138 The Wilson Bulletin — No. 84. 



A VACATION IN QUEBEC. 



BY G. EIFRIG. 



On the 21st of June the writer left Chicago for Ottawa, 

 Ontario, for the purpose of renewing old acquaintances, 

 among the human kind in the beautiful capital of the Do- 

 minion, and among the birds in the woods across the Ottawa 

 River in old Quebec. Another useful purpose of the trip was 

 to get out of the lungs the atmosphere and dust of the class- 

 room and to temporarily blot out of the memory all recol- 

 lection of it. 



The study of Natural History from a moving train, while 

 necessarily superficial and largely uncertain, is yet not to be 

 despised. It is both interesting and instructive to see e.g., 

 the prairie flora of northern Illinois, with its wealth of Phlox 

 tradescantia, erynginm, silphiiim, senccio, etc., gi\e way 

 to the orchards and sugar beets of Michigan, to notice how 

 large areas even in such a fine state as the Badger-state, and 

 in such a fine province as Ontario, are waste land, utterly 

 unsuitable for agriculture, how the Mourning Dove and Red- 

 headed Woodpecker are common up to Toronto but absent 

 north of it, how the farm houses there become smaller and 

 farther apart, but granite boulders and lakes more plentiful. 

 And here also the landscape is more and more dominated by 

 those fine northern evergreen forests. To me the finest de- 

 ciduous woods of oak, hickory and beech have never been 

 so enticing, so mysteriously charming and attractive as those 

 dark, silent evergreen forests of the northland. 



My first station, by prearrangement, was to be at Inlet 

 P. O., about forty miles northeast of Ottawa. The first half 

 of this distance is covered in a Canadian Pacific train to 

 Thurso, where connections had tO' be made with a mail driver, 

 who takes one out the rest of the way. Here the numerous 

 colonies of Chimney Swift and Purple Martin strike one. Of 

 the latter, indeed, every, even the tiniest hamlet in these part'^. 

 seems to have at least one thriving colony. House Wrens 

 are also numerous in the towns, about farm houses, and also 



