200 LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY 



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 understand 

 and appreciate. The white and gray Laurentian 

 bowlders lay along the roadside. The soil seemed 

 as if made up of decayed and pulverized 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 watershed 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. 



