514 Sea -Trout Fishing. 



affording, however, certain and excellent fishing for a short time at 

 their mouths. Others, again, do not bear a high reputation as salmon 

 rivers, owing to their having been either neglected or over-fished. 

 One, the Betsiamite, or Bersimis, is reserved for the use of the In- 

 dians. It is a fine river, but so cruelly fished, netted, speared, and 

 snared by its reckless proprietors that it has almost ceased to rank 

 as a salmon-breeding water. 



Many of these streams will long remain unvisited except by the 

 most enterprising anglers, on account of their remoteness from the 

 common lines of travel and the forbidding uninhabited country through 

 which they flow. The easiest access is still by the way of Quebec. 

 As far as the village of Tadousac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, a 

 daily steam line runs. But here all usual and comfortable ways of 

 transportation end, and the solitary recesses beyond can be pene- 

 trated only by the aid of country carts or of small vessels. Taking 

 into account the enforced delays of preparation, the forlorn condition 

 of beasts, roads, and vehicles upon a land journey, and the accidents 

 of winds, waves, and fogs, a visitor to any of these streams is hardly 

 safe in counting upon less than seven or eight days' traveling between 

 it and New York. 



Whatever its soft Indian name may mean (if it be not rather 

 Breton), Tadousac might well be called the place of rest. Within 

 forty-eight hours from New York, one seems transported to one of 

 the ends of the earth. All around it is vast and lonely. The great 

 river stretches glimmering away to a shore seldom faintly seen. 

 Behind, bare lofty crags shut it in, treeless and silent. A huge 

 promontory bars it from the Saguenay, rolling black and cold as if 

 drained from the eternal chasms of polar glaciers. The air comes 

 thin and pure, the light falls sharp on the gray brows of the cliffs 

 and the brown sand washed up by the bay. Most of those trim 

 cottages dropped among the rocks belong to the best people in the 

 province of Quebec, and a few to countrymen of our own, who long 

 ago found out this retreat for cool, economical, northern lotus-eating. 

 Such traces of human life are lost like dots in the great spaces. The 

 silence is broken every hour by a restless little bell, tinkling from 

 the gable of the oldest church on the continent. This is a pocket- 

 chapel, that could be set inside a town drawing-room, low-pitched, 

 mossy, and winter-bitten, dark inside with two hundred years' censer- 



