The suburbs are attractive, and gradually dissolve into the gardens
and farms of the French husbandmen, living in comfortable houses with
steep roofs, fronted by and sometimes almost embedded in foliage and
flowers. Occasionally an ancient windmill is perched on a hill,
stretching out its broad gyrating sails, as in old Normandy. There are
frequent villages along the St. Lawrence, each clustered around its
church. At Caughnawaga, already referred to, there is an extensive
church with a tall and shining white tin-covered spire, and in a
rather sorry-looking group of houses around it live the few who are
left of the descendants of the once warlike and powerful Mohawks,
known as the "praying Indians," here long ago gathered by the zealous
missionary priests of St. Sulpice. At Lachine, spreading opposite on
the western shore of the St. Lawrence for several miles, is a popular
place of suburban residence, with rows of pleasant villas lining the
banks of Lake St. Louis. Over beyond this lake comes in the main
channel of Ottawa River, with the rapids of St. Anne flowing down from
another inland sea made by its prolonged enlargement, the "Lake of the
Two Mountains." A canal flanks these rapids, and the village of St.
Anne has grown around its ancient church, which is deeply reverenced
by the Canadian boatmen and voyageurs on these waters as their special
shrine, for in the early days all the fur-trading with the great
Canadian northwest was by canoes and bateaux on the Ottawa and Lake
Nipissing, and thence by portage to Lake Huron. Here came many years
ago, on a bateau down the St. Lawrence, the minstrel bard, Tom Moore,
and inspired by the locality, he composed in a cottage, still pointed
out, his noted "Canadian Boat Song":
"Faintly as tolls the evening chime,
Our voices keep tune, and our oars keep time.
Soon as the woods on shore look dim,
We'll sing at St. Anne's our parting hymn.
Row, brothers, row; the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, and the daylight's past.
"Ottawa's tide! this trembling moon
Shall see us float o'er thy surges soon.
Saint of this green isle! hear our prayers:
O, grant us cool heavens, and favoring airs!
Blow, breezes, blow; the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, and the daylight's past."
On the northern shore of the "Lake of the Two Mountains," with Oka
village nestling at the base, where an Indian colony live, are the two
mountains from which the lake is named. One, surmounted by a cross, is
Mount Calvary, having various religious shrines on its summit, and
seven chapels on the road up, representing the seven stations of the
cross. Here is also a monastery of the French "farmer Monks," the
Trappists, who cultivate a large surface. They live a secluded life
under ascetic rules, are not allowed to talk to each other, and only
men enter the monastery, all women being stopped at the threshold.
They rise at two o'clock in the morning, take breakfast soon
afterwards in absolute silence, this being the only meal of the day,
and retire to rest immediately after prayers at sunset. They devote
twelve hours daily to devotions, and labor in the fields the remainder
of the waking time. Their food is a scant allowance of water and
vegetables. They sleep on a board with a straw pillow, and never
undress, even in sickness. They are a branch of the Cistercians, and
their abode overlooks the placid lake, with Montreal spreading beyond.
But the city's finest suburban possession is its Mountain, the summit
being a pleasant park, and the slopes covered with luxuriant foliage,
which in the autumn becomes a blazing mass of resplendent beauty when
the frosts turn the leaves. From the top the view is of unrivalled
magnificence.