's board; the
representation in wood of a hand, a hammer, spikes, pincers, a flask
of vinegar, a ladder, etc., the whole, perchance, surmounted by a
weathercock; but I could not look at an honest weathercock in this
walk without mistrusting that there was some covert reference in it to
St. Peter. From time to time we passed a little one-story chapel-like
building, with a tin-roofed spire, a shrine, perhaps it would be
called, close to the path-side, with a lattice door, through which we
could see an altar, and pictures about the walls; equally open,
through rain and shine, though there was no getting into it. At these
places the inhabitants kneeled and perhaps breathed a short prayer. We
saw one schoolhouse in our walk, and listened to the sounds which
issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of
enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils
received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the
Catholic Church. The churches were very picturesque, and their
interior much more showy than the dwelling-houses promised. They were
of stone, for it was ordered, in 1699, that that should be their
material. They had tinned spires, and quaint ornaments. That of Ange
Gardien had a dial on it, with the Middle Age Roman numerals on its
face, and some images in niches on the outside. Probably its
counterpart has existed in Normandy for a thousand years. At the
church of Château Richer, which is the next parish to Ange Gardien, we
read, looking over the wall, the inscriptions in the adjacent
churchyard, which began with _Ici gît_ or _Repose_, and one over a boy
contained _Priez pour lui_. This answered as well as Père la Chaise.
We knocked at the door of the curé's house here, when a sleek,
friar-like personage, in his sacerdotal robe, appeared. To our
"Parlez-vous Anglais?" even he answered, "Non, monsieur;" but at last
we made him understand what we wanted. It was to find the ruins of the
old _château_. "Ah! oui! oui!" he exclaimed, and, donning his coat,
hastened forth, and conducted us to a small heap of rubbish which we
had already examined. He said that fifteen years before, it was _plus
considérable_. Seeing at that moment three little red birds fly out of
a crevice in the ruins, up into an arbor-vitæ tree which grew out of
them, I asked him their names, in such French as I could muster, but
he neither understood me nor ornithology; he only inquired where we
had _appris à parler Français_; we told him, _dans les États-Unis_;
and so we bowed him into his house again. I was surprised to find a
man wearing a black coat, and with apparently no work to do, even in
that part of the world.
The universal salutation from the inhabitants whom we met was _bon
jour_, at the same time touching the hat; with _bon jour_, and
touching your hat, you may go smoothly through all Canada East. A
little boy, meeting us, would remark, "Bon jour, monsieur; le chemin
est mauvais" (Good morning, sir; it is bad walking). Sir Francis Head
says that the immigrant is forward to "appreciate the happiness of
living in a land in which the old country's servile custom of touching
the hat does not exist," but he was thinking of Canada West, of
course. It would, indeed, be a serious bore to be obliged to touch
your hat several times a day. A Yankee has not leisure for it.
We saw peas, and even beans, collected into heaps in the fields. The
former are an important crop here, and, I suppose, are not so much
infested by the weevil as with us. There were plenty of apples, very
fair and sound, by the roadside, but they were so small as to suggest
the origin of the apple in the crab. There was also a small, red fruit
which they called _snells_, and another, also red and very acid, whose
name a little boy wrote for me, "_pinbéna_." It is probably the same
with, or similar to, the _pembina_ of the voyageurs, a species of
viburnum, which, according to Richardson, has given its name to many
of the rivers of Rupert's Land. The forest trees were spruce,
arbor-vitæ, firs, birches, beeches, two or three kinds of maple,
basswood, wild cherry, aspens, etc., but no pitch pines (_Pinus
rigida_). I saw very few, if any, trees which had been set out for
shade or ornament. The water was commonly running streams or springs
in the bank by the roadside, and was excellent. The parishes are
commonly separated by a stream, and frequently the farms. I noticed
that the fields were furrowed or thrown into beds seven or eight feet
wide to dry the soil.
At the Rivière du Sault à la Puce, which, I suppose, means the River
of the Fall of the Flea, was advertised in English, as the sportsmen
are English, "The best Snipe-shooting grounds," over the door of a
small public house. These words being English affected me as if I had
been absent now ten years from my country, and for so long had not
heard the sound of my native language, and every one of them was as
interesting to me as if I had been a snipe-shooter, and they had been
snipes. The prunella, or self-heal, in the grass here, was an old
acquaintance. We frequently saw the inhabitants washing or cooking
for their pigs, and in one place hackling flax by the roadside. It was
pleasant to see these usually domestic operations carried on out of
doors, even in that cold country.
At twilight we reached a bridge over a little river, the boundary
between Château Richer and St. Anne, _le premier pont de Ste. Anne_,
and at dark the church of _La Bonne Ste. Anne_. Formerly vessels from
France, when they came in sight of this church, gave "a general
discharge of their artillery," as a sign of joy that they had escaped
all the dangers of the river. Though all the while we had grand views
of the adjacent country far up and down the river, and, for the most
part, when we turned about, of Quebec in the horizon behind us, and we
never beheld it without new surprise and admiration; yet, throughout
our walk, the Great River of Canada on our right hand was the main
feature in the landscape, and this expands so rapidly below the Isle
of Orleans, and creates such a breadth of level horizon above its
waters in that direction, that, looking down the river as we
approached the extremity of that island, the St. Lawrence seemed to be
opening into the ocean, though we were still about three hundred and
twenty-five miles from what can be called its mouth.[2]
When we inquired here for a _maison publique_ we were directed
apparently to that private house where we were most likely to find
entertainment. There were no guide-boards where we walked, because
there was but one road; there were no shops nor signs, because there
were no artisans to speak of, and the people raised their own
provisions; and there were no taverns, because there were no
travelers. We here bespoke lodging and breakfast. They had, as usual,
a large, old-fashioned, two-storied box stove in the middle of the
room, out of which, in due time, there was sure to be forthcoming a
supper, breakfast, or dinner. The lower half held the fire, the upper
the hot air, and as it was a cool Canadian evening, this was a
comforting sight to us. Being four or five feet high it warmed the
whole person as you stood by it. The stove was plainly a very
important article of furniture in Canada, and was not set aside during
the summer. Its size, and the respect which was paid to it, told of
the severe winters which it had seen and prevailed over. The master of
the house, in his long-pointed red woolen cap, had a thoroughly
antique physiognomy of the old Norman stamp. He might have come over
with Jacques Cartier. His was the hardest French to understand of any
we had heard yet, for there was a great difference between one speaker
and another, and this man talked with a pipe in his mouth beside,--a
kind of tobacco French. I asked him what he called his dog. He shouted
_Brock_! (the name of the breed). We like to hear the cat called
_min_, "Min! min! min!" I inquired if we could cross the river here to
the Isle of Orleans, thinking to return that way when we had been to
the falls. He answered, "S'il ne fait pas un trop grand vent" (If
there is not too much wind). They use small boats, or pirogues, and
the waves are often too high for them. He wore, as usual, something
between a moccasin and a boot, which he called _bottes Indiennes_,
Indian boots, and had made himself. The tops were of calf or
sheepskin, and the soles of cowhide turned up like a moccasin. They
were yellow or reddish, the leather never having been tanned nor
colored. The women wore the same. He told us that he had traveled ten
leagues due north into the bush. He had been to the Falls of St. Anne,
and said that they were more beautiful, but not greater, than
Montmorenci, _plus beau, mais non plus grand, que Montmorenci_. As
soon as we had retired, the family commenced their devotions. A little
boy officiated, and for a long time we heard him muttering over his
prayers.
In the morning, after a breakfast of tea, maple-sugar, bread and
butter, and what I suppose is called _potage_ (potatoes and meat
boiled with flour), the universal dish as we found, perhaps the
national one, I ran over to the Church of La Bonne Ste. Anne, whose
matin bell we had heard, it being Sunday morning. Our book said that
this church had "long been an object of interest, from the miraculous
cures said to have been wrought on visitors to the shrine." There was
a profusion of gilding, and I counted more than twenty-five crutches
suspended on the walls, some for grown persons, some for children,
which it was to be inferred so many sick had been able to dispense
with; but they looked as if they had been made to order by the
carpenter who made the church. There were one or two villagers at
their devotions at that early hour, who did not look up, but when they
had sat a long time with their little book before the picture of one
saint, went to another. Our whole walk was through a thoroughly
Catholic country, and there was no trace of any other religion. I
doubt if there are any more simple and unsophisticated Catholics
anywhere. Emery de Caen, Champlain's contemporary, told the Huguenot
sailors that "Monseigneur the Duke de Ventadour (Viceroy) did not wish
that they should sing psalms in the Great River."
On our way to the falls, we met the habitans coming to the Church of
La Bonne Ste. Anne, walking or riding in charettes by families. I
remarked that they were universally of small stature. The toll-man at
the bridge over the St. Anne was the first man we had chanced to meet,
since we left Quebec, who could speak a word of English. How good
French the inhabitants of this part of Canada speak, I am not
competent to say; I only know that it is not made impure by being
mixed with English. I do not know why it should not be as good as is
spoken in Normandy. Charlevoix, who was here a hundred years ago,
observes, "The French language is nowhere spoken with greater purity,
there being no accent perceptible;" and Potherie said "they had no
dialect, which, indeed, is generally lost in a colony."
The falls, which we were in search of, are three miles up the St.
Anne. We followed for a short distance a foot-path up the east bank of
this river, through handsome sugar maple and arbor-vitæ groves. Having
lost the path which led to a house where we were to get further
directions, we dashed at once into the woods, steering by guess and by
compass, climbing directly through woods a steep hill, or mountain,
five or six hundred feet high, which was, in fact, only the bank of
the St. Lawrence. Beyond this we by good luck fell into another path,
and following this or a branch of it, at our discretion, through a
forest consisting of large white pines,--the first we had seen in our
walk,--we at length heard the roar of falling water, and came out at
the head of the Falls of St. Anne. We had descended into a ravine or
cleft in the mountain, whose walls rose still a hundred feet above us,
though we were near its top, and we now stood on a very rocky shore,
where the water had lately flowed a dozen feet higher, as appeared by
the stones and driftwood, and large birches twisted and splintered as
a farmer twists a withe. Here the river, one or two hundred feet wide,
came flowing rapidly over a rocky bed out of that interesting
wilderness which stretches toward Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits.
Ha-ha Bay, on the Saguenay, was about one hundred miles north of where
we stood. Looking on the map, I find that the first country on the
north which bears a name is that part of Rupert's Land called East
Main. This river, called after the holy Anne, flowing from such a
direction, here tumbled over a precipice, at present by three
channels, how far down I do not know, but far enough for all our
purposes, and to as good a distance as if twice as far. It matters
little whether you call it one, or two, or three hundred feet; at any
rate, it was a sufficient water privilege for us. I crossed the
principal channel directly over the verge of the fall, where it was
contracted to about fifteen feet in width, by a dead tree which had
been dropped across and secured in a cleft of the opposite rock, and
a smaller one a few feet higher, which served for a hand-rail. This
bridge was rotten as well as small and slippery, being stripped of
bark, and I was obliged to seize a moment to pass when the falling
water did not surge over it, and midway, though at the expense of wet
feet, I looked down probably more than a hundred feet, into the mist
and foam below. This gave me the freedom of an island of precipitous
rock by which I descended as by giant steps,--the rock being composed
of large cubical masses, clothed with delicate close-hugging lichens
of various colors, kept fresh and bright by the moisture,--till I
viewed the first fall from the front, and looked down still deeper to
where the second and third channels fell into a remarkably large
circular basin worn in the stone. The falling water seemed to jar the
very rocks, and the noise to be ever increasing. The vista down-stream
was through a narrow and deep cleft in the mountain, all white suds at
the bottom; but a sudden angle in this gorge prevented my seeing
through to the bottom of the fall. Returning to the shore, I made my
way down-stream through the forest to see how far the fall extended,
and how the river came out of that adventure. It was to clamber along
the side of a precipitous mountain of loose mossy rocks, covered with
a damp primitive forest, and terminating at the bottom in an abrupt
precipice over the stream. This was the east side of the fall. At
length, after a quarter of a mile, I got down to still water, and, on
looking up through the winding gorge, I could just see to the foot of
the fall which I had before examined; while from the opposite side of
the stream, here much contracted, rose a perpendicular wall, I will
not venture to say how many hundred feet, but only that it was the
highest perpendicular wall of bare rock that I ever saw. In front of
me tumbled in from the summit of the cliff a tributary stream, making
a beautiful cascade, which was a remarkable fall in itself, and there
was a cleft in this precipice, apparently four or five feet wide,
perfectly straight up and down from top to bottom, which, from its
cavernous depth and darkness, appeared merely as _a black streak_.
This precipice is not sloped, nor is the material soft and crumbling
slate as at Montmorenci, but it rises perpendicular, like the side of
a mountain fortress, and is cracked into vast cubical masses of gray
and black rock shining with moisture, as if it were the ruin of an
ancient wall built by Titans. Birches, spruces, mountain-ashes with
their bright red berries, arbor-vitæs, white pines, alders, etc.,
overhung this chasm on the very verge of the cliff and in the
crevices, and here and there were buttresses of rock supporting trees
part way down, yet so as to enhance, not injure, the effect of the
bare rock. Take it altogether, it was a most wild and rugged and
stupendous chasm, so deep and narrow, where a river had worn itself a
passage through a mountain of rock, and all around was the
comparatively untrodden wilderness.
This was the limit of our walk down the St. Lawrence. Early in the
afternoon we began to retrace our steps, not being able to cross the
north channel and return by the Isle of Orleans, on account of the
_trop grand vent_, or too great wind. Though the waves did run pretty
high, it was evident that the inhabitants of Montmorenci County were
no sailors, and made but little use of the river. When we reached the
bridge between St. Anne and Château Richer, I ran back a little way to
ask a man in the field the name of the river which we were crossing,
but for a long time I could not make out what he said, for he was one
of the more unintelligible Jacques Cartier men. At last it flashed
upon me that it was _La Rivière au Chien_, or the Dog River, which my
eyes beheld, which brought to my mind the life of the Canadian
voyageur and _coureur de bois_, a more western and wilder Arcadia,
methinks, than the world has ever seen; for the Greeks, with all their
wood and river gods, were not so qualified to name the natural
features of a country as the ancestors of these French Canadians; and
if any people had a right to substitute their own for the Indian
names, it was they. They have preceded the pioneer on our own
frontiers, and named the _prairie_ for us. _La Rivière au Chien_
cannot, by any license of language, be translated into Dog River, for
that is not such a giving it to the dogs, and recognizing their place
in creation, as the French implies. One of the tributaries of the St.
Anne is named _La Rivière de la Rose_; and farther east are _La
Rivière de la Blondelle_ and _La Rivière de la Friponne_. Their very
_rivière_ meanders more than our _river_.
Yet the impression which this country made on me was commonly
different from this. To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may
appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to
me, coming from New England and being a very green traveler
withal,--notwithstanding what I have said about Hudson's Bay,--it
appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard
of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian
villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities
of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a
village in sight, that it is _St. Feréol_ or _St. Anne_, the _Guardian
Angel_ or the _Holy Joseph's_; or of a mountain, that it was _Bélange_
or _St. Hyacinthe_! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly
names begin. _St. Johns_ is the first town you stop at (fortunately we
did not see it), and thenceforward, the names of the mountains, and
streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication
of poetry,--_Chambly_, _Longueuil_, _Pointe aux Trembles_,
_Bartholomy_, etc., etc.; as if it needed only a little foreign
accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to
make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and
the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on
the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the
woods toward Hudson's Bay were only as the forests of France and
Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the
inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me,
significant names lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In
short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to
terminate in and for criminals to run to.
When I asked the man to whom I have referred, if there were any falls
on the Rivière au Chien,--for I saw that it came over the same high
bank with the Montmorenci and St. Anne,--he answered that there were.
How far? I inquired. "Trois quatres lieue." How high? "Je
pense-quatre-vingt-dix pieds;" that is, ninety feet. We turned aside
to look at the falls of the Rivière du Sault à la Puce, half a mile
from the road, which before we had passed in our haste and ignorance,
and we pronounced them as beautiful as any that we saw; yet they
seemed to make no account of them there, and, when first we inquired
the way to the falls, directed us to Montmorenci, seven miles distant.
It was evident that this was the country for waterfalls; that every
stream that empties into the St. Lawrence, for some hundreds of miles,
must have a great fall or cascade on it, and in its passage through
the mountains was, for a short distance, a small Saguenay, with its
upright walls. This fall of La Puce, the least remarkable of the four
which we visited in this vicinity, we had never heard of till we came
to Canada, and yet, so far as I know, there is nothing of the kind in
New England to be compared with it. Most travelers in Canada would not
hear of it, though they might go so near as to hear it. Since my
return I find that in the topographical description of the country
mention is made of "two or three romantic falls" on this stream,
though we saw and heard of but this one. Ask the inhabitants
respecting any stream, if there is a fall on it, and they will
perchance tell you of something as interesting as Bashpish or the
Catskill, which no traveler has ever seen, or if they have not found
it, you may possibly trace up the stream and discover it yourself.
Falls there are a drug, and we became quite dissipated in respect to
them. We had drank too much of them. Beside these which I have
referred to, there are a thousand other falls on the St. Lawrence and
its tributaries which I have not seen nor heard of; and above all
there is one which I have heard of, called Niagara, so that I think
that this river must be the most remarkable for its falls of any in
the world.
At a house near the western boundary of Château Richer, whose master
was said to speak a very little English, having recently lived at
Quebec, we got lodging for the night. As usual, we had to go down a
lane to get round to the south side of the house, where the door was,
away from the road. For these Canadian houses have no front door,
properly speaking. Every part is for the use of the occupant
exclusively, and no part has reference to the traveler or to travel.
Every New England house, on the contrary, has a front and principal
door opening to the great world, though it may be on the cold side,
for it stands on the highway of nations, and the road which runs by it
comes from the Old World and goes to the far West; but the Canadian's
door opens into his backyard and farm alone, and the road which runs
behind his house leads only from the church of one saint to that of
another. We found a large family, hired men, wife, and children, just
eating their supper. They prepared some for us afterwards. The hired
men were a merry crew of short, black-eyed fellows, and the wife a
thin-faced, sharp-featured French-Canadian woman. Our host's English
staggered us rather more than any French we had heard yet; indeed, we
found that even we spoke better French than he did English, and we
concluded that a less crime would be committed on the whole if we
spoke French with him, and in no respect aided or abetted his attempts
to speak English. We had a long and merry chat with the family this
Sunday evening in their spacious kitchen. While my companion smoked a
pipe and parlez-vous'd with one party, I parleyed and gesticulated to
another. The whole family was enlisted, and I kept a little girl
writing what was otherwise unintelligible. The geography getting
obscure, we called for chalk, and the greasy oiled table-cloth having
been wiped,--for it needed no French, but only a sentence from the
universal language of looks on my part, to indicate that it needed
it,--we drew the St. Lawrence, with its parishes, thereon, and
thenceforward went on swimmingly, by turns handling the chalk and
committing to the table-cloth what would otherwise have been left in a
limbo of unintelligibility. This was greatly to the entertainment of
all parties. I was amused to hear how much use they made of the word
oui in conversation with one another. After repeated single insertions
of it, one would suddenly throw back his head at the same time with
his chair, and exclaim rapidly, "Oui! oui! oui! oui!" like a Yankee
driving pigs. Our host told us that the farms thereabouts were
generally two acres or three hundred and sixty French feet wide, by
one and a half leagues (?), or a little more than four and a half of
our miles deep. This use of the word _acre_ as long measure arises
from the fact that the French acre or arpent, the arpent of Paris,
makes a square of ten perches, of eighteen feet each, on a side, a
Paris foot being equal to 1.06575 English feet. He said that the wood
was cut off about one mile from the river. The rest was "bush," and
beyond that the "Queen's bush." Old as the country is, each landholder
bounds on the primitive forest, and fuel bears no price. As I had
forgotten the French for _sickle_, they went out in the evening to the
barn and got one, and so clenched the certainty of our understanding
one another. Then, wishing to learn if they used the cradle, and not
knowing any French word for this instrument, I set up the knives and
forks on the blade of the sickle to represent one; at which they all
exclaimed that they knew and had used it. When _snells_ were mentioned
they went out in the dark and plucked some. They were pretty good.
They said they had three kinds of plums growing wild,--blue, white,
and red, the two former much alike and the best. Also they asked me if
I would have _des pommes_, some apples, and got me some. They were
exceedingly fair and glossy, and it was evident that there was no worm
in them; but they were as hard almost as a stone, as if the season was
too short to mellow them. We had seen no soft and yellow apples by the
roadside. I declined eating one, much as I admired it, observing that
it would be good _dans le printemps_, in the spring. In the morning
when the mistress had set the eggs a-frying she nodded to a thick-set,
jolly-looking fellow, who rolled up his sleeves, seized the
long-handled griddle, and commenced a series of revolutions and
evolutions with it, ever and anon tossing its contents into the air,
where they turned completely topsy-turvy and came down t'other side
up; and this he repeated till they were done. That appeared to be his
duty when eggs were concerned. I did not chance to witness this
performance, but my companion did, and he pronounced it a masterpiece
in its way. This man's farm, with the buildings, cost seven hundred
pounds; some smaller ones, two hundred.
In 1827, Montmorenci County, to which the Isle of Orleans has since
been added, was nearly as large as Massachusetts, being the eighth
county out of forty (in Lower Canada) in extent; but by far the
greater part still must continue to be waste land, lying as it were
under the walls of Quebec.
I quote these old statistics, not merely because of the difficulty of
obtaining more recent ones, but also because I saw there so little
evidence of any recent growth. There were in this county, at the same
date, five Roman Catholic churches, and no others, five cures and five
presbyteries, two schools, two corn-mills, four sawmills, one
carding-mill,--no medical man or notary or lawyer,--five shopkeepers,
four taverns (we saw no sign of any, though, after a little
hesitation, we were sometimes directed to some undistinguished hut as
such), thirty artisans, and five river crafts, whose tonnage amounted
to sixty-nine tons! This, notwithstanding that it has a frontage of
more than thirty miles on the river, and the population is almost
wholly confined to its banks. This describes nearly enough what we
saw. But double some of these figures, which, however, its growth will
not warrant, and you have described a poverty which not even its
severity of climate and ruggedness of soil will suffice to account
for. The principal productions were wheat, potatoes, oats, hay, peas,
flax, maple-sugar, etc., etc.; linen cloth, or _étoffe du pays_,
flannel, and homespun, or _petite étoffe_.
In Lower Canada, according to Bouchette, there are two tenures,--the
feudal and the socage. _Tenanciers_, _censitaires_, or holders of land
_en roture_ pay a small annual rent to the seigneurs, to which "is
added some articles of provision, such as a couple of fowls, or a
goose, or a bushel of wheat." "They are also bound to grind their corn
at the _moulin banal_, or the lord's mill, where one fourteenth part
of it is taken for his use" as toll. He says that the toll is one
twelfth in the United States where competition exists. It is not
permitted to exceed one sixteenth in Massachusetts. But worse than
this monopolizing of mill rents is what are called _lods et ventes_,
or mutation fines,--according to which the seigneur has "a right to a
twelfth part of the purchase-money of every estate within his
seigniory that changes its owner by sale." This is over and above the
sum paid to the seller. In such cases, moreover, "the lord possesses
the _droit de retrait_, which is the privilege of preemption at the
highest bidden price within forty days after the sale has taken
place,"--a right which, however, is said to be seldom exercised.
"Lands held by Roman Catholics are further subject to the payment to
their curates of one twenty-sixth part of all the grain produced upon
them, and to occasional assessments for building and repairing
churches," etc.,--a tax to which they are not subject if the
proprietors change their faith; but they are not the less attached to
their church in consequence. There are, however, various modifications
of the feudal tenure. Under the socage tenure, which is that of the
townships or more recent settlements, English, Irish, Scotch, and
others, and generally of Canada West, the landholder is wholly
unshackled by such conditions as I have quoted, and "is bound to no
other obligations than those of allegiance to the king and obedience
to the laws." Throughout Canada "a freehold of forty shillings yearly
value, or the payment of ten pounds rent annually, is the
qualification for voters." In 1846 more than one sixth of the whole
population of Canada East were qualified to vote for members of
Parliament,--a greater proportion than enjoy a similar privilege in
the United States.
The population which we had seen the last two days--I mean the
habitans of Montmorenci County--appeared very inferior, intellectually
and even physically, to that of New England. In some respects they
were incredibly filthy. It was evident that they had not advanced
since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the
age, and fairly represented their ancestors in Normandy a thousand
years ago. Even in respect to the common arts of life, they are not so
far advanced as a frontier town in the West three years old. They have
no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. If
they have got a French phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can
expect of them. They are very far from a revolution, have no quarrel
with Church or State, but their vice and their virtue is content. As
for annexation, they have never dreamed of it; indeed, they have not a
clear idea what or where the States are. The English government has
been remarkably liberal to its Catholic subjects in Canada, permitting
them to wear their own fetters, both political and religious, as far
as was possible for subjects. Their government is even too good for
them. Parliament passed "an act [in 1825] to provide for the
extinction of feudal and seigniorial rights and burdens on lands in
Lower Canada, and for the gradual conversion of those tenures into the
tenure of free and common socage," etc. But as late as 1831, at least,
the design of the act was likely to be frustrated, owing to the
reluctance of the seigniors and peasants. It has been observed by
another that the French Canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their
influence. The British, Irish, and other immigrants, who have settled
the townships, are found to have imitated the American settlers and
not the French. They reminded me in this of the Indians, whom they
were slow to displace, and to whose habits of life they themselves more
readily conformed than the Indians to theirs. The Governor-General
Denouville remarked, in 1685, that some had long thought that it was
necessary to bring the Indians near them in order to Frenchify
(_franciser_) them, but that they had every reason to think themselves
in an error; for those who had come near them and were even collected
in villages in the midst of the colony had not become French, but the
French who had haunted them had become savages. Kalm said, "Though
many nations imitate the French customs, yet I observed, on the
contrary, that the French in Canada, in many respects, follow the
customs of the Indians, with whom they converse every day. They make
use of the tobacco-pipes, shoes, garters, and girdles of the Indians.
They follow the Indian way of making war with exactness; they mix the
same things with tobacco [he might have said that both French and
English learned the use itself of this weed of the Indian]; they make
use of the Indian bark-boats, and row them in the Indian way; they
wrap square pieces of cloth round their feet instead of stockings; and
have adopted many other Indian fashions." Thus, while the descendants
of the Pilgrims are teaching the English to make pegged boots, the
descendants of the French in Canada are wearing the Indian moccasin
still. The French, to their credit be it said, to a certain extent
respected the Indians as a separate and independent people, and spoke
of them and contrasted themselves with them as the English have never
done. They not only went to war with them as allies, but they lived at
home with them as neighbors. In 1627 the French king declared "that
the descendants" of the French, settled in New France, "and the
savages who should be brought to the knowledge of the faith, and
should make profession of it, should be counted and reputed French
born (_Naturels François_); and as such could emigrate to France, when
it seemed good to them, and there acquire, will, inherit, etc., etc.,
without obtaining letters of naturalization." When the English had
possession of Quebec, in 1630, the Indians, attempting to practice the
same familiarity with them that they had with the French, were driven
out of their houses with blows; which accident taught them a
difference between the two races, and attached them yet more to the
French. The impression made on me was that the French Canadians were
even sharing the fate of the Indians, or at least gradually
disappearing in what is called the Saxon current.
The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure,
nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under
the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest
and with freedom. The latter overran a great extent of country,
selling strong water, and collecting its furs, and converting its
inhabitants,--or at least baptizing its dying infants (_enfans
moribonds_),--without _improving_ it. First went the _coureur de bois_
with the _eau de vie_; then followed, if he did not precede, the
heroic missionary with the _eau d'immortalité_. It was freedom to
hunt, and fish, and convert, not to work, that they sought. Hontan
says that the _coureurs de bois_ lived like sailors ashore. In no part
of the Seventeenth Century could the French be said to have had a
foothold in Canada; they held only by the fur of the wild animals
which they were exterminating. To enable the poor seigneurs to get
their living, it was permitted by a decree passed in the reign of
Louis the Fourteenth, in 1685, "to all nobles and gentlemen settled in
Canada, to engage in commerce, without being called to account or
reputed to have done anything derogatory." The reader can infer to
what extent they had engaged in agriculture, and how their farms must
have shone by this time. The New England youth, on the other hand,
were never _coureurs de bois_ nor _voyageurs_, but backwoodsmen and
sailors rather. Of all nations the English undoubtedly have proved
hitherto that they had the most business here.
Yet I am not sure but I have most sympathy with that spirit of adventure
which distinguished the French and Spaniards of those days, and made
them especially the explorers of the American Continent,--which so
early carried the former to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the
north, and the latter to the same river on the south. It was long
before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West. So far as
inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English
was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the
enterprise of traders.
There was apparently a greater equality of condition among the
habitans of Montmorenci County than in New England. They are an almost
exclusively agricultural, and so far independent population, each
family producing nearly all the necessaries of life for itself. If the
Canadian wants energy, perchance he possesses those virtues, social
and others, which the Yankee lacks, in which case he cannot be
regarded as a poor man.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] From McCulloch's Geographical Dictionary we learn that
"immediately beyond the Island of Orleans it is a mile broad; where
the Saguenay joins it, eighteen miles; at Point Peter, upward of
thirty; at the Bay of Seven Islands, seventy miles; and at the Island
of Anticosti (above three hundred and fifty miles from Quebec), it
rolls a flood into the ocean nearly one hundred miles across."
CHAPTER IV
THE WALLS OF QUEBEC
After spending the night at a farmhouse in Château Richer, about a
dozen miles northeast of Quebec, we set out on our return to the city.
We stopped at the next house, a picturesque old stone mill, over the
_Chipré_,--for so the name sounded,--such as you will nowhere see in
the States, and asked the millers the age of the mill. They went
upstairs to call the master; but the crabbed old miser asked why we
wanted to know, and would tell us only for some compensation. I wanted
French to give him a piece of my mind. I had got enough to talk on a
pinch, but not to quarrel, so I had to come away, looking all I would
have said. This was the utmost incivility we met with in Canada. In
Beauport, within a few miles of Quebec, we turned aside to look at a
church which was just being completed,--a very large and handsome
edifice of stone, with a green bough stuck in its gable, of some
significance to Catholics. The comparative wealth of the Church in
this country was apparent; for in this village we did not see one good
house besides. They were all humble cottages; and yet this appeared to
me a more imposing structure than any church in Boston. But I am no
judge of these things.
Reëntering Quebec through St. John's Gate, we took a caleche in Market
Square for the Falls of the Chaudière, about nine miles southwest of
the city, for which we were to pay so much, besides forty sous for
tolls. The driver, as usual, spoke French only. The number of these
vehicles is very great for so small a town. They are like one of our
chaises that has lost its top, only stouter and longer in the body,
with a seat for the driver where the dasher is with us, and broad
leather ears on each side to protect the riders from the wheel and
keep children from falling out. They had an easy jaunting look, which,
as our hours were numbered, persuaded us to be riders. We met with
them on every road near Quebec these days, each with its complement of
two inquisitive-looking foreigners and a Canadian driver, the former
evidently enjoying their novel experience, for commonly it is only the
horse whose language you do not understand; but they were one remove
further from him by the intervention of an equally unintelligible
driver. We crossed the St. Lawrence to Point Levi in a French-Canadian
ferry-boat, which was inconvenient and dirty, and managed with great
noise and bustle. The current was very strong and tumultuous; and the
boat tossed enough to make some sick, though it was only a mile
across; yet the wind was not to be compared with that of the day
before, and we saw that the Canadians had a good excuse for not taking
us over to the Isle of Orleans in a pirogue, however shiftless they
may be for not having provided any other conveyance. The route which
we took to the Chaudière did not afford us those views of Quebec which
we had expected, and the country and inhabitants appeared less
interesting to a traveler than those we had seen. The Falls of the
Chaudière are three miles from its mouth on the south side of the St.
Lawrence. Though they were the largest which I saw in Canada, I was
not proportionately interested by them, probably from satiety. I did
not see any peculiar propriety in the name _Chaudière_, or caldron. I
saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined. It was just
across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this
tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the keystone of
its arch. It was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full
semicircle, only four or five rods in diameter, though as wide as
usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as
substantial as an arch of stone. It changed its position and colors as
we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and
the mist was so thick. Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men
and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special
purpose beyond this, I know not. At the farthest point in this ride,
and when most inland, unexpectedly at a turn in the road we descried
the frowning citadel of Quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird
of prey. We returned by the river road under the bank, which is very
high, abrupt, and rocky. When we were opposite to Quebec, I was
surprised to see that in the Lower Town, under the shadow of the rock,
the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while
the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad
daylight. As we were too late for the ferry-boat that night, we put up
at a _maison de pension_ at Point Levi. The usual two-story stove was
here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a
fireplace, and so warmed several rooms. We could not understand their
French here very well, but the _potage_ was just like what we had had
before. There were many small chambers with doorways, but no doors.
The walls of our chamber, all around and overhead, were neatly ceiled,
and the timbers cased with wood unpainted. The pillows were checkered
and tasseled, and the usual long-pointed red woolen or worsted
nightcap was placed on each. I pulled mine out to see how it was made.
It was in the form of a double cone, one end tucked into the other;
just such, it appeared, as I saw men wearing all day in the streets.
Probably I should have put it on if the cold had been then, as it is
sometimes there, thirty or forty degrees below zero.
When we landed at Quebec the next morning a man lay on his back on the
wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the
path of the horses, groaning, "O ma conscience!" I thought that he
pronounced his French more distinctly than any I heard, as if the
dying had already acquired the accents of a universal language. Having
secured the only unengaged berths in the Lord Sydenham steamer, which
was to leave Quebec before sundown, and being resolved, now that I had
seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of the city, I proceeded
to walk round the Upper Town, or fortified portion, which is two miles
and three quarters in circuit, alone, as near as I could get to the
cliff and the walls, like a rat looking for a hole; going round by the
southwest, where there is but a single street between the cliff and
the water, and up the long wooden stairs, through the suburbs
northward to the King's Woodyard, which I thought must have been a
long way from his fireplace, and under the cliffs of the St. Charles,
where the drains issue under the walls, and the walls are loopholed
for musketry; so returning by Mountain Street and Prescott Gate to the
Upper Town. Having found my way by an obscure passage near the St.
Louis Gate to the glacis on the north of the citadel proper,--I
believe that I was the only visitor then in the city who got in
there,--I enjoyed a prospect nearly as good as from within the citadel
itself, which I had explored some days before. As I walked on the
glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers' dwellings in
the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a
soldier's cat walking up a cleated plank into a high loophole designed
for _mus-catry_, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully
waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness
and all her paths were peace. Scaling a slat fence, where a small
force might have checked me, I got out of the esplanade into the
Governor's Garden, and read the well-known inscription on Wolfe and
Montcalm's monument, which for saying much in little, and that to the
purpose, undoubtedly deserved the prize medal which it received:--
MORTEM . VIRTUS . COMMUNEM .
FAMAM . HISTORIA .
MONUMENTUM . POSTERITAS .
DEDIT
(Valor gave them one death, history one fame, posterity one monument.)
The Government Garden has for nosegays, amid kitchen vegetables,
beside the common garden flowers, the usual complement of cannon
directed toward some future and possible enemy. I then returned up St.
Louis Street to the esplanade and ramparts there, and went round the
Upper Town once more, though I was very tired, this time on the
_inside_ of the wall; for I knew that the wall was the main thing in
Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money, and therefore I must make
the most of it. In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have
in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is
true. Moreover, I cannot say but I yielded in some measure to the
soldier instinct, and, having but a short time to spare, thought it
best to examine the wall thoroughly, that I might be the better
prepared if I should ever be called that way again in the service of
my country. I committed all the gates to memory, in their order, which
did not cost me so much trouble as it would have done at the
hundred-gated city, there being only five; nor were they so hard to
remember as those seven of Bœotian Thebes; and, moreover, I thought
that, if seven champions were enough against the latter, one would be
enough against Quebec, though he bore for all armor and device only an
umbrella and a bundle. I took the nunneries as I went, for I had
learned to distinguish them by the blinds; and I observed also the
foundling hospitals and the convents, and whatever was attached to, or
in the vicinity of the walls. All the rest I omitted, as naturally as
one would the inside of an inedible shell-fish. These were the only
pearls, and the wall the only mother-of-pearl for me. Quebec is
chiefly famous for the thickness of its parietal bones. The technical
terms of its conchology may stagger a beginner a little at first, such
as _banlieue_, _esplanade_, _glacis_, _ravelin_, _cavalier_, etc.,
etc., but with the aid of a comprehensive dictionary you soon learn
the nature of your ground. I was surprised at the extent of the
artillery barracks, built so long ago,--_Casernes Nouvelles_, they
used to be called,--nearly six hundred feet in length by forty in
depth, where the sentries, like peripatetic philosophers, were so
absorbed in thought as not to notice me when I passed in and out at
the gates. Within are "small arms of every description, sufficient for
the equipment of twenty thousand men," so arranged as to give a
startling _coup d'œil_ to strangers. I did not enter, not wishing
to get a black eye; for they are said to be "in a state of complete
repair and readiness for immediate use." Here, for a short time, I
lost sight of the wall, but I recovered it again on emerging from the
barrack yard. There I met with a Scotchman who appeared to have
business with the wall, like myself; and, being thus mutually drawn
together by a similarity of tastes, we had a little conversation _sub
moenibus_, that is, by an angle of the wall, which sheltered us. He
lived about thirty miles northwest of Quebec; had been nineteen years
in the country; said he was disappointed that he was not brought to
America after all, but found himself still under British rule and
where his own language was not spoken; that many Scotch, Irish, and
English were disappointed in like manner, and either went to the
States or pushed up the river to Canada West, nearer to the States,
and where their language was spoken. He talked of visiting the States
some time; and, as he seemed ignorant of geography, I warned him that
it was one thing to visit the State of Massachusetts, and another to
visit the State of California. He said it was colder there than usual
at that season, and he was lucky to have brought his thick togue, or
frock-coat, with him; thought it would snow, and then be pleasant and
warm. That is the way we are always thinking. However, his words were
music to me in my thin hat and sack.
At the ramparts on the cliff near the old Parliament House I counted
twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor,
with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them,--there are said to
be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at Quebec,--all
which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the
motto, "In time of peace prepare for war;" but I saw no preparations
for peace: she was plainly an uninvited guest.
Having thus completed the circuit of this fortress, both within and
without, I went no farther by the wall for fear that I should become
wall-eyed. However, I think that I deserve to be made a member of the
Royal Sappers and Miners.
In short, I observed everywhere the most perfect arrangements for
keeping a wall in order, not even permitting the lichens to grow on
it, which some think an ornament; but then I saw no cultivation nor
pasturing within it to pay for the outlay, and cattle were strictly
forbidden to feed on the glacis under the severest penalties. Where
the dogs get their milk I don't know, and I fear it is bloody at best.
The citadel of Quebec says, "I _will_ live here, and you shan't
prevent me." To which you return, that you have not the slightest
objection; live and let live. The Martello towers looked, for all the
world, exactly like abandoned windmills which had not had a grist to
grind these hundred years. Indeed, the whole castle here was a
"folly,"--England's folly,--and, in more senses than one, a castle in
the air. The inhabitants and the government are gradually waking up to
a sense of this truth; for I heard something said about their
abandoning the wall around the Upper Town, and confining the
fortifications to the citadel of forty acres. Of course they will
finally reduce their intrenchments to the circumference of their own
brave hearts.
The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them;
they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day
they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The
very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become
old and dilapidated, as the word _barrack_ implies. I couple all
fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be
found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not
actually dismantled, it is because that there the intellect of the
inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near
Valdivia in South America, when a traveler remarked to him that, with
one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces,
gravely replied, "No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two." Perhaps
the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to
the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d'Acre, and the
days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a
clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun.
I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object
for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the
development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both
in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress
than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as
frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside
a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason
for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half
an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing
with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and
it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it
almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the
colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was
a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it
chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town
got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags,
as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country
village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting
only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a
man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of
broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his
business. Or is this an indispensable machinery for the good
government of the country? The inhabitants of California succeed
pretty well, and are doing better and better every day, without any
such institution. What use has this fortress served, to look at it
even from the soldiers' point of view? At first the French took care
of it; yet Wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of
Quebec without experiencing any hindrance at last from its
fortifications. They were only the bone for which the parties fought.
Then the English began to take care of it. So of any fort in the
world,--that in Boston Harbor, for instance. We shall at length hear
that an enemy sailed by it in the night, for it cannot sail itself,
and both it and its inhabitants are always benighted. How often we
read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and
so the fort was evacuated! Have not the schoolhouse and the
printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?
However, this is a ruin kept in remarkably good repair. There are some
eight hundred or thousand men there to exhibit it. One regiment goes
bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the
muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to Quebec. This universal
exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the
keeper of a menagerie showing his animals' claws. It was the English
leopard showing his claws. Always the royal something or other; as at
the menagerie, the Royal Bengal Tiger. Silliman states that "the cold
is so intense in the winter nights, particularly on Cape Diamond, that
the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour, and are relieved at
the expiration of that time;" "and even, as it is said, at much
shorter intervals, in case of the most extreme cold." What a natural
or unnatural fool must that soldier be--to say nothing of his
government--who, when quicksilver is freezing and blood is ceasing to
be quick, will stand to have his face frozen, watching the walls of
Quebec, though, so far as they are concerned, both honest and
dishonest men all the world over have been in their beds nearly half a
century,--or at least for that space travelers have visited Quebec
only as they would read history! I shall never again wake up in a
colder night than usual, but I shall think how rapidly the sentinels
are relieving one another on the walls of Quebec, their quicksilver
being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile Wolfe may even
then be scaling the Heights of Abraham, or some persevering Arnold
about to issue from the wilderness; some Malay or Japanese, perchance,
coming round by the northwest coast, have chosen that moment to
assault the citadel! Why, I should as soon expect to find the
sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of Nineveh, which
have so long been buried to the world. What a troublesome thing a wall
is! I thought it was to defend me, and not I it! Of course, if they
had no wall, they would not need to have any sentinels.
You might venture to advertise this farm as well fenced with
substantial stone walls (saying nothing about the eight hundred
Highlanders and Royal Irish who are required to keep them from
toppling down); stock and tools to go with the land if desired. But it
would not be wise for the seller to exhibit his farm-book.
Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older
country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All
things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain
rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust
of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of
Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some
cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was
on the inhabitants and their institutions. Yet the work of burnishing
goes briskly forward. I imagined that the government vessels at the
wharves were laden with rottenstone and oxalic acid,--that is what the
first ship from England in the spring comes freighted with,--and the
hands of the Colonial legislature are cased in wash-leather. The
principal exports must be _gun_ny bags, verdigris, and iron rust.
Those who first built this fort, coming from Old France with the
memory and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were
unquestionably behind their age; and those who now inhabit and repair
it are behind their ancestors or predecessors. Those old chevaliers
thought that they could transplant the feudal system to America. It
has been set out, but it has not thriven. Notwithstanding that Canada
was settled first, and, unlike New England, for a long series of years
enjoyed the fostering care of the mother country; notwithstanding
that, as Charlevoix tells us, it had more of the ancient _noblesse_
among its early settlers than any other of the French colonies, and
perhaps than all the others together, there are in both the Canadas
but 600,000 of French descent to-day,--about half so many as the
population of Massachusetts. The whole population of both Canadas is
but about 1,700,000 Canadians, English, Irish, Scotch, Indians, and
all, put together! Samuel Laing, in his essay on the Northmen, to
whom especially, rather than the Saxons, he refers the energy and
indeed the excellence of the English character, observes that, when
they occupied Scandinavia, "each man possessed his lot of land without
reference to, or acknowledgment of, any other man, without any local
chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was
due,--without tenure from, or duty or obligation to, any superior,
real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. The individual
settler held his land, as his descendants in Norway still express it,
by the same right as the King held his crown, by udal right, or
adel,--that is, noble right." The French have occupied Canada, not
_udally_, or by noble right, but _feudally_, or by ignoble right. They
are a nation of peasants.
It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the
aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada
as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists
in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay
here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the
Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad
citizen, probably a rebel, there,--certainly if he were already a
rebel at home. I suspect that a poor man who is not servile is a much
rarer phenomenon there and in England than in the Northern United
States. An Englishman, methinks,--not to speak of other European
nations,--habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of
the English nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of
Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud
of it. But an American--one who has made a tolerable use of his
opportunities--cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is
advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of
man in these respects. It is a government, that English one,--like
most other European ones,--that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you
would naturally forget it; under which one cannot be wholesomely
neglected, and grow up a man and not an Englishman merely,--cannot be
a poet even without danger of being made poet-laureate! Give me a
country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a
government that does not understand you to let you alone. One would
say that a true Englishman could speculate only within bounds. (It is
true the Americans have proved that they, in more than one sense, can
_speculate_ without bounds.) He has to pay his respects to so many
things, that, before he knows it, he _may_ have paid away all he is
worth. What makes the United States government, on the whole, more
tolerable--I mean for us lucky white men--is the fact that there is so
much less of government with us. Here it is only once in a month or a
year that a man _needs_ remember that institution; and those who go to
Congress can play the game of the Kilkenny cats there without fatal
consequences to those who stay at home, their term is so short; but in
Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself
before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the
master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the
Champ de Mars and exhibits itself and toots. Everywhere there appeared
an attempt to make and to preserve trivial and otherwise transient
distinctions. In the streets of Montreal and Quebec you met not only
with soldiers in red, and shuffling priests in unmistakable black and
white, with Sisters of Charity gone into mourning for their deceased
relative,--not to mention the nuns of various orders depending on the
fashion of a tear, of whom you heard,--but youths belonging to some
seminary or other, wearing coats edged with white, who looked as if
their expanding hearts were already repressed with a piece of tape. In
short, the inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two
fires,--the soldiery and the priesthood.
CHAPTER V
THE SCENERY OF QUEBEC; AND THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE
About twelve o'clock this day, being in the Lower Town, I looked up at
the signal-gun by the flagstaff on Cape Diamond, and saw a soldier up
in the heavens there making preparations to fire it,--both he and the
gun in bold relief against the sky. Soon after, being warned by the
boom of the gun to look up again, there was only the cannon in the
sky, the smoke just blowing away from it, as if the soldier, having
touched it off, had concealed himself for effect, leaving the sound to
echo grandly from shore to shore, and far up and down the river. This
answered the purpose of a dinner-horn.
There are no such restaurants in Quebec or Montreal as there are in
Boston. I hunted an hour or two in vain in this town to find one, till
I lost my appetite. In one house, called a restaurant, where lunches
were advertised, I found only tables covered with bottles and glasses
innumerable, containing apparently a sample of every liquid that has
been known since the earth dried up after the flood, but no scent of
solid food did I perceive gross enough to excite a hungry mouse. In
short, I saw nothing to tempt me there, but a large map of Canada
against the wall. In another place I once more got as far as the
bottles, and then asked for a bill of fare; was told to walk up
stairs; had no bill of fare, nothing but fare. "Have you any pies or
puddings?" I inquired, for I am obliged to keep my savageness in check
by a low diet. "No, sir; we've nice mutton-chop, roast beef,
beefsteak, cutlets," and so on. A burly Englishman, who was in the
midst of the siege of a piece of roast beef, and of whom I have never
had a front view to this day, turned half round, with his mouth half
full, and remarked, "You'll find no pies nor puddings in Quebec, sir;
they don't make any here." I found that it was even so, and therefore
bought some musty cake and some fruit in the open market-place. This
market-place by the waterside, where the old women sat by their tables
in the open air, amid a dense crowd jabbering all languages, was the
best place in Quebec to observe the people; and the ferry-boats,
continually coming and going with their motley crews and cargoes,
added much to the entertainment. I also saw them getting water from
the river, for Quebec is supplied with water by cart and barrel. This
city impressed me as wholly foreign and French, for I scarcely heard
the sound of the English language in the streets. More than three
fifths of the inhabitants are of French origin; and if the traveler
did not visit the fortifications particularly, he might not be
reminded that the English have any foothold here; and, in any case, if
he looked no farther than Quebec, they would appear to have planted
themselves in Canada only as they have in Spain at Gibraltar; and he
who plants upon a rock cannot expect much increase. The novel sights
and sounds by the waterside made me think of such ports as Boulogne,
Dieppe, Rouen, and Havre-de-Grâce, which I have never seen; but I
have no doubt that they present similar scenes. I was much amused from
first to last with the sounds made by the charette and caleche
drivers. It was that part of their foreign language that you heard the
most of,--the French they talked to their horses,--and which they
talked the loudest. It was a more novel sound to me than the French of
conversation. The streets resounded with the cries, "_Qui donc!_"
"_Marche tôt!_" I suspect that many of our horses which came from
Canada would prick up their ears at these sounds. Of the shops, I was
most attracted by those where furs and Indian works were sold, as
containing articles of genuine Canadian manufacture. I have been told
that two townsmen of mine, who were interested in horticulture,
traveling once in Canada, and being in Quebec, thought it would be a
good opportunity to obtain seeds of the real Canada crookneck squash.
So they went into a shop where such things were advertised, and
inquired for the same. The shopkeeper had the very thing they wanted.
"But are you sure," they asked, "that these are the genuine Canada
crookneck?" "Oh, yes, gentlemen," answered he, "they are a lot which I
have received directly from Boston." I resolved that my Canada
crookneck seeds should be such as had grown in Canada.
Too much has not been said about the scenery of Quebec. The
fortifications of Cape Diamond are omnipresent. They preside, they
frown over the river and surrounding country. You travel ten, twenty,
thirty miles up or down the river's banks, you ramble fifteen miles
amid the hills on either side, and then, when you have long since
forgotten them, perchance slept on them by the way, at a turn of the
road or of your body, there they are still, with their geometry
against the sky. The child that is born and brought up thirty miles
distant, and has never traveled to the city, reads his country's
history, sees the level lines of the citadel amid the cloud-built
citadels in the western horizon, and is told that that is Quebec. No
wonder if Jacques Cartier's pilot exclaimed in Norman French, "Que
bec!" (What a beak!) when he saw this cape, as some suppose. Every
modern traveler involuntarily uses a similar expression. Particularly
it is said that its sudden apparition on turning Point Levi makes a
memorable impression on him who arrives by water. The view from Cape
Diamond has been compared by European travelers with the most
remarkable views of a similar kind in Europe, such as from Edinburgh
Castle, Gibraltar, Cintra, and others, and preferred by many. A main
peculiarity in this, compared with other views which I have beheld, is
that it is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a
solitary and majestic river cape alone, that this view is obtained. I
associate the beauty of Quebec with the steel-like and flashing air,
which may be peculiar to that season of the year, in which the blue
flowers of the succory and some late goldenrods and buttercups on the
summit of Cape Diamond were almost my only companions,--the former
bluer than the heavens they faced. Yet even I yielded in some degree
to the influence of historical associations, and found it hard to
attend to the geology of Cape Diamond or the botany of the Plains of
Abraham. I still remember the harbor far beneath me, sparkling like
silver in the sun, the answering highlands of Point Levi on the
southeast, the frowning Cap Tourmente abruptly bounding the seaward
view far in the northeast, the villages of Lorette and Charlesbourg on
the north, and, further west, the distant Val Cartier, sparkling with
white cottages, hardly removed by distance through the clear air,--not
to mention a few blue mountains along the horizon in that direction.
You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of
civilization. Yonder small group of hills, according to the
guide-book, forms "the portal of the wilds which are trodden only by
the feet of the Indian hunters as far as Hudson's Bay." It is but a
few years since Bouchette declared that the country ten leagues north
of the British capital of North America was as little known as the
middle of Africa. Thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical
associations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and
from Nature, as if the beholder had read her history,--an influence
which, like the Great River itself, flowed from the Arctic fastnesses
and Western forests with irresistible tide over all.
The most interesting object in Canada to me was the River St.
Lawrence, known far and wide, and for centuries, as the Great River.
Cartier, its discoverer, sailed up it as far as Montreal in
1535,--nearly a century before the coming of the Pilgrims; and I have
seen a pretty accurate map of it so far, containing the city of
"Hochelaga" and the river "Saguenay," in Ortelius's _Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum_, printed at Antwerp in 1575,--the first edition having
appeared in 1570,--in which the famous cities of "Norumbega" and
"Orsinora" stand on the rough-blocked continent where New England is
to-day, and the fabulous but unfortunate Isle of Demons, and Frislant,
and others, lie off and on in the unfrequented sea, some of them
prowling near what is now the course of the Cunard steamers. In this
ponderous folio of the "Ptolemy of his age," said to be the first
general atlas published after the revival of the sciences in Europe,
only one page of which is devoted to the topography of the _Novus
Orbis_, the St. Lawrence is the only large river, whether drawn from
fancy or from observation, on the east side of North America. It was
famous in Europe before the other rivers of North America were heard
of, notwithstanding that the mouth of the Mississippi is said to have
been discovered first, and its stream was reached by Soto not long
after; but the St. Lawrence had attracted settlers to its cold shores
long before the Mississippi, or even the Hudson, was known to the
world. Schoolcraft was misled by Gallatin into saying that Narvaez
discovered the Mississippi. De Vega does _not_ say so. The first
explorers declared that the summer in that country was as warm as
France, and they named one of the bays in the Gulf of St. Lawrence the
Bay of Chaleur, or of warmth; but they said nothing about the winter
being as cold as Greenland. In the manuscript account of Cartier's
second voyage, attributed by some to that navigator himself, it is
called "the greatest river, without comparison, that is known to have
ever been seen." The savages told him that it was the "chemin du
Canada,"--the highway to Canada,--"which goes so far that no man had
ever been to the end that they had heard." The Saguenay, one of its
tributaries, which the panorama has made known to New England within
three years, is described by Cartier, in 1535, and still more
particularly by Jean Alphonse, in 1542, who adds, "I think that this
river comes from the sea of Cathay, for in this place there issues a
strong current, and there runs there a terrible tide." The early
explorers saw many whales and other sea-monsters far up the St.
Lawrence. Champlain, in his map, represents a whale spouting in the
harbor of Quebec, three hundred and sixty miles from what is called
the mouth of the river; and Charlevoix takes his reader to the summit
of Cape Diamond to see the "porpoises, white as snow," sporting on the
surface of the harbor of Quebec. And Boucher says in 1664, "from there
[Tadoussac] to Montreal is found a great quantity of _Marsouins
blancs_." Several whales have been taken pretty high up the river
since I was there. P. A. Gosse, in his "Canadian Naturalist," p. 171
(London, 1840), speaks of "the white dolphin of the St. Lawrence
(_Delphinus Canadensis_)," as considered different from those of the
sea. "The Natural History Society of Montreal offered a prize, a few
years ago, for an essay on the _Cetacea_ of the St. Lawrence, which
was, I believe, handed in." In Champlain's day it was commonly called
"the Great River of Canada." More than one nation has claimed it. In
Ogilby's "America of 1670," in the map _Novi Belgii_, it is called "De
Groote River van Niew Nederlandt." It bears different names in
different parts of its course, as it flows through what were formerly
the territories of different nations. From the Gulf to Lake Ontario
it is called at present the St. Lawrence; from Montreal to the same
place it is frequently called the Cateraqui; and higher up it is known
successively as the Niagara, Detroit, St. Clair, St. Mary's, and St.
Louis rivers. Humboldt, speaking of the Orinoco, says that this name
is unknown in the interior of the country; so likewise the tribes that
dwell about the sources of the St. Lawrence have never heard the name
which it bears in the lower part of its course. It rises near another
father of waters,--the Mississippi,--issuing from a remarkable spring
far up in the woods, called Lake Superior, fifteen hundred miles in
circumference; and several other springs there are thereabouts which
feed it. It makes such a noise in its tumbling down at one place as is
heard all round the world. Bouchette, the Surveyor-General of the
Canadas, calls it "the most splendid river on the globe;" says that it
is two thousand statute miles long (more recent geographers make it
four or five hundred miles longer); that at the Rivière du Sud it is
eleven miles wide; at the Traverse, thirteen; at the Paps of Matane,
twenty-five; at the Seven Islands, seventy-three; and at its mouth,
from Cape Rosier to the Mingan Settlements in Labrador, near one
hundred and five (?) miles wide. According to Captain Bayfield's
recent chart it is about _ninety-six_ geographical miles wide at the
latter place, measuring at right angles with the stream. It has much
the largest estuary, regarding both length and breadth, of any river
on the globe. Humboldt says that the River Plate, which has the
broadest estuary of the South American rivers, is ninety-two
geographical miles wide at its mouth; also he found the Orinoco to be
more than three miles wide at five hundred and sixty miles from its
mouth; but he does not tell us that ships of six hundred tons can sail
up it so far, as they can up the St. Lawrence to Montreal,--an equal
distance. If he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a
city's port so far inland, we should have got a very different idea of
the Orinoco. Perhaps Charlevoix describes the St. Lawrence truly as
the most _navigable_ river in the world. Between Montreal and Quebec
it averages about two miles wide. The tide is felt as far up as Three
Rivers, four hundred and thirty-two miles, which is as far as from
Boston to Washington. As far up as Cap aux Oyes, sixty or seventy
miles below Quebec, Kalm found a great part of the plants near the
shore to be marine, as glasswort (_Salicornia_), seaside pease (_Pisum
maritimum_), sea-milkwort (_Glaux_), beach-grass (_Psamma arenaria_),
seaside plantain (_Plantago maritima_), the sea-rocket (_Bunias
cakile_), etc.
The geographer Guyot observes that the Marañon is three thousand miles
long, and gathers its waters from a surface of a million and a half
square miles; that the Mississippi is also three thousand miles long,
but its basin covers only from eight to nine hundred thousand square
miles; that the St. Lawrence is eighteen hundred miles long, and its
basin covers more than a million square miles (Darby says five hundred
thousand); and speaking of the lakes, he adds, "These vast fresh-water
seas, together with the St. Lawrence, cover a surface of nearly one
hundred thousand square miles, and it has been calculated that they
contain about one half of all the fresh water on the surface of our
planet." But all these calculations are necessarily very rude and
inaccurate. Its tributaries, the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and Saguenay,
are great rivers themselves. The latter is said to be more than one
thousand (?) feet deep at its mouth, while its cliffs rise
perpendicularly an equal distance above its surface. Pilots say there
are no soundings till one hundred and fifty miles up the St. Lawrence.
The greatest sounding in the river, given on Bayfield's chart of the
gulf and river, is two hundred and twenty-eight fathoms. McTaggart, an
engineer, observes that "the Ottawa is larger than all the rivers in
Great Britain, were they running in one." The traveler Grey writes: "A
dozen Danubes, Rhines, Taguses, and Thameses would be nothing to
twenty miles of fresh water in breadth [as where he happened to be],
from ten to forty fathoms in depth." And again: "There is not perhaps
in the whole extent of this immense continent so fine an approach to
it as by the river St. Lawrence. In the Southern States you have, in
general, a level country for many miles inland; here you are
introduced at once into a majestic scenery, where everything is on a
grand scale,--mountains, woods, lakes, rivers, precipices,
waterfalls."
We have not yet the data for a minute comparison of the St. Lawrence
with the South American rivers; but it is obvious that, taking it in
connection with its lakes, its estuary, and its falls, it easily bears
off the palm from all the rivers on the globe; for though, as
Bouchette observes, it may not carry to the ocean a greater volume of
water than the Amazon and Mississippi, its surface and cubic mass are
far greater than theirs. But, unfortunately, this noble river is
closed by ice from the beginning of December to the middle of April.
The arrival of the first vessel from England when the ice breaks up
is, therefore, a great event, as when the salmon, shad, and alewives
come up a river in the spring to relieve the famishing inhabitants on
its banks. Who can say what would have been the history of this
continent if, as has been suggested, this river had emptied into the
sea where New York stands!
After visiting the Museum and taking one more look at the wall, I made
haste to the Lord Sydenham steamer, which at five o'clock was to leave
for Montreal. I had already taken a seat on deck, but finding that I
had still an hour and a half to spare, and remembering that large map
of Canada which I had seen in the parlor of the restaurant in my
search after pudding, and realizing that I might never see the like
out of the country, I returned thither, asked liberty to look at the
map, rolled up the mahogany table, put my handkerchief on it, stood on
it, and copied all I wanted before the maid came in and said to me
standing on the table, "Some gentlemen want the room, sir;" and I
retreated without having broken the neck of a single bottle, or my
own, very thankful and willing to pay for all the solid food I had
got. We were soon abreast of Cap Rouge, eight miles above Quebec,
after we got under weigh. It was in this place, then called _Fort du
France Roy_, that the Sieur de Roberval with his company, having sent
home two of his three ships, spent the winter of 1542-43. It appears
that they fared in the following manner (I translate from the
original): "Each mess had only two loaves, weighing each a pound, and
half a pound of beef. They ate pork for dinner, with half a pound of
butter, and beef for supper, with about two handfuls of beans without
butter. Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays they ate salted cod, and
sometimes green, for dinner, with butter; and porpoise and beans for
supper. Monsieur Roberval administered good justice, and punished each
according to his offense. One, named Michel Gaillon, was hung for
theft; John of Nantes was put in irons and imprisoned for his fault;
and others were likewise put in irons; and many were whipped, both men
and women; by which means they lived in peace and tranquillity." In an
account of a voyage up this river, printed in the Jesuit Relations in
the year 1664, it is said: "It was an interesting navigation for us in
ascending the river from Cap Tourmente to Quebec, to see on this side
and on that, for the space of eight leagues, the farms and the houses
of the company, built by our French, all along these shores. On the
right, the seigniories of Beauport, of Notre Dame des Anges; and on
the left, this beautiful Isle of Orleans." The same traveler names
among the fruits of the country observed at the Isles of Richelieu, at
the head of Lake St. Peter, "kinds (_des espèces_) of little apples or
haws (_senelles_), and of pears, which only ripen with the frost."
Night came on before we had passed the high banks. We had come from
Montreal to Quebec in one night. The return voyage, against the
stream, takes but an hour longer. Jacques Cartier, the first white man
who is known to have ascended this river, thus speaks of his voyage
from what is now Quebec to the foot of Lake St. Peter, or about
half-way to Montreal: "From the said day, the 19th, even to the 28th
of the said month [September, 1535], we had been navigating up the
said river without losing hour or day, during which time we had seen
and found as much country and lands as level as we could desire, full
of the most beautiful trees in the world," which he goes on to
describe. But we merely slept and woke again to find that we had
passed through all that country which he was eight days in sailing
through. He must have had a troubled sleep. We were not long enough on
the river to realize that it had length; we got only the impression of
its breadth, as if we had passed over a lake a mile or two in breadth
and several miles long, though we might thus have slept through a
European kingdom. Being at the head of Lake St. Peter, on the
above-mentioned 28th of September, dealing with the natives, Cartier
says: "We inquired of them by signs if this was the route to Hochelaga
[Montreal]; and they answered that it was, and that there were yet
three days' journeys to go there." He finally arrived at Hochelaga on
the 2d of October.
When I went on deck at dawn we had already passed through Lake St.
Peter, and saw islands ahead of us. Our boat advancing with a strong
and steady pulse over the calm surface, we felt as if we were
permitted to be awake in the scenery of a dream. Many vivacious
Lombardy poplars along the distant shores gave them a novel and
lively, though artificial, look, and contrasted strangely with the
slender and graceful elms on both shores and islands. The church of
Varennes, fifteen miles from Montreal, was conspicuous at a great
distance before us, appearing to belong to, and rise out of, the
river; and now, and before, Mount Royal indicated where the city was.
We arrived about seven o'clock, and set forth immediately to ascend
the mountain, two miles distant, going across lots in spite of
numerous signs threatening the severest penalties to trespassers, past
an old building known as the MacTavish property,--Simon MacTavish, I
suppose, whom Silliman refers to as "in a sense the founder of the
Northwestern Company." His tomb was behind in the woods, with a
remarkably high wall and higher monument. The family returned to
Europe. He could not have imagined how dead he would be in a few
years, and all the more dead and forgotten for being buried under such
a mass of gloomy stone, where not even memory could get at him without
a crowbar. Ah! poor man, with that last end of his! However, he may
have been the worthiest of mortals for aught that I know. From the
mountain-top we got a view of the whole city; the flat, fertile,
extensive island; the noble sea of the St. Lawrence swelling into
lakes; the mountains about St. Hyacinthe, and in Vermont and New York;
and the mouth of the Ottawa in the west, overlooking that St. Anne's
where the voyageur sings his "parting hymn," and bids adieu to
civilization,--a name, thanks to Moore's verses, the most suggestive
of poetic associations of any in Canada. We, too, climbed the hill
which Cartier, first of white men, ascended, and named Mont-real (the
3d of October, O. S., 1535), and, like him, "we saw the said river as
far as we could see, _grand_, _large_, _et spacieux_, going to
the southwest," toward that land whither Donnacona had told the
discoverer that he had been a month's journey from Canada, where there
grew "_force Canelle et Girofle_," much cinnamon and cloves, and where
also, as the natives told him, were three great lakes and afterward
_une mer douce_,--a sweet sea,--_de laquelle n'est mention avoir vu le
bout_, of which there is no mention to have seen the end. But instead
of an Indian town far in the interior of a new world, with guides to
show us where the river came from, we found a splendid and bustling
stone-built city of white men, and only a few squalid Indians offered
to sell us baskets at the Lachine Railroad Depot, and Hochelaga is,
perchance, but the fancy name of an engine company or an eating-house.
[Illustration: _Montreal from Mount Royal_]
We left Montreal Wednesday, the 2d of October, late in the afternoon.
In the La Prairie cars the Yankees made themselves merry, imitating
the cries of the charette-drivers to perfection, greatly to the
amusement of some French-Canadian travelers, and they kept it up all
the way to Boston. I saw one person on board the boat at St. Johns,
and one or two more elsewhere in Canada, wearing homespun gray
greatcoats, or capotes, with conical and comical hoods, which fell
back between their shoulders like small bags, ready to be turned up
over the head when occasion required, though a hat usurped that place
now. They looked as if they would be convenient and proper enough as
long as the coats were new and tidy, but would soon come to have a
beggarly and unsightly look, akin to rags and dust-holes. We reached
Burlington early in the morning, where the Yankees tried to pass off
their Canada coppers, but the newsboys knew better. Returning through
the Green Mountains, I was reminded that I had not seen in Canada such
brilliant autumnal tints as I had previously seen in Vermont. Perhaps
there was not yet so great and sudden a contrast with the summer heats
in the former country as in these mountain valleys. As we were passing
through Ashburnham, by a new white house which stood at some distance
in a field, one passenger exclaimed, so that all in the car could hear
him, "There, there's not so good a house as that in all Canada!" I did
not much wonder at his remark, for there is a neatness, as well as
evident prosperity, a certain elastic easiness of circumstances, so to
speak, when not rich, about a New England house, as if the proprietor
could at least afford to make repairs in the spring, which the
Canadian houses do not suggest. Though of stone, they are no better
constructed than a stone barn would be with us; the only building,
except the château, on which money and taste are expended, being the
church. In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for
the château, and while every village here contains at least several
gentlemen or "squires," _there_ there is but one to a seigniory.
I got home this Thursday evening, having spent just one week in Canada
and traveled eleven hundred miles. The whole expense of this journey,
including two guide-books and a map, which cost one dollar twelve and
a half cents, was twelve dollars seventy-five cents. I do not suppose
that I have seen all British America; that could not be done by a
cheap excursion, unless it were a cheap excursion to the Icy Sea, as
seen by Hearne or Mackenzie, and then, no doubt, some interesting
features would be omitted. I wished to go a little way behind the word
_Canadense_, of which naturalists make such frequent use; and I should
like still right well to make a longer excursion on foot through the
wilder parts of Canada, which perhaps might be called _Iter
Canadense_.
NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS[3]
Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read
in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground,
of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes; of
the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the
rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting
of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of
health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.
Within the circuit of this plodding life,
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring strews them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievances.
I have remembered, when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length
Against the arrows of the coming sun,
How in the shimmering noon of summer past
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
The bee's long smothered hum, on the blue flag
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb,
Its own memorial,--purling at its play
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
In the staid current of the lowland stream;
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
Beneath a thick integument of snow.
So by God's cheap economy made rich
To go upon my winter's task again.
I am singularly refreshed in winter when I hear of service-berries,
poke-weed, juniper. Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer
glories? There is a singular health in those words, Labrador and East
Main, which no desponding creed recognizes. How much more than Federal
are these States! If there were no other vicissitudes than the
seasons, our interest would never tire. Much more is adoing than
Congress wots of. What journal do the persimmon and the buckeye keep,
and the sharp-shinned hawk? What is transpiring from summer to winter
in the Carolinas, and the Great Pine Forest, and the Valley of the
Mohawk? The merely political aspect of the land is never very
cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a
political organization. On this side all lands present only the
symptoms of decay. I see but Bunker Hill and Sing-Sing, the District
of Columbia and Sullivan's Island, with a few avenues connecting them.
But paltry are they all beside one blast of the east or the south wind
which blows over them.
In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at
least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and
livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so. There
is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance
so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high
pastures. I would keep some book of natural history always by me as a
sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the
system. To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a
fountain of health. To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty
no harm nor disappointment can come. The doctrines of despair, of
spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such
as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag
here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur
Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any
circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not
countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do
forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that
the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the
northern night the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and
walrus on the ice. They are of sick and diseased imaginations who
would toll the world's knell so soon. Cannot these sedentary sects do
better than prepare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other
busy living men? The practical faith of all men belies the preacher's
consolation. What is any man's discourse to me, if I am not sensible
of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets? In
it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am
not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling
streams. Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry
that leap in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a
summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods
ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident
and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook
minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales, worn
bright by the attrition, is reflected upon the bank!
We fancy that this din of religion, literature, and philosophy, which
is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the
universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's
axle; but if a man sleep soundly, he will forget it all between sunset
and dawn. It is the three-inch swing of a pendulum in a cupboard,
which the great pulse of nature vibrates by and through each instant.
When we lift our eyelids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke
and rattle like the cars on a railroad. When I detect a beauty in any
of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired
spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible
privacy of a life,--how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there
is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. What
an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life!
Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far
more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior. I am pleased
to learn that Thales was up and stirring by night not unfrequently,
as his astronomical discoveries prove. Linnæus, setting out for
Lapland, surveys his "comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" and
"gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much complacency as Bonaparte a
park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the
man is admirable. His eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird,
quadruped and biped. Science is always brave; for to know is to know
good; doubt and danger quail before her eye. What the coward overlooks
in his hurry, she calmly scrutinizes, breaking ground like a pioneer
for the array of arts that follow in her train. But cowardice is
unscientific; for there cannot be a science of ignorance. There may be
a science of bravery, for that advances; but a retreat is rarely well
conducted; if it is, then is it an orderly advance in the face of
circumstances.
But to draw a little nearer to our promised topics. Entomology extends
the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with
a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the
universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will
bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with
the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no
interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with
pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer
noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is
made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest-fly?
There were ears for these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon's ode
will show.
"We pronounce thee happy, Cicada,
For on the tops of the trees,
Drinking a little dew,
Like any king thou singest,
For thine are they all,
Whatever thou seest in the fields,
And whatever the woods bear.
Thou art the friend of the husbandmen,
In no respect injuring any one;
And thou art honored among men,
Sweet prophet of summer.
The Muses love thee,
And Phœbus himself loves thee,
And has given thee a shrill song;
Age does not wrack thee,
Thou skillful, earthborn, song-loving,
Unsuffering, bloodless one;
Almost thou art like the gods."
In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all
the land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so
then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year.
Nor can all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure
that night has chosen. Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the
cricket's chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall.
Alternate with these if you can.
About two hundred and eighty birds either reside permanently in the
State, or spend the summer only, or make us a passing visit. Those
which spend the winter with us have obtained our warmest sympathy. The
nuthatch and chickadee flitting in company through the dells of the
wood, the one harshly scolding at the intruder, the other with a faint
lisping note enticing him on; the jay screaming in the orchard; the
crow cawing in unison with the storm; the partridge, like a russet
link extended over from autumn to spring, preserving unbroken the
chain of summers; the hawk with warrior-like firmness abiding the
blasts of winter; the robin[4] and lark lurking by warm springs in the
woods; the familiar snowbird culling a few seeds in the garden or a
few crumbs in the yard; and occasionally the shrike, with heedless and
unfrozen melody bringing back summer again:--
His steady sails he never furls
At any time o' year,
And perching now on Winter's curls,
He whistles in his ear.
As the spring advances, and the ice is melting in the river, our
earliest and straggling visitors make their appearance. Again does the
old Teian poet sing as well for New England as for Greece, in the
RETURN OF SPRING
Behold, how, Spring appearing,
The Graces send forth roses;
Behold, how the wave of the sea
Is made smooth by the calm;
Behold, how the duck dives;
Behold, how the crane travels;
And Titan shines constantly bright.
The shadows of the clouds are moving;
The works of man shine;
The earth puts forth fruits;
The fruit of the olive puts forth.
The cup of Bacchus is crowned,
Along the leaves, along the branches,
The fruit, bending them down, flourishes.
The ducks alight at this season in the still water, in company with
the gulls, which do not fail to improve an east wind to visit our
meadows, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming themselves, and
diving to peck at the root of the lily, and the cranberries which the
frost has not loosened. The first flock of geese is seen beating to
north, in long harrows and waving lines; the jingle of the song
sparrow salutes us from the shrubs and fences; the plaintive note of
the lark comes clear and sweet from the meadow; and the bluebird, like
an azure ray, glances past us in our walk. The fish hawk, too, is
occasionally seen at this season sailing majestically over the water,
and he who has once observed it will not soon forget the majesty of
its flight. It sails the air like a ship of the line, worthy to
struggle with the elements, falling back from time to time like a ship
on its beam ends, and holding its talons up as if ready for the
arrows, in the attitude of the national bird. It is a great presence,
as of the master of river and forest. Its eye would not quail before
the owner of the soil, but make him feel like an intruder on its
domains. And then its retreat, sailing so steadily away, is a kind of
advance. I have by me one of a pair of ospreys, which have for some
years fished in this vicinity, shot by a neighboring pond, measuring
more than two feet in length, and six in the stretch of its wings.
Nuttall mentions that "the ancients, particularly Aristotle, pretended
that the ospreys taught their young to gaze at the sun, and those who
were unable to do so were destroyed. Linnæus even believed, on ancient
authority, that one of the feet of this bird had all the toes divided,
while the other was partly webbed, so that it could swim with one
foot, and grasp a fish with the other." But that educated eye is now
dim, and those talons are nerveless. Its shrill scream seems yet to
linger in its throat, and the roar of the sea in its wings. There is
the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile
feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of the Argonautic
expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight over
Parnassus.
The booming of the bittern, described by Goldsmith and Nuttall, is
frequently heard in our fens, in the morning and evening, sounding
like a pump, or the chopping of wood in a frosty morning in some
distant farm-yard. The manner in which this sound is produced I have
not seen anywhere described. On one occasion, the bird has been seen
by one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up
as much as it could hold, then, raising its head, it pumped it out
again with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or three
feet, and making the sound each time.
At length the summer's eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the
flicker among the oaks on the hillside, and a new dynasty begins with
calm security.
In May and June the woodland quire is in full tune, and, given the
immense spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does
not see how the void could be better filled.
Each summer sound
Is a summer round.
As the season advances, and those birds which make us but a passing
visit depart, the woods become silent again, and but few feathers
ruffle the drowsy air. But the solitary rambler may still find a
response and expression for every mood in the depths of the wood.
Sometimes I hear the veery's[5] clarion,
Or brazen trump of the impatient jay,
And in secluded woods the chickadee
Doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise
Of heroes, and set forth the loveliness
Of virtue evermore.
The phœbe still sings in harmony with the sultry weather by the
brink of the pond, nor are the desultory hours of noon in the midst of
the village without their minstrel.
Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays
The vireo rings the changes sweet,
During the trivial summer days,
Striving to lift our thoughts above the street.
With the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. The plover is
heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches
flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and
the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping
amid the rustle of the leaves. The crows, too, begin now to
congregate; you may stand and count them as they fly low and
straggling over the landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at
intervals of half a mile, until a hundred have passed.
I have seen it suggested somewhere that the crow was brought to this
country by the white man; but I shall as soon believe that the white
man planted these pines and hemlocks. He is no spaniel to follow our
steps; but rather flits about the clearings like the dusky spirit of
the Indian, reminding me oftener of Philip and Powhatan than of
Winthrop and Smith. He is a relic of the dark ages. By just so slight,
by just so lasting a tenure does superstition hold the world ever;
there is the rook in England, and the crow in New England.
Thou dusky spirit of the wood,
Bird of an ancient brood,
Flitting thy lonely way,
A meteor in the summer's day,
From wood to wood, from hill to hill,
Low over forest, field, and rill,
What wouldst thou say?
Why shouldst thou haunt the day?
What makes thy melancholy float?
What bravery inspires thy throat,
And bears thee up above the clouds,
Over desponding human crowds,
Which far below
Lay thy haunts low?
The late walker or sailor, in the October evenings, may hear the
murmurings of the snipe, circling over the meadows, the most
spirit-like sound in nature; and still later in the autumn, when the
frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary loon pays a visit to our
retired ponds, where he may lurk undisturbed till the season of
moulting is passed, making the woods ring with his wild laughter. This
bird, the Great Northern Diver, well deserves its name; for when
pursued with a boat, it will dive, and swim like a fish under water,
for sixty rods or more, as fast as a boat can be paddled, and its
pursuer, if he would discover his game again, must put his ear to the
surface to hear where it comes up. When it comes to the surface, it
throws the water off with one shake of its wings, and calmly swims
about until again disturbed.
These are the sights and sounds which reach our senses oftenest during
the year. But sometimes one hears a quite new note, which has for
background other Carolinas and Mexicos than the books describe, and
learns that his ornithology has done him no service.
It appears from the Report that there are about forty quadrupeds
belonging to the State, and among these one is glad to hear of a few
bears, wolves, lynxes, and wildcats.
When our river overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the
meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness
advertises me of an unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far
off then. I am affected by the sight of the cabins of the muskrat,
made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river,
as when I read of the barrows of Asia. The muskrat is the beaver of
the settled States. Their number has even increased within a few
years in this vicinity. Among the rivers which empty into the
Merrimack, the Concord is known to the boatmen as a dead stream. The
Indians are said to have called it Musketaquid, or Prairie River. Its
current being much more sluggish and its water more muddy than the
rest, it abounds more in fish and game of every kind. According to the
History of the town, "The fur-trade was here once very important. As
early as 1641, a company was formed in the colony, of which Major
Willard of Concord was superintendent, and had the exclusive right to
trade with the Indians in furs and other articles; and for this right
they were obliged to pay into the public treasury one twentieth of all
the furs they obtained." There are trappers in our midst still, as
well as on the streams of the far West, who night and morning go the
round of their traps, without fear of the Indian. One of these takes
from one hundred and fifty to two hundred muskrats in a year, and even
thirty-six have been shot by one man in a day. Their fur, which is not
nearly as valuable as formerly, is in good condition in the winter and
spring only; and upon the breaking up of the ice, when they are driven
out of their holes by the water, the greatest number is shot from
boats, either swimming or resting on their stools, or slight supports
of grass and reeds, by the side of the stream. Though they exhibit
considerable cunning at other times, they are easily taken in a trap,
which has only to be placed in their holes, or wherever they frequent,
without any bait being used, though it is sometimes rubbed with their
musk. In the winter the hunter cuts holes in the ice, and shoots them
when they come to the surface. Their burrows are usually in the high
banks of the river, with the entrance under water, and rising within
to above the level of high water. Sometimes their nests, composed of
dried meadow-grass and flags, may be discovered where the bank is low
and spongy, by the yielding of the ground under the feet. They have
from three to seven or eight young in the spring.
Frequently, in the morning or evening, a long ripple is seen in the
still water, where a muskrat is crossing the stream, with only its
nose above the surface, and sometimes a green bough in its mouth to
build its house with. When it finds itself observed, it will dive and
swim five or six rods under water, and at length conceal itself in its
hole, or the weeds. It will remain under water for ten minutes at a
time, and on one occasion has been seen, when undisturbed, to form an
air-bubble under the ice, which contracted and expanded as it breathed
at leisure. When it suspects danger on shore, it will stand erect like
a squirrel, and survey its neighborhood for several minutes, without
moving.
In the fall, if a meadow intervene between their burrows and the
stream, they erect cabins of mud and grass, three or four feet high,
near its edge. These are not their breeding-places, though young are
sometimes found in them in late freshets, but rather their
hunting-lodges, to which they resort in the winter with their food,
and for shelter. Their food consists chiefly of flags and fresh-water
mussels, the shells of the latter being left in large quantities
around their lodges in the spring.
The Penobscot Indian wears the entire skin of a muskrat, with the
legs and tail dangling, and the head caught under his girdle, for a
pouch, into which he puts his fishing-tackle, and essences to scent
his traps with.
The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have
disappeared; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the
mink is less common than formerly.
Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest
and most familiar reputation, from the time of Pilpay and Æsop to the
present day. His recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk.
I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours,
or which perhaps I have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation as
if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood,
and expected soon to catch it in its lair. I am curious to know what
has determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were
coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. I know which way a mind
wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and
whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals
and distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace.
Sometimes you will see the trails of many together, and where they
have gamboled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to
a singular listlessness and leisure in nature.
When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the
carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the
sunshine along the ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and earth as
to their true proprietor. He does not go in the sun, but it seems to
follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it.
Sometimes, when the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep,
you may give chase and come up with one on foot. In such a case he
will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest
direction, though he may lose ground by it. Notwithstanding his
fright, he will take no step which is not beautiful. His pace is a
sort of leopard canter, as if he were in no wise impeded by the snow,
but were husbanding his strength all the while. When the ground is
uneven, the course is a series of graceful curves, conforming to the
shape of the surface. He runs as though there were not a bone in his
back. Occasionally dropping his muzzle to the ground for a rod or two,
and then tossing his head aloft, when satisfied of his course. When he
comes to a declivity, he will put his fore feet together, and slide
swiftly down it, shoving the snow before him. He treads so softly that
you would hardly hear it from any nearness, and yet with such
expression that it would not be quite inaudible at any distance.
Of fishes, seventy-five genera and one hundred and seven species are
described in the Report. The fisherman will be startled to learn that
there are but about a dozen kinds in the ponds and streams of any
inland town; and almost nothing is known of their habits. Only their
names and residence make one love fishes. I would know even the number
of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line. I am
the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for
all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook.
Methinks I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a
degree.
I have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of
fishing and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of
Homer or Shakespeare; and now, when I turn the pages and ponder the
plates of the Angler's Souvenir, I am fain to exclaim,--
"Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud?"
Next to nature, it seems as if man's actions were the most natural,
they so gently accord with her. The small seines of flax stretched
across the shallow and transparent parts of our river are no more
intrusion than the cobweb in the sun. I stay my boat in mid-current,
and look down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes of his nets,
and wonder how the blustering people of the town could have done this
elvish work. The twine looks like a new river-weed, and is to the
river as a beautiful memento of man's presence in nature, discovered
as silently and delicately as a footprint in the sand.
When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under
my feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How
many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain!
The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. At
length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the
heavens again.
Early in the spring, after the ice has melted, is the time for
spearing fish. Suddenly the wind shifts from northeast and east to
west and south, and every icicle, which has tinkled on the meadow
grass so long, trickles down its stem, and seeks its level unerringly
with a million comrades. The steam curls up from every roof and
fence.
I see the civil sun drying earth's tears,
Her tears of joy, which only faster flow.
In the brooks is heard the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice,
floating with various speed, full of content and promise, and where
the water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty
rafts hold conversation in an undertone. Every rill is a channel for
the juices of the meadow. In the ponds the ice cracks with a merry and
inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled grating
hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a highway
for the woodman's team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the
skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. Town
committees anxiously inspect the bridges and causeways, as if by mere
eye-force to intercede with the ice and save the treasury.
The river swelleth more and more,
Like some sweet influence stealing o'er
The passive town; and for a while
Each tussock makes a tiny isle,
Where, on some friendly Ararat,
Resteth the weary water-rat.
No ripple shows Musketaquid,
Her very current e'en is hid,
As deepest souls do calmest rest
When thoughts are swelling in the breast,
And she that in the summer's drought
Doth make a rippling and a rout,
Sleeps from Nahshawtuck to the Cliff,
Unruffled by a single skiff.
But by a thousand distant hills
The louder roar a thousand rills,
And many a spring which now is dumb,
And many a stream with smothered hum,
Doth swifter well and faster glide,
Though buried deep beneath the tide.
Our village shows a rural Venice,
Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;
As lovely as the Bay of Naples
Yon placid cove amid the maples;
And in my neighbor's field of corn
I recognize the Golden Horn.
Here Nature taught from year to year,
When only red men came to hear,--
Methinks 't was in this school of art
Venice and Naples learned their part;
But still their mistress, to my mind,
Her young disciples leaves behind.
The fisherman now repairs and launches his boat. The best time for
spearing is at this season, before the weeds have begun to grow, and
while the fishes lie in the shallow water, for in summer they prefer
the cool depths, and in the autumn they are still more or less
concealed by the grass. The first requisite is fuel for your crate;
and for this purpose the roots of the pitch pine are commonly used,
found under decayed stumps, where the trees have been felled eight or
ten years.
With a crate, or jack, made of iron hoops, to contain your fire, and
attached to the bow of your boat about three feet from the water, a
fish-spear with seven tines and fourteen feet long, a large basket or
barrow to carry your fuel and bring back your fish, and a thick outer
garment, you are equipped for a cruise. It should be a warm and still
evening; and then, with a fire crackling merrily at the prow, you may
launch forth like a cucullo into the night. The dullest soul cannot
go upon such an expedition without some of the spirit of adventure; as
if he had stolen the boat of Charon and gone down the Styx on a
midnight expedition into the realms of Pluto. And much speculation
does this wandering star afford to the musing night-walker, leading
him on and on, jack-o'-lantern-like, over the meadows; or, if he is
wiser, he amuses himself with imagining what of human life, far in the
silent night, is flitting moth-like round its candle. The silent
navigator shoves his craft gently over the water, with a smothered
pride
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