568 The Halcyon in Canada. 



mense wave or puff of fog that came drifting up the river and set all 

 the fog-guns booming along shore. We were soon through it into 

 clear, crisp space, with room enough for any eye to range in. On 

 the south, the shores of the great river appear low and uninteresting, 

 but on the north, they are bold and striking enough to make it up — 

 high, scarred, unpeopled mountain ranges the whole way. The 

 points of interest to the eye in the broad expanse of water were the 

 white porpoises that kept rolling, rolling in the distance all day. 

 They came up like the perimeter of a great wheel, that turns slowly 

 and then disappears. From mid-forenoon we could see far ahead an 

 immense column of yellow smoke rising up and flattening out upon 

 the sky and stretching away beyond the horizon. Its form was that 

 of some aquatic plant that shoots a stem up through the water and 

 spreads its broad leaf upon the surface. This smoky lily-pad must 

 have reached nearly to Maine. It proved to be in the Indian 

 country, in the mountains beyond the mouth of the Saguenay, and 

 must have represented an immense destruction of forest timber. 



The steamer is two hours crossing the St. Lawrence from Riviere 

 du Loup to Tadousac. The Saguenay pushes a broad sweep of 

 dark-blue water down into its mightier brother, that is sharply de- 

 fined from the deck of the steamer. The two rivers seem to touch, 

 but not to blend, so proud and haughty is this chieftain from the 

 north. On the mountains above Tadousac one could see banks of 

 sand left by the ancient seas. Naked rock and sterile sand are all 

 the Tadousacker has to make his garden of, so far as I observed. 

 Indeed, there is no soil along the Saguenay until you get to Ha-ha 

 Bay, and then there is not much, and poor quality at that. 



What the ancient fires did not burn, the ancient seas have 

 washed away. I overheard an English resident say to a Yankee 

 tourist, " You will think you are approaching the end of the world 

 up here." It certainly did suggest something apocryphal or anti- 

 mundane — a segment of the moon or of a cleft asteroid, matter dead 

 or wrecked. The world-builders must have had their foundry up in 

 this neighborhood, and the bed of this river was doubtless the channel 

 through which the molten granite flowed. Some mischief-loving 

 god has let in the sea while things were yet red-hot, and there has 

 been a time here. But the channel still seems filled with water from 

 the mid- Atlantic, cold and blue-black, and in places between seven 



