[woop] LAURENCIANA 35 
the salt water meets the fresh, the Old World meets the New, and more 
than half the history of Canada was made. 
The Montreal Channel flows between almost continuous villages 
on both banks; the hills recede to the far horizon; and there are touches 
of Holland in occasional flats, with trim lines of uniform trees and a 
windmill or two against the sky. In Lake St. Peter, half way up the 
Channel, the last throb of the tide dies out. At the end of the 
Channel, and from the top of Mount Royal, you again see the 
panorama of the hills. On fine days you can make out the crest 
of the Adirondacks, the southern outpost of the Laurentians, nearly 
ninety miles away. The view at your feet is very different. It is 
that of a teeming city, already well on its triumphant way into its 
second half-million of citizens. Having looked down upon its present 
extent, and then all round, at the enormously larger area of contiguous 
country over which it can expand, you might remember that this city, 
the Mountain itself, and the open lands behind, form, after all, only a 
single island among an archipelago at the Mouth of the Ottawa, which 
is by no means the greatest among the tributary streams of the St. 
Lawrence. 
The Upper St. Lawrence is full of exultant life, showing its primeval 
vigour in a long series of splendid rapids. Rapids always look to me 
like the muscles of a river, strained for a supreme effort. But man 
has accepted the challenge, running the rapids when going down stream 
and working his way up by canals, which are as worthy of admiration 
for their disciplined, traffic-bearing strength as the rapids are for their 
own strenuous untutored beauty. The banks are nowhere very bold 
or striking. But there is plenty of human variety blended with pleas- 
ant vestiges of Nature. Farms, orchards, villages, parks, towns, 
meadows, trees and rocks and woodlands, alternate with each other 
till the Thousand Islands are reached, at the beginning of the Lakes. 
Here there are hundreds of channels, great or small, eddies innumer- 
able, ripples, calms, and a few secluded backwaters—all threading their 
way, fast or slowly, through a maze of rocky, tree-crested islets, and 
glinting or dappled in the sun and shade. Nature must have been 
making holiday when she laid out this labyrinth of water-gardens for 
her own and her devotees’ delight. And man makes holiday here 
himself. But what a holiday! Half the scene is defaced by sham 
palaces and sham castles and other brick and stone abominations in 
the style that’s advertised as “real baronial.’ All of it is worried by 
fidgetty motor boats, the reek of suburbia, and every other jarring note 
that millionairish shoddydom can make most stridently out of harmony 
with the natural surroundings. The pity of it is that once the Philistines 
have made the place more than half their own they have not gone 
