192 LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY 



The Hudson must take a back seat now, and a good 

 way back. One of the two or three great water- 

 courses of the globe is before you. No other river, 

 I imagine, carries such a volume of pure cold water 

 to the sea. Nearly all its feeders are trout and 

 salmon streams, and what an airing and what a 

 bleaching it gets on its course ! Its history, its an- 

 tecedents, are unparalleled. The great lakes are its 

 camping grounds; here its hosts repose under the 

 sun and stars in areas like that of states and king- 

 doms, and it is its waters that shake the earth at 

 Niagara. Where it receives the Saguenay it is 

 twenty miles wide, and when it debouches into the 

 Gulf it is a hundred. Indeed, it is a chain of Ho- 

 meric sublimities from beginning to end. The great 

 cataract is a fit sequel to the great lakes; the spirit 

 that is born in vast and tempestuous Superior takes 

 its full glut of power in that fearful chasm. If 

 paradise is hinted in the Thousand Islands, heU is 

 unveiled in that pit of terrors. 



Its last escapade is the great rapids above Mon- 

 treal, down which the steamer shoots with its breath- 

 less passengers, after which, inhaling and exhaling 

 its mighty tides, it flows calmly to the sea. 



The St. Lawrence is the type of nearly all the 

 Canadian rivers, which are strung with lakes and 

 rapids and cataracts, and are full of peril and ad' 

 venture. 



Here we reach the oldest part of the continent, 

 geologists tell us ; and here we encounter a fragment 

 of the Old World civilization. Quebec presents the 



