3i6 



LIFE IN MONTREAL. 



[Chap. VII. 



fire cleared the country to the top of the rocks, but did not 

 descend. In others, there had been no fire, and especially 

 where a stream descended underneath, there was an unusually 

 dense mass of forest. In exposed places you saw a bare rock, 

 strewed with little trees, lying as if they had been felled : or 

 some standing, but dead. They had died of inanition, having 

 used up the shreds of soil. How the living trees supported 

 themselves is a mystery. . . . 



" The Saguenay is not a river, and its gorge is not a canon : 

 this is clear to me. Its bed could never have been water- 

 scooped : nor are the outlines of its banks those of flowing 

 water. It is very rare to see screes or pebbles or land-slides. 

 There appears very little of the fallen material you always see 

 at the seaside. The tide enters and subsides ; but not with 

 waves ; and whatever descends from frosts and weathering 

 probably falls at once to unknown depths. No one has 

 sounded and analyzed the waters of the abyss. . . . The 

 daily flow of the blue sea-water mixes with so much brown, and 

 pours out at ebb tide a queer-coloured fluid, distinct for a long 

 distance, which looks blackish brown as the steamer curls it, 

 but breaks into brownish green foam in the sun. Would that 

 William, or W. Lant, and the Porcupine' crew, would come and 

 explore it ! Is there any life there ? For the whole sixty 

 miles, you see not a shanty or an axe-man, not a beast, and 

 very few birds. Not a canoe or raft is seen on its waters : no 

 fisher wastes his time there. For what purpose is this weird 

 region, separating the busy St. Lawrence from the fertile settle- 

 ments of the St. John River and Chicoutoremi country ? Has 

 it been disturbed since the first ages ; or do we see here the 

 remains of the cataclasms of the Protozoic age? Was this Labra- 

 dorian continent, as we now see it, witness to the whole series 

 of geological changes, which have built up the British Isles 

 and most of the present continents ? Was the Saguenay 

 chasm part of the same settling convulsions which produced 

 the deep chain of lakes ? I must say I felt it a very solemn 

 sight : and in its still grandeur, showing no signs of alteration 

 from the very earliest ages, the greatest earthly image of 



