UP THE ST. LAWRENCE.
The St. Lawrence River was gained, and escaping with a few days'
quarantine at Grosse Isle, we reached Quebec, there to be transferred to
a fine steamer for Montreal. At Lachine we were provided with large
barges, here called batteaux, which sufficed to accommodate the whole of
the _Asia's_ passengers going west, with their luggage. They were drawn
by Canadian ponies, lively and perfectly hardy little animals, which,
with their French-Canadian drivers, amused us exceedingly. While loading
up, we were favoured with one of those accidental historical "bits"--as
a painter would say--which occur so rarely in a lifetime. The then
despot of the North-West, Sir George Simpson, was just starting for the
seat of his government _via_ the Ottawa River. With him were some
half-dozen officers, civil and military, and the party was escorted by
six or eight Nor'-West canoes--each thirty or forty feet long, and
manned by some twenty-four Indians, in the full glory of war-paint,
feathers, and most dazzling costumes. To see these stately boats, and
their no less stately crews, gliding with measured stroke, in gallant
procession, on their way to the vasty wilderness of the Hudson's Bay
territory, with the British flag displayed at each prow, was a sight
never to be forgotten. And as they paddled, the woods echoed far and
wide to the strange weird sounds of their favourite boat-song:--
"A la claire fontaine,
M'en allant promener,
J'ai trouve l'eau si belle,
Que je m'y suis baigne.
Il y a longtemps que je t'aime,
Jamais je ne t'oublirai."
From Lachine to the Coteau, thence by canal and along shore successively
to Cornwall, Prescott, and Kingston, occupied several days. We were
charmed to get on dry land, to follow our batteau along well-beaten
paths, gathering nuts, stealing a few apples now and then from some
orchard skirting the road; dining at some weather-boarded way-side
tavern, with painted floors, and French cuisine, all delightfully
strange and comical to us; then on board the batteau again at night.
Once, in a cedar swamp, we were enraptured at finding a dazzling
specimen of the scarlet _lobelia fulgens_, the most brilliant of wild
flowers, which Indians use for making red ink. At another time, the
Long Sault rapids, up which was steaming the double-hulled steamer
_Iroquois_, amazed us by their grandeur and power, and filled our minds
with a sense of the vastness of the land we had come to inhabit. And so
we wended on our way until put aboard the Lake Ontario steamer _United
Kingdom_ for Little York, where we landed about the first week in
September, 1833, after a journey of four months. Now-a-days, a trip to
England by the Allan Line is thought tedious if it last ten days, and
even five days is considered not unattainable. When we left England, a
thirty mile railway from Liverpool to Manchester was all that Europe had
seen. Dr. Dionysius Lardner pronounced steam voyages across the Atlantic
an impossibility, and men believed him. Now, even China and Japan have
their railways and steamships; Canada is being spanned from the Atlantic
to the Pacific by a railroad, destined, I believe, to work still greater
changes in the future of our race, and of the world.