Adventurous travellers, who penetrated into Canada during the late visit
of the Sovereign-Apparent of that colony, have furnished the public,
through the daily press, with minute and more or less faithful
descriptions of places upon the grand routes, Quebec and Montreal have
been done by them to a hair; Kingston and another wicked place made
notorious for bad manners; Toronto, Hamilton, and London of the West
photographed with a camera of maximum dimensions. Upon the two great
railroad-lines by which Canada is now traversed,--the Grand Trunk
and the Great Western,--there is hardly a station which has not been
mentioned by the reporters, either for the loyal manner in which it
was decorated to do honor to the youthful Prince, or for the rather
inhospitable display of certain objectionable symbols by the people
around.
But neither in Canada nor elsewhere is it upon the grand routes that
glimpses can be had of interior life and character. Primitive simplicity
is altogether incompatible with railroads. The boy who resides near a
station is quite an old man, compared with any average boy taken from
the sequestered clearings ten miles back: he may be a worse kind of boy,
or he may be a better, but he isn't the same kind, at any rate. Of
girls it is more difficult to speak with confidence in the present
era,--hooped skirts having pretty nearly assimilated them everywhere;
but I have noticed that they are less ingenuous along railroads than in
secluded districts, and their parents more suspicious,--a fact which
makes railroad-vicinities inferior places to dwell in, compared to those
that are rural and remote from the demoralizing influences of up and
down trains.
I do not aver that the railroad is devoid of a kind of poetry of its
own,--the same kind of sentiment, nearly, that resides about anvils
and smelting-furnaces in the Hartz Mountains and in the great
coal-districts: an infernal kind of sentiment, for the most part, being
inseparable from burning fiery furnaces and grime; as in "Fridolin," and
in the "Song of the Bell," and in the "Forging of the Anchor." Once,
particularly, in travelling by rail, did I experience the mysterious
glamour that seems to hang round iron more than about any other metal.
It was past midnight; and on waking up after a sleep of some hours, I
found myself alone in the long car, which had come to a stand-still
while I slept. The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a
short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic
from the incomprehensible unseen. On looking out of the window, I saw by
some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; _we_, I
say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose
gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the
great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train,
striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went. Of course
there was nothing unusual in such a proceeding, the object of which was,
probably, to ascertain something connected with the condition of the
rolling stock; but there was a kind of awful poetry in the toll of the
iron bell, which ran, and reverberated, and tingled among the iron ribs
in the building, making them all sing as if they were things of flesh
and blood, with plenty of iron in the latter, which is reckoned to be
conducive to robust health.
But the romance of rolling stock has yet to be disengaged, and the
inspired conductor or bardic baggage-master destined to do that is yet
in the shell. May he long remain there!
Off the track some ten or twenty miles, though, almost anywhere, some of
the materials, at least, for good, regular poetry of the old-fashioned
kind are to be found. A mill, for instance, with a wooden wheel,--no
demoralizing iron about it, in fact, except what cannot well be
dispensed with, in view of wear and tear. A white cottage, where
the miller dwells serene; mossy roof, red brick chimney, and no
lightning-rod or any other iron, being the principal features of the
serene miller's abode. Cherries, in that tranquil person's garden, that
are nearly ripe, and roses of a delicate red,--but none so ripe or so
red as the lips and cheeks of the serene miller's daughter, who trips
across the little wooden foot-bridge over the mill-stream, singing a
birdy kind of song as she goes. She is clad in a black velvet bodice
and russet skirt, and has no iron about her of any description, unless,
indeed, it is in her blood,--where it ought to be. The breath of kine
waiting to be relieved of their honest milk, which is a good, solid kind
of fluid in such places, and meanders about the land with great freedom
in company with honey. All these things will be very scarce in the world
by-and-by, on which account it seems to be a judicious thing to go off
the track a little, now and then, if only to "say that we have seen
them."
In following the graphic narratives of the Prince of Wales's tour, the
mind naturally wandered away to places _not_ visited by him, although
within easy distance of his fore-ordered course. It is well that there
are places left to talk about! Let us conjure up a few old reminiscences
of one,--a silent, primitive little nook of the North, within an hour's
ride of Quebec, but too insignificant a spot for the coveted distinction
of a royal visit. Crowned heads, then, will have the goodness to
transfer their attention, and skip to the next article.
The nook to which I refer is Lorette, in Lower or French Canada, where
it is commonly called _Jeune Lorette_, to distinguish it from _Ancienne
Lorette_,--a less interesting place, distant from it about four miles.
Jeune Lorette is situated about eight miles north-west of Quebec, upon
the beautiful, romantic stream called the St. Charles, which rushes down
many a picturesque gorge, and winds through many pleasant meadows, in
its course of some twenty miles from Lake St. Charles away up in the
hills to the St. Roch suburb of Quebec. Here it assumes the character of
a deep, tortuous dock, incumbered with the _débris_ of many ship-yards,
and reflecting the skeleton shapes of big-ribbed merchantmen on the
stocks. Here, too, it is generally called the Little River; probably to
distinguish it from the great River St. Lawrence, into which it oozes at
this point.
But higher up, as I have said, the St. Charles is romantic and rushes
on its fate. At Lorette, it divides the village in twain: a western
section, for the most part peopled by French-Canadian _habitans_; an
eastern one, inhabited by half-breed Indians, a remnant of the once
powerful Hurons of old.
These Canadian Hurons are not, in their present condition, corroborative
of the Cooper specifications of Indian life: rather the contrary, in
fact. There is a wing of them--a wing without feathers, indeed--settled
down at Amherstburgh, on the far western marge of Lake Erie, in Canada,
quite six hundred miles away from their brethren of Lorette. When
shooting woodcock once in that district, I entered the comfortable log
farm-house of the chief of the settlement, whose name was Martin. He
was a fat, rather Dutch-looking Indian, but still active and
industrious,--for a man who is an Indian and fat. I asked Mr. Martin if
he hunted much; to which he replied, No, he did not,--adding, that he
never was far into the woods but once in his life, and that was on
his own lot of a hundred acres of bush, in which he was lost, on that
occasion, for two days.
Among the Hurons of Lorette there are a few young men who hunt moose and
caribou in the proper season; but the men, generally speaking, as
well as the women, are engaged in the manufacture of snow-shoes and
moccasons,--articles for which there is a great demand in Lower Canada.
Philippe Vincent, a chieftain and shoemaker of the tribe, told me that
he had disposed of twelve hundred dollars' worth of these articles, on
a trip to Montreal, from which he had just returned. Many articles of
Indian fancy-work are also manufactured by them: beaded pouches for
tobacco, bark-work knick-knacks, and curious racks made of the hoofs of
the moose, and hung upon the wall to stick small articles into.
On the profits of this work many of them live in comfort,--nay, in
luxury. Paul Vincent, a cousin of Philippe mentioned above, and, like
him, a chief of the tribe and a renowned builder of snow-shoes, paid two
hundred and seventy-five dollars for a piano for his daughter, when I
was at Quebec, five or six years ago. Whenever I visited Philippe, that
stately man of the Hurons would usher me into a little parlor with a
sofa in it and a carpet on the floor; he would produce brandy in a cut
decanter, and cake upon a good porcelain plate, and would be merry in
French and expansive on the subject of trade.
Most of these hybrid Hurons are quite as white as their Canadian
neighbors; but they generally have the horse-tail hair, and black, beady
eye of the aborigines. The ordinary dress of the men, in winter, is a
blue blanket-coat, made with a _capuchon_, or hood, which latter is
generally trimmed with bright-colored ribbon and ornamented with beads.
Epaulettes, fashioned out of pieces of red and blue cloth, somewhat
after the pattern of a pen-wiper, impart a distinguished appearance
to the shoulders of these garments, which are rendered still more
picturesque by being tucked round the body with heavy woollen sashes,
variegated in red, blue, and yellow. Some of these sashes are heavily
beaded, and worth from five to ten dollars each; and they, as well
as the Indian blanket-coats, are to be had at the furriers' shops in
Quebec, where there is a considerable demand for them by members of
snow-shoe clubs, and others whose occupations or amusements render that
style of costume appropriate for their wear. The older women dress
in the ordinary squaw costume, with short, narrow petticoats, and
embroidered _metasses_, or leggings. When going out, they fold a blue
blanket over all, and put on a regular, unpicturesque, stove-pipe hat,
with a band of tin-foil around it,--which makes them look like one of
those mulatto coachmen one sees now and then on the box of a _bonton_
barouche, with his silver-mounted hat and double-caped blue box-coat.
The young girls are disposed to innovations upon the petticoats, and
modifications of the _metasses_. Once I saw one standing on a great gray
crag at the foot of the fall. She looked extremely picturesque at a
little distance, giving a nice bit of local color to the scene with her
scarlet legs; but on a nearer approach, much of the value of the color
disappeared before the unromantic facts of a pale-face petticoat and
patent-leather gaiter-boots. I have noticed several of the younger
people here with brown hair and blue or gray eyes, significant that the
aboriginal blood is being gradually diluted. In another generation or
two, there will be little of it left among them. But the correspondents
of the press, who described some of these Indians seen by them at
Quebec, are mistaken in attributing to them an admixture of Irish blood.
Until within eight years past, there were few, if any, Irish to be found
in the neighborhood of Lorette. Since that time, the construction of the
Quebec water-works, which are supplied from Lake St. Charles, has given
employment to hundreds of the Hibernian stock in that neighborhood;
and I know not whether their influence as regards race may not be now
discernible in the features of many pugnacious Huronites of tender
years: but the white element traceable in the lineaments of the present
and passing generations of the settlement is distinctly attributable to
the proximity of the French-Canadian, whose language has been transfused
into them with the blood.
Few, if any, of the older people of Lorette speak English,--Huron and
French being the only languages at their command. Since the building of
the great reservoir, however, many of the rising generation are picking
up the English tongue in its roundest Irish form. Previously, matters
were the reverse. I once noticed a handsome, brown-faced boy there, who
used to come about with a bow and arrows, soliciting coppers, which were
placed one by one in a split stick, shot at, and pocketed by the archer,
if hit,--as they almost always were. He spoke Indian and French, and I
took him for an olive-branch of the tribe; but, on questioning him, he
told me that his name was Bill Coogan, and that he first saw the light,
I think, in Cork, Ireland.
There is one charming feature at Lorette,--a winding, dashing cascade,
which boils and creams down with splendid fury through a deep gorge
fenced with pied and tumbled rocks, and overhung by gnarly-boughed
cedars, pines, and birches. There is, or at least there was, a crumbling
old saw-mill on a ledge of rock nearly half-way up the torrent. It was
in keeping with the scene, and I hope it is there still; but it was very
shaky when I last saw it, and has probably made an _éboulement_ down to
the foot of the fall before now. Some short distance above the head of
the fall, near the bridge by which the two villages are connected,
the scene is pictorially damaged by a stark, staring paper-mill, the
dominant colors of which are Solferino-red and pea-green. This, a
comparatively new feature in the landscape, is not visible from below,
however, and it is from there that the fall is seen to best advantage.
To the eye of the experienced fisherman, it is obvious that the St.
Charles, with its sparkling rapids, and the deep, swirling pools formed
by its numerous "elbows," must erstwhile have been a chosen, retreat of
the noble salmon. Even now, notwithstanding the obstructions caused by
the immense deposits of ship-yard refuse at its mouth, a few of these
fine fish are caught every season by one or two persevering anglers
from Quebec,--men who thrive on disappointment,--whose fish-hooks are
miniature anchors of Hope. Lake St. Charles, from which the river
derives its existence and its name, is a wild, beautiful tarn, about
five miles above Lorette, embosomed in hills and woods. There are good
bass in that lake, by whose shores there dwells--or dwelt--an ancient
fisherman called Gabriel, who supplied anglers with canoes, and paddled
them about the waters.
Lorette, although undistinguished by a glance from the mild blue eyes of
the Premier Prince of England, was flashed upon, years ago, by the awful
light that gleamed from the dark, fierce ones of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark. This is how I came to know it.
Fifteen years ago,--it was on the seventeenth of August, 1845,--I made
my first pilgrimage to Lorette, in company with a friend. We wandered at
large through the village, talking _patois_ to the swarthy damsels, and
picking up Indian knick-knacks, as we went. At last, fired with the
ambition of doing a distinguished thing, we proposed calling upon the
head chief of the village, whose name, I think, was Simon, but might
possibly have been Peter,--for I regret to say that my memory is rather
misty upon that important point. That personage was absent from home;
but we were hospitably received by his father, who also appeared to be
his butler, as he was engaged in bottling off some root-beer into stone
blacking-jars, when we entered. I suppose the chief's father must once
have been a chief himself, and that his menial position arose from the
fact of his appearance being rather disreputable. He was a decrepit and
very dirty old man, in a tight blue frock-coat, and swathed as to his
spindle shanks with scarlet leggings. Sitting by a small window at the
farther end of the large, bare room, was the prettiest little Huronite
damsel I ever saw, rather fair than dark, and very neatly attired in a
costume partly Indian. This little girl--a granddaughter of the dirty
old man, as that person informed us--was occupied in tying up some small
bundles of what the Canadians call _racine_--a sweet-smelling kind of
rush-grass, sold by them in the Quebec market, and used like _sachets_,
for imparting a pleasant odor to linen garments. After some conversation
of a general character, the old man requested us to write our names in
his visitors' book, which was a long, dirty volume, similar in form to
those usually seen upon bar-counters. In this book we were delighted to
find the autographs of many dear friends, of whom we little expected
to meet with traces in this nook of the North. Mark Tapley and Oliver
Twist, for instance, had visited the place in company some two years
before. There could be no mistake about it; for there were the two
names, in characteristic, but different manuscript, bound together
by the mystic circumflex that indicated them to be friends and
travelling-companions. The record covered a period of ten years; but
was that sufficient to account for the appearance of Shakspeare on its
pages? And yet there he was; and in merry mood he must have been, when
he came to Lorette,--for he wrote himself down "Bill," and dashed off
a little picture of himself after the signature, in a bold, if not
artistic manner. Our friend Titmouse was there, too, represented by
his famous declaration commencing, "Tittlebat Titmouse is my name." He
seemed to have taken particularly fast hold of the memory of the old
Huron, who described him as a tremendous-looking, big person, with
large black whiskers, and remembered having enjoyed a long pull at a
brandy-flask carried by him. Of course there can be no doubt about that
man being the real Tittlebat of our affections. Of the other signatures
in the Huronite album, I chiefly remember that of M.F. Tupper, which I
looked upon at the time as a base forgery, and do aver my belief now
that it was nothing else: for the aged sagamore described the writer of
that signature as a young, cheerful, and communicative man, who smoked a
short, black pipe, and had spaniels with him. Could my friend, could I,
venture to inscribe our humble names among this galaxy of the good and
great? Not so: and yet, to pacify the Huronite patriarch's thirst for
autographs, we wrote signatures in his brown old book; and if that
curious volume is still in existence, the names of Don Caesar de Bazan
and Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Bart., will be found closely linked together
on a particular page with the circumflex of friendship.
And now the old man, delighted with the addition to his autographs,
proposed to treat us to an exhibition of several medals gained by him
for deeds of valor when he was a warrior, and previously to his having
entered upon the career of a bottler of root-beverages. He had silver
disks presented to him by at least two of Thackeray's Georges, a couple
from William IV., and I think one from her present Majesty, Queen
Victoria. All of these he touched with reverence, and not until he had
purified his hands upon a dirty towel. After we had duly admired these
decorations, and listened with patience to the old man's garrulous talk
about them, he told us that he had yet another to show,--one presented
to him many years ago by a great man of that day,--a man embalmed
for all posterity on account of his unrivalled performances upon the
tight-rope,--a man of whom he reduced all description to mendicancy in
designating him as _un danseur très-renommé sur la corde tendue_. The
medal was a small silver one, and it bore the following inscription:--