LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE.
LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE.
THE FAIR DOMINION
A RECORD OF CANADIAN IMPRESSIONS
BY
R. E. VERNÈDE
AUTHOR OF
'THE PURSUIT OF MR. FAVIEL,' 'MERIEL OF THE MOORS,' ETC.
With 12 Illustrations in Colour
from Drawings by
CYRUS CUNEO
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.
1911
PREFACE
You know how long ago, in the earlier-than-Victorian days, the country cousin, in order to see life, went up to the Metropolis. A terrible journey it was, but well worth the labour and anxiety. Accounts are still extant of how the bustle and noise of the streets amazed him, of how endless the houses seemed, how startled he was by the glittering, clattering folk, how innocent and countrified he felt by comparison with them. Nowadays, though the London we know is to that old London as a vast and sleepless city to a small somnolent town, the country cousin is no longer carried off his feet by a visit to it. It is not vast enough or noisy enough or new enough to impress him. Perhaps no single city ever will be again.
But Canada! Some Winnipeg school teachers who came over recently to see London, told a journalist that it seemed so quiet compared with Canadian cities. 'In our cities,' they said, 'it is impossible to escape from the noise of the streets.' ... Yet the streets and the cities are not really the things that impress one most in Canada. The amazing things are the forests and the fields, the prairies and the lakes and the mountains: all the illimitable space and the irrepressible men who are closing it in and giving it names for us to know it by.
Clearly the English country cousin who wishes to be impressed should go to Canada. It is as easy to reach as London was in the old days, and there are no highwaymen. He will come back—if he comes back—with many stories to tell his friends of the wonders he has seen and of the still more incredible things that will soon be visible. That is at least my position. I went out originally for the Bystander, which wanted its Canadian news, like all its other news, up-to-date and not too solemn, and I am indebted to the editor of that journal for permission to make use in parts of the articles I sent him for this book, in which, by the way, I have still endeavoured to avoid solemnity. For some reason or other, many writers upon Canada do fall into a solemn and portentous way of describing the country—with the result that people who know nothing of the facts say to themselves, 'This is indeed an important Dominion, but dull.' As a matter of fact, of course, Canada is a highly exciting country—from its grizzly bears to its political problems—and having spent delightful months in various parts, some well known, others, such as the French River, the Columbia Valley, and the Selkirks, very little known; riding in trains or on mountain ponies, sometimes trying to catch maskinongÉs (a tigerish kind of pike), sometimes trying to catch prime ministers (who cannot be described in such a general way)—I have tried to set down my impressions as incompletely as I received them. Never, I hope, have I fallen into the error of describing exactly how many salmon are canned in the Dominion, or what Sir Wilfrid Laurier should do if he really wishes to remain a great party leader. The errors I have fallen into will be obvious, and I need not run through them here.... As for criticisms—if now and then I stop to make some—if I start saying, 'Canada is a great country, nevertheless, we do some things just as well or better at home,' no Canadian need mind. Country cousins have said just that sort of thing from all time. Every cousin—even the most countrified—makes some reservations in favour of his own place; he would not be worth entertaining otherwise. If the criticisms are pointless, Canadians may say, 'What can you expect from a country cousin?' If there is something in them, they will be entitled to remark, 'This English country cousin shows some intelligence. But then he has been to Canada—the centre of things.'
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE START FROM LIVERPOOL
II. THE STEERAGE PASSAGE
III. LANDING IN CANADA
IV. A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC
V. THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY
VI. STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND A TRAVELLER'S VOW
VII. A HABITANT VILLAGE AND ITS NOTAIRE
VIII. GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL
IX. TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER
X. MASKINONGÉ FISHING ON THE FRENCH RIVER
XI. SOME SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY
XII. THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO
XIII. THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW TIMERS OF WINNIPEG
XIV. A PRAIRIE TOWN AND THE PRAIRIE POLICE
XV. IN CALGARY
XVI. THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION
XVII. AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS
XVIII. INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
XIX. A HOT BATH IN BANFF
XX. CANADA AND WOMAN
XXI. THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS
XXII. A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY
XXIII. THE FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE
XXIV. THE SELKIRKS—A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY
XXV. AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK THROUGH THE COLUMBIA VALLEY
XXVI. FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST
XXVII. A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY
XXVIII. THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND
XXIX. A CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF
BRITISH COLUMBIA AND A BIG FIRE AT VICTORIA
XXX. BACK THROUGH OTTAWA
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE ... Frontispiece
CHATEAU FRONTENAC FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS. DAY. QUEBEC
CHATEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC
MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES
A TRAIL IN THE ROCKIES
THE HALT. SADDLEBACK. LAGGAN
LAKE LOUISE. LAGGAN. ALBERTA
IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS
ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY
THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS
A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES
IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT
THE FAIR DOMINION
CHAPTER I
THE START FROM LIVERPOOL
Canada and its wonders might lie before us, yet it was not all joy there at the Liverpool docks, where we waited our opportunity to go on board S.S. Empress of Britain. For one thing, the sun on that August day of last year was so unusually warm that standing about with a bag amongst crowds of people who were seeing other people off was hard work; for another, I had left behind me in my Hertfordshire home my bull-mastiff, forlorn ever since I had begun packing, and not a bit deceived by the bone she had been supplied with at parting. Even while she had gnawed it, she had whined. All those other people already on the great ship, the people in the bows—the emigrants—were leaving more even than a bull-mastiff: friends—for who knew how long?—their parents in England perhaps for ever. Here were thoughts to obscure the pleasure of those who were making for a new world, thoughts to sadden those who, whether by their own choice or not, were staying behind. Less than my bull-mastiff could they be either deceived or solaced. True, they might remember that this is the way a great Empire is made. We talk of the Empire often enough. But then we who talk of it are rarely those who make it or suffer for it; and perhaps we are therefore more easily consoled by a great idea than they.
Luckily going on board ship has to be a bustling business. My two companions and I, who had been promised a four-berth third-class cabin between us, had to bustle quite a lot—to different gangways from which we were rapidly sent back and into various queues, which turned out, after we had waited in them for some time, to be composed of some other class of passenger. We were extremely heated before we found ourselves in the end about to be passed up a gangway at which the medical inspection of a group of Scandinavians was at the moment going on. Scandinavian seems to be a roomy word which covers all Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Lapps; and no foreigners not coming under this category are carried by the 'Empress' boats.
The theory seems to be in regard to them that they are the only right and proper shipmates for English emigrants going to Canada. They were being pretty carefully examined all the same, men and women alike. The doctors' attention seemed to centre on their heads and eyelids. Hats were pulled off as they came level with them, and tow-coloured hair was grasped and peered into apparently with satisfactory results, for only a couple of elderly people were held back for a few minutes; and they I fancy had not passed the eye test, and were therefore not free from suspicion of having trachoma—a not uncommon North European disease supposed to cause total blindness, which is least of all to be desired in a new country. The two detained Scandinavians were re-examined and passed, after which our turn came. I think we all three felt a little uneasy in the eyelids as we advanced upon the doctor, but we need not have been anxious, for after a swift glance at us he reassured us by grinning and saying, 'There's nothing wrong with you, I should say,'—and so we passed on board. For the next hour or two we were part of a whirl of confused humanity. There is always a tendency among landsmen to become sheepish at sea, and in the steerage there were nine hundred of us, most of whom had never been at sea before. So we rushed together and got jammed down companionways and in passages which even on so big a liner as this could not hold us all abreast, and scrummed to find the numbers of our berths from the steward, and flung ourselves in masses upon our baggage, and pressed pell-mell to the sides of the ship to wave good-bye, and formed a solid tossing square saloonwards when bells rang and we thought they might mean meals.
Of course there must have been even then self-possessed passengers, who knew what they were about and only seemed to be lost with the crowd, and to be vaguely trying to muddle through. Canadians returning to their own country were conspicuous later by reason of their cool bearing and air of knowing their way about the world. And the invisible discipline of the ship that was to turn us all later into reasonable and orderly individuals was no doubt already at work. But the impression any one looking down on us that first evening would have received would have been the impression of a scurrying crowd, fancifully and variously dressed for its Atlantic voyage—clerks in pink shirts and high collars and bowler hats, peasants in smocks, women in the very latest flapping head-gear, or bareheaded and shawled, infants either terribly smart or mere bundles of old clothes.
Up on the first-class deck superior people were walking calmly about with just the right clothes and manners for such a small event as crossing the Atlantic must have been to most of them. Occasionally one of these upper folk would come to the rails, lean over and smilingly stare at us: wondering perhaps at our confusion. But then all our fortunes were embarked on the ship, and only a little part of theirs.
When I went to sleep that night on a clean straw mattress in a lower berth, with a pleasant air blowing in through the port-hole in the passage, we were, I suppose, out to sea, and the air was Atlantic air, and no longer that of the old country.
CHAPTER II
THE STEERAGE PASSAGE
Apart from its other merits the steerage has this to its credit—every one is very friendly and affable. No one required an introduction before entering into conversation, and the suspicion that we might be making the acquaintance of some doubtful and inferior person who would perhaps presume upon it later did not worry any of us. I sat at a delightful table. Some one who knew the ins and outs of a steerage passage had advised me to go in to meals with the first 'rush,' instead of waiting for the second or third. His theory was that the first relay got the pick of the food. So my two friends and I had taken care to answer the very first call to the saloon, which happened to be for high tea, and, seating ourselves at random, found that we were thereby self-condemned to take every meal in the same order—including breakfast at the unaccustomed and somewhat dispiriting hour of 7 A.M. I do not know that it greatly mattered. In the cabin next ours there were several small children, who appeared to wake and weep about 4 A.M., and either to throw themselves or be thrown out of their berths on to the floor a little later. Their lamentations then became so considerable, that we were not sorry to rise and go elsewhere.
Besides the three of us, there were at our table the following:—
(1) A Norwegian peasant. Going on to the land. Quiet and rapid in his eating.
(2) Another Norwegian peasant, also going on to the land. He must have arrived on board very hungry, and he remained so throughout the voyage. He used to help himself to butter with his egg spoon, after he had finished most of his egg with it. Moreover, he would rise and stretch a red and dusky arm all down the table, if he sighted something appetising afar off. As we had a most excellent table steward, whose waiting could not have been beaten in the first-class, we all rather resented this behaviour, and I—as his next door neighbour—was deputed to hold him courteously in his seat until the desired eatables could be passed him.
(3) A Durham miner going to a mine in northern Ontario. A cheery red-faced person. He had bought a revolver before starting for Canada, because friends had told him that they were rough sort of places up there. I afterwards stayed a night in a mining town, and the only row that I heard was caused by a young Salvation Army girl, who beat a drum violently for hours outside the bar. We advised the miner to practise with his revolver in some isolated spot, these weapons being tricky.
(4) A small shy cockney boy who was going out to his dad at Winnipeg. I don't know what his dad was, but I should think a clerk of sorts.
(5) A brass metal worker from the North. Going to a job in Peterborough. A quiet pleasant young man.
(6) A chauffeur who had also been in the Royal Engineers. Had been in the South African War, and told stories about it much more interesting than those you see in books.
(7) A horse-breaker, with whom I spent many hours learning about bits and bridles and shoes. He was the only married man among these seven. He hoped to bring his wife and family out within the year, and was not going to be happy until he did, even though the kids would have to be vaccinated, and he had most conscientious objections to this process.
All these men—even the Norwegian with his egg-spoon habits—would be, I could not help thinking, a distinct gain to any country. I fancy too that they represented the steerage generally. Of course there were other types. I remember some characteristic Londoners of the less worthy sort—gummy-faced youths in dirty clothes that had been smart. There was one in particular, whom the horse-breaker would refer to as 'that lad that goes about in what was once a soot o' clothes,' who had a perfect genius for card tricks and making music on a comb. His career in Canada, judging by criticisms passed upon him by returning Canadians, was likely to be brief and unsuccessful.
The food—to turn to what is always of considerable interest on a voyage—was good but solid. Pea soup, followed by pork chops and plum-pudding, makes an excellent dinner when you are hungry. Everybody was hungry the first day and also the last three days. In between there was a cessation of appetites. The sea was never in the least rough, but there was some slight motion on the second day out, and the majority of the nine hundred had probably never been to sea before. The strange affliction took them unawares, and they did not know how to deal with it. Where they were first seized, there they remained and were ill. The sides of the ship which appealed to more experienced travellers did not allure them. It was during this affliction that a device which had struck me as a most excellent idea upon going on board seemed in practice less good. This was a railed-in sand-pit which the paternal company had constructed between decks for the entertainment of the emigrant children. I had seen a dozen or more at a time playing in it with every manifestation of delight. Even now while they were ailing there, they did not seem to mind it.
Everywhere one went on that day of tribulation one had to walk warily.
Afterwards the sea settled down into a mill pond, and every one began to wear a cheerful and hopeful look. In the evenings, and sometimes in the afternoons as well, some of the Scandinavians would produce concertinas and violins, and the whole of them would dance their folk-dances for hours. It was extraordinary how gracefully they danced—the squat fair-haired women and the big men heavily clothed and booted. There was an attempt on the part of some of the English people to take part in these dances, but they soon realised their inferiority, and gave it up in favour of sports and concerts. The sports, though highly successful in themselves, led to a slight contretemps when the Bishop of London, who happened to be on board, came over by request to distribute the prizes. The Scandinavians, who quite wrongly thought they had been left out of the sports, seized the opportunity afforded by the bishop's address (which was concerned with our future in Canada), to form in Indian file, with a concertinist at their head, and march round and round the platform on which the bishop stood, making a deafening noise. It looked for a little as if there might be a scuffle between them and the prize-winners, but peace prevailed, though we were all prevented from hearing what was no doubt very sound advice. Apart from this, there was no horseplay to speak of until the last night but one, when a rowdy set, headed by a fat Yorkshireman, chose to throw bottles about in the dark, down in that part of the ship where about fifty men were berthed together. For this the ringleader was hauled before the captain and properly threatened.
Our concerts went with less Éclat. They were held in the dining-saloon, and there were usually good audiences. It seemed however that we had only one accompanist, whose command of the piano was limited, and in any case self-consciousness invariably got the better of the performers at the last moment. Either they would not come forward at all when their turn arrived, or else, having come forward, they turned very red, wavered through a few notes and then lost their voices altogether. Our best English concertina player, a fat little Lancashire engineer, had his instrument seized with the strangest noises halfway through 'Variations on the Harmonica,' and after a manly effort to restrain them, failed and had to retire in haste. We generally bridged over these recurring gaps in the programme by singing 'Yip i addy.'
It was so fine most of the voyage, that one could be quite happy on deck doing nothing at all but resting and strolling and talking. A few of the girls skipped occasionally and some of the men boxed: there was no real zeal for deck games. The voyage was too short, and with the new life and the new world at the end of it we all wanted to find out from one another what we knew—or at least what we thought—Canada would be like. We stood in some awe of returning Canadians who talked of dollars as if they were pence, and we wondered if we should get jobs as easily as people said we should. Almost every type of worker was represented among us, and many types of people.
Chief among my own particular acquaintances made on the boat were a young lady-help from Alberta, two Russian Jews from Archangel, a Norwegian farm hand from somewhere near the Arctic circle, two miners from Ontario, and three small boys belonging to Perth, Scotland.
I do not know how the Russian Jews came to be on the boat. They had some Finnish, and I suppose slipped in with the Scandinavians. They also spoke a few words of German, which was the language we misused together. They were brothers, good-looking men with charming manners. The elder wore a frock coat and a bowler hat, and looked a romantic Shylock. The other was clothed in a smock, and was hatless. They said they had fled from the strife of Russia, and they wished particularly to know if Canada was a free country. The younger man was an ironworker and made penny puzzles in iron which, so far as I could make out, the elder brother invented. They had one puzzle with them, but it was very complicated, and I was afraid that the sale of such things in Canada might be limited, unless Canadians fancied bewildering themselves over intricate ironwork during the long winters. Still those two fugitives rolled Russian cigarettes very well too, which should earn them a living.
The Norwegian was a simple youth in a queer hat, which afterwards blew off into the sea much to his sorrow. He was very bent on acquiring the English language during the voyage, not having any of it to start with. I used to sit with him on one side and the small Perthshire boys on the other, while we translated Scottish into Norwegian and back again. The Scotch boys would inquire of me what 'hat' was in Norse, and I would point to the queer head-gear above-mentioned, and ask its owner to name its Norwegian equivalent. One of the things that stumped me—being a mere Englishman—was a question put by the smallest Perth boy: 'Whit is gollasses in Norwegian?'
It took me some time to find out what gollasses were in English, and I don't know how to spell them now.
CHAPTER III
LANDING IN CANADA
It was while we were still out to sea that I first realised what Canada might be like, and how different from England. We had been steaming for five days, and hitherto the Atlantic had seemed a familiar and still English sea. The sky above, the air around, even the vast slowly heaving waters and the set of the sun one might see from an English cliff. But on this last day but one, which was a day of hot sun, the sky seemed to have risen immeasurably higher than in England and to have become incredibly clearer, except where little white rugged clouds were set. Snow clouds in a perfect winter's sky, I should have said, if I had known myself to be at home; yet the air round the ship was of the very balmiest summer. We should never get such a sky and such an air together in England, and we were all stimulated by it and began to forget England and think more of Canada. We wondered when we were going to see the lights of Belle Isle, and somebody said we should pass an island called Anticosti, and we began to look out for Anticosti, and anybody who knew anything about Anticosti was listened to like an oracle. Not that anybody did know much—even those who had crossed to and fro several times. After all there was no reason why they should, for Atlantic liners do not stop there, and there is not much to be seen in passing. Still we weighed the words of those who had passed it carefully, and decided to see what we could of it so that we might also be regarded as oracles next time we came that way.
Though we had not seen Canada, yet we had received a favourable impression of it, which was lucky, because the next day, when we had got into the St. Lawrence, it came on to sleet and vapour. We of the steerage, who had brought up our boxes and babies almost before breakfast, so as to be ready to land at the earliest moment, had to content ourselves with sitting on them between decks (on the boxes, for choice, but the babies would get in the way too), and watch the little white villages and tinned church spires and dark woods of French Canada drive past the portholes in the mist. We should like to have been on deck seeing more of our new home, breathing some of its bracing air; but the rain was incessant. Heavens, but it got stuffy too on that lower deck. Nine hundred of us in our best clothes and our overcoats—holding on to bundles and kids, and sweating. It got so stuffy, that I took the opportunity of crossing in the rain to the first-class, and hunting out two people to whom I had introductions. One was the Canadian Minister for Emigration, who had already been over to inspect us in a paternal sort of way and declared that we were 'a particularly good lot'—very different, he hinted, from the sort of English emigrants who used to be shipped over, and got Englishmen a bad name in the new country for years. His gratification at our general excellence was so natural that I did not broach the question of whether Canada's gain was England's loss. I hope it was not. I suppose we can afford to lose even good men, provided we are not going to lose them really, but only station them at a different spot along the great road of the Empire.
The other person I was anxious to see was Archbishop Bourne, who was going out to the Eucharistic Congress at Montreal. We discussed that extraordinarily lucid book of Monsieur AndrÉ Siegfried, which deals with the race question in Canada. The archbishop admitted its value, though he thought it unfair in parts. He was assured, for example, that the unsocial attitude of the Irish and French Canadian Catholics towards one another as well as towards those of another religion was fast disappearing, nor did he seem to think that the Church any longer tended to frustrate enterprise by keeping its members under its wing in the East. Many Catholics were going West nowadays, and after the Congress he himself was going West in the spirit of the times. Perhaps he was right about the rapprochement of the Irish and French Catholics, though men on the spot maintain that their unsociability is largely due to the fact that both have a singular yearning for State employment and the employment will not always go round.
It was still raining when I recrossed to the steerage, and it was still raining when we got into the Canadian Pacific Railway dock at about 5 P.M. I was standing beside the horse-breaker at the time, and the first thing that caught his eye in Quebec was the shape of the telegraph poles.
'Why, look at them,' he said, 'they're all crooked!'
A little later, he commented on the slowness with which the French-Canadian porters were getting the baggage off the boat. 'They may have this here hustle on them that they talk of,' he said, 'but I've seen that done a lot quicker in London.'
It was more loyalty to the old country than disloyalty to the new that prompted the remark, in which there was perhaps some justification. A Canadian who was standing by seemed to think so at any rate.
'This is only French Canada,' he said, 'wait till you get West.'
Still we all of us had to wait a bit in French Canada anyhow. We did not get through the emigration sheds till 9.30 P.M., and then there was one's baggage to be got through the Customs after. Not that there was much in that, the officials being most amiable. But we none of us much enjoyed the emigrant inspection. It is necessary and desirable no doubt, but we felt that we had been inspected pretty often already on board the boat, and we had been up since daylight, and we were hungry and miserable, and hot in the sheds and cold out of them, and the babies fractious, and everybody shoving and pushing, and we felt like some sheep at sheep-dog trials which have to be driven through pen after pen, and would go so much faster if they only knew how, and the dogs didn't press them. However it was all accomplished at last, and then the emigrants got into the westbound train that was waiting for them. First and second-class passengers had long since vanished in carriages to such abodes of luxury as the ChÁteau Frontenac and the rest of the leading hotels. Now there were no carriages left. And we heard that a hundred people at least had been turned away from the ChÂteau Frontenac, so full was it; and since in any case we wished to start our Canadian impressions from a humbler standpoint, we set out in the rain for a Quebec inn which some of the Canadians returning in the steerage had told us of. I suppose we had a good deal more than a mile to go through the rain carrying bags, along those awful roads from the docks. I know something about those roads, because I not only walked along them that night, but next morning I drove a dray along them. I had gone back to the docks to get my trunk which I had had to leave there, and the dray was the only thing I could get to drive up in. Soon after we had started I said to the driver—a merry-faced French Canadian—'Il trotte bien,' referring to the horse, and he was so pleased with the compliment, or the French perhaps, that he handed me the reins and let me drive the rest of the way through the stone piles and mud that appeared to form the roads in lower Quebec. In return for the reins I had lent him my tobacco pouch; and when the horse leapt an extra deep hole, he would stop filling his pipe and hold me in round the waist.
To go back to the inn—I suppose it was ten o'clock before we got there. A few men sat smoking, with their feet against the wall in the entrance room where the office was; and after we had waited about for ten minutes or so, one of them told us if we wanted to see the clerk we'd better ring a bell. We did so, and presently a youth turned up and patronisingly accorded us rooms for the night.
'Is there any chance of getting a meal to-night?' we inquired, somewhat damped by his unenthusiastic reception. (I may say that I never met an office clerk in a Canadian hotel who did seem keen on welcoming guests. That is one of the differences between the old world and the new.)
'Yup, there's a cafÉ downstairs,' said the youth, as he lit a cigar and sat down to read a newspaper.
We went downstairs, and there in a narrow little room behind a long counter which had plates of sausage rolls, under meat covers to keep them from the flies, upon it, and little high stools upon which you sit in discomfort to eat the sausage rolls quickly in front of it, we found a small pale-faced boy who said 'Sure!' in the cheeriest way when we repeated our question about food. Five minutes later he had produced from a stove which he was almost too small to reach fried bacon and eggs and coffee, and while we sat and ate these good things, he gave us advice about the future. He evidently knew without asking that we were emigrants from the old country, and he supposed we wanted jobs. He recommended waiting as a start—waiting in a hotel. Waiting was not, he said, much of a thing to stick at; but there was pretty good money to be made at it in the season. Lots of tourists gave good tips—especially in Quebec—and you could save money as a waiter if you tried. He himself was from the States, but he liked Quebec well enough. Of course it was not as hustling as further west, and not to be compared to the States. If a man had ideas, the States was the place for him. There were more opportunities for a man with ideas in the States than there were in Canada. We asked him how much a man with ideas could reckon upon making in the States, and he said such a man could reckon upon making as much as five dollars a day. It did not seem an overwhelming amount to my aspiring mind—not for a man with ideas. Perhaps that is because one has heard of so many millionaires down in the States, beginning with Mr. Rockefeller. But then again, perhaps millionaires are not men with ideas themselves so much as men who know how to use the ideas of others.
Having started on money, the boy gave us a lecture on the Canadian coinage, the advantages of the decimal system, where copper money held good and why—all in a way that would have done credit to a financial expert. We thought him an amazing boy to be frying eggs and bacon behind a counter in a small cafÉ: only you don't just stick to one groove in Canada. At least you ought not to, as the boy himself told us. Englishmen were like that, but it didn't do in the States or Canada. A man should have several strings to his bow, and be ready to turn his hand to anything.
Refreshed by our supper and his advice, we adjourned to the bar which was handy, and got further enlightenment from the barman there. He was a French Canadian, very dapper in a stiff white shirt and patent leather boots. Money was also his theme. He told us he made forty cents an hour, and meant to get up to seventy-five cents pretty soon. That was good money to get, but he was worth it, and if the boss didn't think so he would try some other boss who did. It was no good a man's sitting down and taking less money than he was worth. A man would not get anywhere if he did that sort of thing. He certainly mixed cocktails at a lightning pace, and all the time he chatted he strode up and down behind the bar like a caged jackal. He gave me my first idea of that un-English restlessness—American, I suppose, in its origin—which is beginning to spread so rapidly through Canada. In America I fancy they are beginning to distrust it a little. Too much enterprise may lead to an unsettled condition that is not much better than stagnation. Farm hands tend to leave their employers at critical moments, just for the sake of novelty. Farmers themselves are so anxious to get on that they take what they can out of the land, and move to new farms, leaving the old ruined. It may be that in a newer country like Canada enterprise is less perilous. That remains to be seen. We retired to bed at midnight, sleepier even than men from the old country are reputed to be.
CHAPTER IV
A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC
Quebec city is full of charms and memories. I am no lover of cities when they have grown so great that no one knows any longer what site they were built on, or what sort of a country is buried beneath them. Their streets may teem with people and their buildings be very splendid, but if they have shut off the landscape altogether I cannot admire them. Quebec will never be one of those cities, however great she may grow. Quebec stands on a hill, and just as a city on a hill cannot be hid, so too it cannot hide from those who live in it the country round, nor even the country it stands on. Always there will be in Quebec a sense of steepness. The cliffs still climb even where they are crowded with houses. And the air that reaches Quebec is the air of the hills. Always too—from Dufferin Terrace at least—there will be visible the sweep of the St. Lawrence, the dark crawl to the north-east of the Laurentian Mountains, and the clear and immensely lofty Canadian skies.
I spent the whole of my first day in Quebec on Dufferin Terrace, except for that journey down to the docks. Once I was on the terrace, I forgot how bad the roads had been. You might drive a thousand miles through stones and mud, and forget them all the moment you set foot on Dufferin Terrace. Everything you see from it is beautiful, from the ChÂteau Frontenac behind—surely the most picturesque and most picturesquely situated hotel in the world—to the wind on the river below. Most beautiful of all the things I saw was the moon starting to rise behind Port Levis. It started in the trees, and at first I thought it was a forest fire. There was nothing but red flame that spread and spread among the trees at first. Suddenly it shot up into a round ball of glowing orange, so that I knew it was the moon long before it turned silver, high up, and made a glimmering pathway across the river.
During this moonrise the band was playing on the terrace, and all Quebec was strolling up and down or standing listening to the music, as is its custom on summer evenings. The scene on the terrace has often enough been described—with its mingling of many types, American tourists and Dominican friars, habitants from far villages, and business men from the centre of things, archbishops and Members of Parliament, and ships' stewards and commercial travellers, and freshly arrived immigrants and old market women. The fair Quebeckers love the terrace as much as their men folk, and I saw several pretty faces among them and many pretty figures. They know how to walk, these French Canadian ladies, and also how to dress—the latter an art which has still to be achieved by the women of the West.
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC, FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS.
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC, FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS.
The terrace besides being gay is very friendly too. My two companions of the voyage had gone on that morning, being in a hurry to reach the prairie; but I found several new friends on the terrace in the course of the day. One was a young working man from England, who had brought his child on to the terrace to play when I first met him. He was so well-dressed and prosperous looking that I should never have guessed he was only a shoe-leather cutter, as he told me he was. But then he had been out in Quebec for five years, and he was making twenty-five dollars a week instead of the thirty-two shillings a week he used to make in Nottingham at the same trade. He said he had been sorry to leave England, but you were more of a man in Canada. There were not twenty men after one job—that was the difference. Consequently, if your boss offered to give you any dirt, you could tell him to go to Hell. I suppose we should have counted him a wicked and dangerous Socialist in England, but there is no doubt that he is a typical Canadian citizen, and the kind of man they want there. Another acquaintance I picked up was a commercial traveller from Toronto—a stout tubby energetic man, who asked me, almost with tears in his eyes, why England would not give up Free Trade and study Canadian needs? He was particularly keen on English manufacturers studying Canadian needs, and he put the matter in quite a novel light as far as I was concerned. His argument was that we made things in England too well. What was the use, he demanded, of making good durable things when Canadians did not want them? It only meant that the States jumped in with inferior goods more suited to the moment. He assured me that Canada was a new country, and Canadians did not want to buy things that would last hundreds of years. Take furniture, machinery, anything—Canadians only wanted stuff that would last them a year or two, after which they could scrap it and get something new. That kept the money in circulation. Anyway, he insisted, a thing was no good if it was better than what a customer required. I had not thought of things in that way before, and it was interesting to hear him.
My third acquaintance was a member of the Quebec Parliament, who started to chat quite informally, and having ascertained that I was fresh from the old country took me to his house, that I might drink Scotch whisky, and be informed that French Canadians loved the King and hated the Boer War. I think when a French Canadian does not know you well, he will always make these two admissions—but not any more—lest you should be unsympathetic or he should give himself away.
That is why, since the position of French Canadians in Canadian politics will some day be of the greatest importance, we ought all to be thankful for the existence of Mr. Bourassa. Mr. Bourassa is represented—by his opponents—as the violent leader of a small faction of French Canadians, as a trial to moderate men of all sorts, including the majority of his own French-Canadian fellow-citizens. All this is very true. In Canadian politics, as they stand at present, Mr. Bourassa stands for just that and very little more. Politically he is an extremist and a nuisance. But disregarding for a moment immediate practical politics, Mr. Bourassa stands for much more than that—stands indeed for the real essence of French Canada. He is the French Canadian in action, shouting on the house-tops what most of them prefer to dream of by the fire-side, insisting upon bringing forward ideas which the others would leave to be brought forward by chance or in the lapse of time.
He has been called the Parnell of Canada, but these international metaphors are generally calculated to mislead. The most that Parnell ever demanded was Home Rule for Ireland—that small part of Great Britain, that fraction of the Empire. Mr. Bourassa does not only want Home Rule for Quebec. He wants it for Canada; only the Canada he sees thus self-ruling is a Canada permeated by French Canadianism. If Parnell had wanted Home Rule, so that England, Scotland, and Wales might be ruled from Dublin, he would have attained to something of the completeness of Mr. Bourassa's policy. Mr. Bradley, whose book on Canada in the Twentieth Century is as complete as any one book on Canada could be, and as up-to-date as any—allowing for the fact that Canada changes yearly—declared in in it, some years ago, that the French Canadians realised that for them to populate the North-West was a dream to be given up. It may be a dream, but I doubt if it is given up: and the dreams of a population more prolific than any other on the face of the earth may some day become realities. What is against these dreams? The influx of English immigrants? The rush for the land of American farmers? But these are only temporary obstacles. The Americans may go back again. They often do. The English immigrants are largely unmarried young men, and there are no women in the West. They are making ready the land, but the inheritors of it have yet to appear. It is not strange if Mr. Bourassa sees those inheritors among his own people—only it is not yet their time, not for many years yet—not for so many years yet that it seems almost unpractical and absurd to look forward to it. Even such a faith as that which Mr. Bourassa has confessed to in regard to the Eastern provinces—Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick—that 'In fifteen years they will have become French in language and Roman Catholic in faith,' seems highly unpractical. Ontario is not likely to become Roman Catholic any faster than Ulster. But on the other hand it will only increase in its anti-Frenchness and its anti-Roman Catholicism in so far as it is upheld and influenced by Imperialism. Imperialism to Mr. Bourassa is that bogey which goes about linking up all those small non-conforming, hustling, militant and materialistic communities which unaided would come into the Catholic French-Canadian fold. It is that odious system which prevents other nations within the Empire—such as French Canada—from developing along their own natural lines. It is something which easily causes Mr. Bourassa to forget that England and Englishmen—representing a distant sovereignty which keeps the world's peace—have been a boon and a blessing to French Canadians rather than otherwise; and causes him to remember that they may in a moment become an imminent sovereignty—imposing conscription, war, chapels (things that the Ontarian takes to like a duck to water) upon the whole Canadian community. Such impositions would not only strengthen the non-French Canadians, and ruin the natural progress-to-power of the French Canadians; but they would topple down like a house of cards those splendid dreams which might in a French-Canadianised Canada become realities. What dreams? Rome shifted to Montreal for one, and the Vatican gardens of the future sweeping down to the St. Lawrence. The whole vast wealth of the Dominion diverted to the carrying out of those traditions which are neither French nor English but Canadian ... started four hundred years before by the captains and the priests, voyageurs and martyrs, who in an age of unbelief went forth in response to miraculous signs for the furtherance of the glory of God.
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC.
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC.
I said that Quebec was full of memories. It is well to remember that most of these are French-Canadian memories. The Englishman, at home or touring, thinks most naturally of Wolfe in connection with Quebec, and thinks with pride how that fight on the Plains of Abraham marked, in Major Wood's words, 'three of the mightiest epochs of modern times—the death of Greater France, the coming of age of Greater Britain, and the birth of the United States.' The splendid daring climb of the English army, the romantic fevered valour of its general, the suddenness and completeness of the reversal of positions, unite to make us think that never was a more glorious event, or one better calculated to appeal to men of the New World. But do not let us forget that for French Canadians—great event as it was, severing their allegiance to France for ever on the one hand, leaving them free men as never before on the other—it was only one event in a new world that was already for them (but not for us) three hundred years old. 'Here Wolfe fell.' But here also, long before Wolfe fell, Champlain stood, and French captains led valiant men on expeditions against strange insidious foes, and the Cross was carried onwards by the priests, and amid mystic voices and divinations, and slaughterings and endurances, the faith prevailed and the character of the people was formed. They have no hankering for France—these people to whom Wolfe's battle seems but one out of many. France, they think, has forsaken the Church. But they are French still—these people—and amazingly conservative in their customs and their creed. We may tell them that England—which sent out Wolfe—has given them material prosperity, equality under the law, the means of justice. They will reply, or rather they will silently think, and only an occasional Nationalist will dare to say:—
'We owe nothing to Great Britain. England did not take Canada for love, or to plant the Cross of religion as the French did, but in order to plant their trading posts and make money.'
Gratitude is not a virtue nations take pride in possessing; they are indeed seldom nations until they have forgotten to be grateful. I suppose French Canadians are on their way to forgetting to be grateful to England for what she did in times past, but it is not because they have any real quarrel with England, or desire to injure her. Merely because they feel that from England exudes that Imperialism which appeals in no way from the past, and menaces, they think, their future.
CHAPTER V
THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY
Almost directly one lands in Canada, one feels the desire to move west. It is not that the east fails to attract and interest, or that a man might not spend many years in Quebec province alone, and still have seen little of its vast, wild, northern parts. Again there is the Evangeline country, little known for all that it is 'storied.' But the tide is west just at present. Everybody asks everybody else—Have you been West, or Are you going West? And every one who has been West or is going feels himself to be in the movement. Some day no doubt the tide will set back again, or flow both ways equally. To-day it flows westward.
I should have been sorry, however, if I had not gone eastward at least as far as the Saguenay, and I am duly grateful to the American who, so to speak, irritated me into going there. He was a thin, pale youth, somewhat bald from clutching at his hair, who sat next to me at dinner my third day at Quebec. He announced to the table at large that he was travelling for his pleasure, but to judge from his strained face, travelling for his pleasure was one of the hardest jobs he had tried. He had been doing Quebec, and he gave all Canadians present to understand that Quebec had made him very very tired. Look at the trips around too. Look at the Montmorency Falls. Had anybody present seen Niagara? Well, if anybody had seen Niagara, the Montmorency Falls could only make him tired. One or two Canadians present bent lower to their food. But on the whole Canadians do not readily enter into argument, and half Niagara Falls is Canadian too, so that finding no opponents the youth proceeded triumphantly to give the relative proportions in figures of the two falls. As he directed them chiefly at me, I felt bound to say that I had seen falls about a tenth the size of either which had struck me as worth going to see. He then said that he guessed I was from England. I said this was so. Thereupon he told me that everybody in England was asleep. I suggested that sleep was better than insomnia, and shocked by my soporific levity, he advised me to go and have a look at New York if I wanted to know how things could hum. I said I supposed that New York was a fairly busy place. A silly remark—only he happened to be a New Yorker, and all that tiredness left him. I learnt so much about the busyness of New York that I have hardly forgotten it all yet.
Afterwards, but some time afterwards, when the American had left the table, a Scottish Canadian asked me if I had done the Saguenay trip, and when I said that I had not done it, he strongly advised me not to miss it.
'It's the finest trip in Canada. Yes, sir.'
I decided to go. It takes just two days from the start at Quebec to Chicoutimi and back, and you go in a spacious sort of houseboat which paddles along at just the right pace, first on one side of the river then on the other, stopping to load and unload at the little villages along the St. Lawrence. There to the left—a great sheet of silver hung from the cliff—were the Montmorency Falls, which had made that young American tired. A hundred and twenty years ago Queen Victoria's father occupied the Kent house, hard by the Falls, now a hotel. Wolfe lay ill for two weeks in a farm close by; probably on no other sick-bed in the world were plans so big with fate conceived. Then the Ile d'OrlÉans floats by—that fertile island which Cartier named after the Grape God four hundred years ago, because of the vines that grew there. All this waterway is history, French-Canadian history mostly. With a fine mist hung over the river, concealing the few modern spires and roofs, you can see the country to-day just as Cartier saw it when he came sailing up. Neither four hundred nor four thousand years will serve to modernise the banks of the St. Lawrence. Take that thirty-mile stretch where the Laurentides climb sheer from the water. That is what Cartier saw—nothing different. No houses, no people; only the grey rock growing out of the green trees, and the grey sky overhead. Lower down, with the sun shining as it did for us, Cartier would see, if he came sailing up to-day, all those picturesque French-Canadian villages which have sprung up along the shore—Baie St. Paul, St. IrÉnÉe, Murray Bay, Tadousac, with the white farms of the Habitants, and the summer homes of the Quebeckers and Montrealers, and the shining spires of the churches, and the wooden piers jutting far out into the river. Those piers are particularly cheerful places. There are always gangs of porters waiting to run out freight from the hold, and a gathering of ladies in gay frocks who want to greet friends on board, and heaps of little habitants playing about or smoking their pipes. The habitant appears to start his pipe at the age of eight or nine years, judging from those who frequent the piers.
I think I was the only Englishman on board that boat. Most of the passengers were Americans, but cheerful ones—not like that young man at the hotel—and we were all very keen on seeing everything, so that it became dusk much too soon for most of us. We got to Tadousac just about dusk, which I was particularly sorry for, since of all the places we passed, it held the most memories. In 1600 the whole fur trade of Canada centred round this benighted little spot, and the men of St. Malo were the rivals of the Basques for the black foxes trapped by the Indians of that date. I should like to have seen this queer little port by daylight, but I suppose for most purposes Parkman's description holds good, and cannot easily be beaten:—
'A desolation of barren mountain closes round it, betwixt whose ribs of rugged granite, bristling with savins, birches, and firs, the Saguenay rolls its gloomy waters from the northern wilderness. Centuries of civilisation have not tamed the wildness of the place; and still, in grim repose, the mountains hold their guard around the waveless lake that glistens in their shadow, and doubles, in its sullen mirror, crag, precipice and forest.'
I know that Parkman goes on to say that when Champlain landed here in April 1608 he found the lodges of an Indian camp, which he marked in his plan of Tadousac. When we landed, there were also a few shacks in much the same spot, and in one of the best lighted of them hung a placard to this effect:—
THE ONLY REAL INDIAN
BUY WORK FROM HIM.
The lodges Champlain saw belonged to an Algonquin horde, 'Denizens of surrounding wilds, and gatherers of their only harvest—skins of the moose, cariboo, and bear; fur of the beaver, marten, otter, fox, wild cat, and lynx.'
Other days, other harvests. From the shack of the Only Real Indian I saw one stout tourist issue forth (a Chicago pork-packer he must have been, if persons ever correspond to their professions), laden with three toy bows and arrows, as many miniature canoes, and what appeared to be a couple of patchwork bedspreads. That the descendant of braves should live by making patchwork bedspreads seemed too much, even though I had given up as illusions the Red Indians of my boyhood. Far rather would I at that moment have seen the stout tourist come forth, either scalpless himself, or dangling at his ample belt the raven locks of the Only Real Indian.
In the night we went on to Chicoutimi, but saw nothing of that, being asleep. We had sung songs, American songs—'John Brown's Body,' 'Marching through Georgia,' etc., till a late hour of the night; and in any case the bracing river air would have insured sleep. Only in the morning as we came down the Saguenay again did I wake to its beauty and strangeness. Men have learnt to tunnel through rocks at last, but the Saguenay learnt this art for itself thousands of years ago. A wide water tunnel through the sheer rock, a roofless tunnel, open to the sky, that is the Saguenay—most magnificent at the point where Cap TrinitÉ looms up, a wall of darkness fifteen hundred feet high.
It is a curious fact that famous landscapes always produce a remarkable frivolity in the human tourist visiting them. Perhaps it is man's instinct to assert himself against nature. When the boat draws opposite Cap TrinitÉ, stewards produce buckets of stones and passengers are invited to try and hit the Cap with the stones from impossible distances. I do not know that it greatly added to the pleasure of the trip, but we all tried to hit the cliff with the stones and most of us failed, and had to content ourselves with drawing echoes from it. After that we went on, and some of the white whales which are characteristic of the Saguenay began to appear, and experienced travellers explained that they were not really white whales but a sort of white porpoise. Once again, as we passed it, Tadousac was invisible, but this time because a white fog had wrapped it round. So silently we turned out of the Saguenay into the St. Lawrence. I think the silence of the Saguenay was what had most impressed me. Not very long before I had steamed down the Hoogly where by day the kites wheel and shriek overhead, and the air buzzes with insects' sounds, and all night the jackals scream—a noisy river, full of treacherous sandbanks, its shores green with the bright poisonous green of the East. The Saguenay, unique as it is in many ways, seemed by the contrast of its deepness and silence, and by the fresh darkness of the rocks and trees that shut it in, to be peculiarly a river of the West. I do not know if it would have made the somewhat bald young American tired.
It is only fair to say that his attitude about Quebec is not at all characteristic of his fellow-countrymen. For most Americans, Quebec province (and still more perhaps the woods of Ontario) is becoming almost as popular a playground as Switzerland is for Englishmen. Camping out has become a great craze among Americans, and if the camping out can be done amid unspoilt natural surroundings, close to rivers where one can fish and woods where one can hunt, an ideal holiday is assured them. I forget who it was who said that much of the old American versatility and nobility had disappeared since the American boys left off whittling sticks, but in any case the desire to whittle sticks is renewed again among them, from Mr. Roosevelt downwards. And in Canada this whittling of sticks—this return to nature—can easily be accomplished. For the north is still there, unexploited. In Quebec province, fishing and hunting clubs of Quebec and Montreal have secured the rights over vast tracts of country. So vast are those tracts that one or two clubs, I was told, have not even set eyes on all the trout streams they preserve. This may be an exaggeration, though probably not a great one. There remains—especially in Ontario—much water and wood that any one may sport in unlicensed, or get access to by permission of the local hotel proprietor. Some of the Americans on the boat had been fishing in Quebec streams and told me of excellent sport they had had, so that I began to wonder why no Englishmen ever came this way. The voyage to Canada is a little further than that to Norway, but there are more fish in Canada. And there is certainly only one Saguenay in the world.
CHAPTER VI
STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND A TRAVELLER'S VOW
Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ is usually referred to as the Lourdes of Canada. When a metaphor of this sort is used it usually means that the spot referred to is in some way inferior to the original. In the case of Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ, the inferiority is not, I believe, in the matter of the number of miracles wrought there, but in the matter of general picturesqueness. Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ is not nearly so picturesque as Lourdes. If you wish to palliate this fact, you say, as one writer has said, that 'The beauty of modern architecture mingles at BeauprÉ with the remains of a hoary past.' If you do not wish to palliate it, you say, as I do, that Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ is not in the least picturesque. I did not particularly care for the modern architecture, and the hoary past is not particularly in evidence. Do not suppose me to say that BeauprÉ has not a hoary past. Red Indians, long before the days of railroads, travelled thither to pray at the feet of Ste. Anne. Breton seamen, who belong only to tradition, promised a shrine to Ste. Anne, if she would save them from shipwreck. They erected the first chapel. The second and larger chapel was built as far back as 1657, and miracles were quite frequent from then onwards. Nevertheless, the basilica is quite new, and so is the whole appearance of the place.
I visited it in company with a French-Canadian commercial traveller. He was a great big good-looking youth with curly hair and blue eyes, and he travelled in corsets or something of that sort for a Montreal firm. I could not help thinking that many ladies would buy corsets from him or anything else whether they wanted them or not, because of his charming boyish manner and his good looks. He asked me to go to Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ with him. He said that he supposed that I was not a Catholic, but that did not matter. He wished to go to the good Ste. Anne, and it would be a good thing to go. He had been several times before, but he had not been for several years. He could easily take the afternoon off, and first of all we would go by the electric train to the good Ste. Anne, and then on the way back we would step off at the Falls station, and see the Montmorency Falls, and also the Zoo that is there. It would be great fun to see the Zoo. He had not seen the Zoo for several years, and the animals would be very interesting.
So we took an afternoon electric train. There are electric trains for pilgrims, of whom a hundred thousand at least are said to visit the shrine yearly, and there are also electric trains for tourists. We took a tourist train, and having secured one of the little handbooks supplied by the electric company, had the gratification of knowing that even if the car was pretty full it was, so the company claimed, run at a greater rate of speed than any other electric service.
At times in Canada I found myself getting very slack in attempting descriptions of things simply because some company that had rights of transport over the particular district had, so to speak, thrust into my hand some pamphlet in which all the description was done for me. Thus it was in the case of the district line between Quebec and Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ. 'It is difficult,' I read in the electric company's handbook which we had secured, 'to describe in words the dainty beauty of the scenery along this route.'
'That is a nuisance,' I said to my companion, 'because words are the only things I could describe it in.'
'It is much better to smoke,' said he.
So we smoked; and now I tell you straight out of that illogical pamphlet, that 'The route from Quebec to Ste. Anne may be compared to a splendid panorama. There are shady woodlands and green pastures, undulating hills and sparkling rivers, whose banks are lined with pretty villages, the tinned spires of the parish churches rising above the rest of the houses, sparkling in the sun.' There, a little ungrammatically, you have the scene 'to which,' adds my pamphlet, 'the Falls of Montmorency river add a touch of grandeur.' Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ itself is twenty-one miles from Quebec. We went straight from the station into the church, where the first thing to catch the eye are the votive offerings and particularly the crutches, walking-sticks, and other appliances left there by pilgrims who, having been cured of their infirmities by miracle, had no further use for these material aids. It is difficult to arrange such things in any way that can be called artistic, and since the general effect is nothing but ugly it might be wise for the church officials also to dispense with such material aids to faith. Apart from these the most striking object is the miraculous statue. It stands on a pedestal ten feet high and twelve feet from the communion rails. The pedestal was the gift of a New York lady, the statue itself was presented by a Belgian family. At the foot of it many people were kneeling. A mass was being said and the church was very full, and every time a petitioner got up from his knees from the feet of the statue another moved down the aisle and took his or her place. I suppose we were in the church fully half an hour before my companion found an opportunity to go and kneel at the feet of the good Ste. Anne, and having watched him there, I got up from my place and went out into the village. It was rather a depressing village, full of small hotels and restaurants and shops stocked with miraculous souvenirs. I suppose more rubbish is sold in this line than in any other. After inspecting a variety of it, I bought a bottle of cider and a local cigar and sat on a fence smoking until my friend reappeared. He came out most subdued and grave—not in the least the boisterous person who had gone in—and said we would now go back. As we had to wait half an hour for a returning train, I suggested that we should go and have some more cider, but he said no, he would rather drink from the holy spring. 'Although this water,' said my pamphlet, 'has always been known to be there, it is only within the last thirty or thirty-five years that the pilgrims began to make a pious use of it. What particular occasion gave rise to this confidence, or when this practice first spread among the people, cannot be positively asserted. However it may be, it is undeniable that faith in the water from the fountain has become general, and the use of it, from motives of devotion, often produces effects of a marvellous nature.' Unfortunately, the fountain was not working, owing, I expect, to the water having got low in the dry weather, and my friend had to go without his drink. He said, however, that it did not matter, and remained in a grave, aloof state all the way back in the train as far as the Falls station, and indeed till we got to the Zoo in the Kent house grounds. There, the exertion of trying to get the beavers to cease working and come out and show themselves to me—an exertion finally crowned with success, for the fat, furry, silent creatures came out and sat on a log for us—livened him up a bit. But he fell into a muse again in front of the cage containing the timber wolf, and remained there so long that I was almost overcome by the smell of this ferocious animal. I got him away at last, and I do not think he spoke after that until we got to Quebec and were walking from the station to our inn.
