THE HALCYON IN CANADA. 225 



rock, and doubtless contained very little vegetable 

 matter. It is so barren that it will never repay 

 clearing and cultivating. 



Our course was an up-grade toward the highlands 

 that separate the water-shed of St. John Lake from 

 that of the St. Lawrence, and as we proceeded the 

 spruce became smaller and smaller till the trees were 

 seldom more than eight or ten inches in diameter. 

 .Nearly all of them terminated in a dense tuft at the 

 top beneath which the stem would be bare for several 

 feet, giving them the appearance, my friend said, as 

 they stood sharply defined along the crests of the 

 mountains, of cannon swabs. Endless, interminable 

 successions of these cannon swabs, each just like its 

 fellow, came and went, came and went, all day. Some- 

 times we could see the road a mile or two ahead, and 

 it was as lonely and solitary as a path in the desert. 

 Periods of talk and song and jollity were succeeded 

 by long stretches of silence. A buck-board upon such 

 a road does not conduce to a continuous flow of ani- 

 mal spirits. A good brace for the foot and a good 

 hold for the hand is one's main lookout much of the 

 time. We walked up the steeper hills, one of them 

 nearly a mile long, then clung grimly to the board 

 during the rapid descent of the other side. 



We occasionally saw a solitary pigeon in every 

 instance a cock leading a forlorn life in the wood, 

 a hermit of his kind, or more probably a rejected 

 and superfluous male. We came upon two or three 

 broods of spruce-grouse in the road, so tame that 

 15 



