224 THE HALCYON IN CANADA. 



and they came in, when it was jabber, jabber, jabber 

 in the next room till I fell asleep. 



In the morning, to my inquiry as to who the 

 travelers were and what they wanted, La Chance said 

 they were old acquaintances going a-fishing and had 

 stopped to have a little talk. 



Breakfast was served early and we were upon the 

 road before the sun. Then began a forty-mile ride 

 through a dense Canadian spruce forest over the 

 drift and bowlders of the paleozoic age. Up to this 

 point the scenery had been quite familiar, not 

 much unlike that of the Catskills, but now there 

 was a change ; the birches disappeared, except now 

 and then a slender white or paper birch, and spruce 

 everywhere prevailed. A narrow belt on each side 

 of the road had been blasted by fire, and the dry, 

 white stems of the trees stood stark and stiff. The 

 road ran pretty straight, skirting the mountains and 

 threading the valleys, and hour after hour the dark 

 silent woods wheeled past us. Swarms of black 

 flies those insect wolves waylaid us and hung to 

 us till a smart spurt of the horse, where the road 

 favored, left them behind. But a species of large 

 horse-fly, black and vicious, it was not so easy to get 

 rid of. When they alighted upon the horse we 

 would demolish them with the whip or with our felt 

 hats, a proceeding the horse soon came to under- 

 stand and appreciate*. The white and gray Lauren- 

 tian bowlders lay along the roadside. The soil 

 seemed as if made up of decayed and pulverized 



