Laurenciana
By Lt.-Colonel William Wood

Laurenciana
By Lt.-Colonel William Wood Author of “The Fight for Canada". (Read the 2Sth September 1910.)

Preface.

A river, like a man, is the triunion of body, soul and spirit.

Everyone knows the St. Lawrence as a giant body for all the world to wonder at. But few know it as the home of a much greater soul and spirit, the inspiration of all who heed its best appeal.

We are insistently told that our modern civilization is making for every kind of mental and moral righteousness. So it may, in the end. But, as an age of exploitation is always apt to mistake comfort for civilization, we must expect to find the St. Lawrence making only a statistical appeal to most of our people to-day. Higher aspects are nearly hidden by immediate surroundings of horse-power, gallons, and dollars and cents. But the fact that this is so does not imply any real incompatibility between the different aspects. “Business is business” is an excellent definition of a most excellent thing. And, using the word “business” to cover every form of honest money-making, the definition becomes still better, by reason of its implications. We can no more exist without business than we can without food. Business is always and everywhere indispensable for every people and, to a greater or less extent, for every individual man, woman and child in the world. Moreover, it supplies the necessary material basis for all higher things. So I have nothing whatever to say against business here, although I look at the life of our River from quite a different point of view. On the contrary, I am always ready to cry “business is business” with the best of them. But I do this because I believe that business is really business, pure and simple—the root of existence, not the flower of life.

The flower of life is Service—the service of God in Religion, and the service of Man in Statesmanship, War and the Intellectual Life. Service is greater than business, immeasurably greater; for it is the soul and spirit of life, not the mere body of existence. But it is mainly done for business people, who naturally form the bulk of mankind. It is sometimes done by them; and then they deserve greater credit, other things being equal, than people habitually engaged in service, because they must first rise above their business, while service itself exalts its devotees. Besides, there are kinds of applied business which rise into service by virtue of their application. So it is quite plain that service and business are as intimately correlated in human affairs as mind and body are in the individual man. This may seem an absurdly trite and obvious point to argue in a preface; little more than a formal way of saying that it takes all sorts to make a world. But the point is worth some elaboration, since devotion to any kind of service, and especially to the intellectual life, is thought a poor “business proposition ” in a generation so materialized as to think one sort alone —and that a purely commercial sort—will make any world worth having. Our people are apt to forget what they owe to “The River of Canada,” what this River owes to the sword and the cross, and what it may still owe to the pen and the brush. And they are equally apt to be heedless of the fact, and resent it when brought to their notice, that the service of genius is the only thing that ever has or ever can make any people great. Everything that makes our life worth living comes from the original and creative minds of men of genius. These men are so few that all of them, in all ages put together, would not nearly equal the population of one small town. Yet without them man could not be man. They are the units of life, other men are the ciphers. All the ciphers in the world are no better than a single cipher. And all the countless ordinary men would never have made any advance without the leadership of the few extra-ordinary men. But these few would never have moved mankind unless some bond of sympathy had turned units and ciphers together into a concrete number. Take a simple illustration. Shakespeare, in and by himself, is merely 1. As none of his readers could have written his plays, all of his readers are simply so many ciphers, in that particular respect. But put unit and ciphers together, and all the otherwise futile ciphers become parts of an effective whole, which is 10, or 100, or 1,000, or 1,000,000, or more, according to the number of ciphers under the influence of the unit. Thus each is needful to the other, because a unit alone would be purely selfish, and therefore could do no service, while the ciphers alone could never do anything at all, even for themselves.

Our greatest New-World disability is our blindness to this very aspect of interdependent need. Most of our people think a whole nation can live on business alone and that it can buy service like any other “goods.” But every people forms a body corporate of all the human faculties; and the health of this body depends on the due exercise of all its vital organs. There is evolution by atrophy downwards as well as upwards. And disuse of our higher organs will assuredly bring the nemesis of reversion to a lower type. Business is the food and stomach, service the head and heart. We cannot exist without the one, nor live without the other. And this dual unity is the reason why service must grow out of a national yearning for it, why statesmanship is more than a branch of business, why fleets and armies cannot be hired like journeymen, why pure science is of an altogether higher kind than any commercial application of it, and also the reason why you can no more separate use and beauty in any great art than you can separate soul and body in a living man. Unity involves idiosyncrasy: can we appreciate the higher faculties of other bodies when we do not appreciate those of our own? The thing is impossible. Take the five senses of Art—music, literature, architecture, sculpture and painting. They all grow out of the higher forms of life, yet are essential parts of it. Then, how can we appreciate, at all events as a people, their less intimate appeal, as the growth of other lives, when we have no native yearning for their more intimate appeal at home?

We need business for our existence as much as any people. But we shall never do more than exist unless we have an exalting touch beyond. For the real life of any country depends entirely on its power of producing and appreciating units of genius devoted to the service of God and Man.

But I forbear to meddle with these great matters any further, lest a still more pretentious preface should make a flatter anti-climax of a tentative introduction to a possible book.

Any general view of the whole of the Laurentian waters may also itself be a too pretentious introduction for a book which is gradually growing out of various and variously published notes about the one special part of them where I happen to be a traveller at home—the Lower St. Lawrence from Montreal to the Sea. But this part is the greater because of that whole.

These notes are purely personal, the mere record of impressions made by the life of the river on one who loves every single feature of it:—its sights and sounds: its many different craft, from birch-bark canoes to first-class battleships; its beasts and birds and fish; its Indians and hunters, fisherfolk and habitants, discoverers, explorers, sailors, soldiers, statesmen, saints, its men of science and its men of art—in a word, all that has made it, and all that we hope vail continue to make it worthy of its old renown as “The Great River,” “The River of Canada.” But, personal as they are, I think these notes worth making now, when old and new are meeting along its course as they have not before and can not again. And I venture to hope that when the genius comes to make its life immortal he will re-make my ciphers with his own units into what will serve a more propitious future.

INTRODUCTION

The King of Waterways

I. When Naaman the Syrian turned away from Elisha in a rage it was by a comparison of rivers that he showed his passionate pride in the glories of his own land—“Are not Abana and Pharphar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel ?” Yet, if Jordan were as nothing in comparison with the rivers of Damascus, were not Pharphar and Abana themselves as nothing in comparison with Euphrates, “that great River, the River Euphrates,” whose fame will echo down the centuries of faith for ever? Besides, there were other and still larger streams, of Asian and African renown, and real and fabled immensity. There were giants in those days among the old-world rivers.

But a new world came into the ken of man, and set other and mightier standards of natural greatness among the rivers of the earth. Imagine the wonder of the first western voyagers when they drew up the fresh water of the Amazon, while they were still far out of sight of land, and surrounded by what they had still supposed to be the vast saltness of the South Atlantic! What a river, which could pour its own “pomp of waters unwithstood” over the very ocean! Later on, this same river was found to be so astonishingly navigable that the largest sea-going ships could pass inland, without a hindrance, for at least three thousand miles—as far as England is from Equatorial Surely this must be the greatest of all fresh waters, old or new! It springs from the Andean fastness of perpetual snow, receives the tribute of a hundred tropical streams—each one of which surpasses many a principal river of Europe—and then flows out to sea, a long day’s sail and more, on its own triumphant course, still the Amazon and still fresh.

But if the whole of the Amazon and all its tributaries, and all the other rivers in the Old World and the New, with all their tributaries, and every lake in every land as well, were all to unite every drop of their fresh waters, they could not equal those which are held in the single freshwater reservoir of the five Great Lakes of the St. Lawrence! So, if the St. Lawrence River itself, and its many tributaries and myriads of minor lakes, are added in, we find how much more than half of all the world’s fresh water is really Laurentian. But even this is not all. There is more salt water in the mouth and estuary of the St Lawrence than in all the mouths and all the estuaries of all other rivers. Moreover, all the tides of all these other rivers do not together form so vast a volume as that which ebbs and flows inlandward between Belk; Isle and Lake St. Peter, nine hundred miles apart. Thus, in each and all the elements of native grandeur, the Laurentian waters —salt and fresh, tidal and lake—are not only immeasurably first among their rivals, taken singly, but unchallengeably first compared with all their rivals united together, throughout the whole world beside.

Mere size, however, is a vacuous thing to conjure with—except before press-ridden audiences, whose minds have been perverted to machine-made ends. And even the St. Lawrence would be nothing to glory in if it could only boast a statistical supremacy of so many gallons of water. But its lasting appeal is to a higher sense than this, to the sense of supreme delight in the consummate union of strength and beauty, in beauty that is often stern and wild, and strength that is sometimes passive; but always to both together.

II. Look at those most eastern gateways of the whole New World—the Straits of Cabot and Belle Isle. The narrow passage of Belle Isle may flow between a grim stretch of Labrador and a wild point of Newfoundland; but it is a worthy portal, and its Island a worthy sentinel, with seven hundred feet of dauntless granite fronting the forces of the North Atlantic. The much wider Cabot Strait is sixty miles across; but both its bold shores are in view of each other. Cape North is four hundred, Cape Ray a thousand feet higher than Belle Isle. There can be no mistake about the exact points at which you enter Laurentian waters, when you have such landmarks as these to bring abeam. Nor is there any weak touch of indistinction about the Long Range of Newfoundland, which runs north and south between these straits for over three hundred miles, often at a height of two thousand feet. This Long Range forms the base of the whole island stronghold, which throws its farthest salient the same distance forward to Cape Race, whose natural bastion served for centuries as the universal landfall of all American voyages.

Newfoundland is an “ island of the sea,” if ever there was one. Nowhere else does the sea enter so intimately into the life of a country and a people, calling—always calling—loudly along a thousand miles of surf-washed coastline, echoingly up a hundred resounding fiords that search out the very heart of the land, whisperingly through a thousand snug little lisping tickles—but calling, always calling its sons away to the fishing grounds, east and north and west, and sometimes to the seafaring ends of the earth.

Newfoundland is as large as Wales and Ireland put together; yet it stands in an actual contraction of the mouth of the St. Lawrence, which is four hundred miles across from Battle Harbour to Cape Breton. Inside, the Gulf is another hundred miles wider again, between Labrador and Nova Scotia, and large enough to hold England and Scotland. So the entire mouth of the St. Lawrence could easily contain the whole of the British Isles. The three principal (Julf Islands are historic Cape Breton, garden-like Prince Edward Island, and Anticosti, which, though the least of the three, is over a hundred and twenty miles long. There is a whole zone of difference between the north and south shores of the Gulf, between the gaunt sub-arctics of Labrador and the tall maize fields and lush meadow lands of Acadia, where, as the old French writers ail assure us, “everything will grow that grows in France, except the olive.”

The Gulf is the deepest of river mouths—a deep sea of its own, round all its shores, with lonely deep-sea islands—St. Paul’s, Brion, the Magdalens, and Bird Rocks. The Magdalens are a long and brilliant crescent of yellow sand-hills, bright green grass, dark green clumps of spruce, and red cliffs of weathered sandstone. But Deadman’s Island stands gloomily apart, its whole bulk forming a single monstrous corpse, draped to the water’s edge. The Bird Rocks are two sheer islets, ringed white from base to summit with lines of sea-gulls. A lighthouse now occupies the top of the larger Rock; but, on a moonlight night, the smaller still looks like a snow-capped mountain, from the mass of gannets asleep on it.

The Gulf has many wild spots, but none so wild as Labrador. And this is all the more striking, because of the closeness of civilization, old and new. At Bradore Bay you are in view of the continual come and go of ocean liners. Yet, along the shore, from here west to Natash-quan, you will find plenty of waste places, with nothing between them ami the Pole, except a few Indians and Eskimo. No part of the continent of America is so close to Europe as Labrador, which may also have been the first part of the New World visited by the Norsemen in the tenth century. Yet the interior of it is less known in the twentieth than Central Africa or Alaska. It is of immense extent. Both its north-to-south and east-to-west beelines are over a thousand miles. And between these four points lie wildernesses of rocky tablelands, covered with a maze of waters. It is a savage land—ruthless and bare and strong—that seems to have risen overnight from chaos, dripping wet. The bewildered streams hardly know which way to find the sea. Most of them flow along the surface in changeable shallows, as if they had not had time to cut their channels; and many lakes discharge in more than one direction. Labrador, indeed, is to-day very much as the Great Ice Era left it thousands and thousands of years ago. But even glacial times are modern compared with its real age. Its formation is older, far older, than man; even if we go back to his earliest anthropoid ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is older than the original progenitors of all our fellow-beings, millions of years ago. For it is the very core of the great azoic Laurentians, the only hind now left on the face of the earth that actually stood by when Life itself was born.

Here, among the islands, where you can see the untamed mainland on one side and the tameless sea on the other, here—though you may have been round the oceans, and gazed your fill on Alps and Himalayas—you feel the scene transcend all others in the poignancy of its contrast between eternal Nature and evanescent Man. Your little lonely craft is no greater here, in this vastitude of time and space, than that curled speck of down from a sea-bird’s breast, poised for an instant on a smooth of water. And you yourself, another infinitesimal speck, are here no more than one among the myriad millions of the Animal Kingdom, living out one momentary Hash of your fretful life between primeval water and primeval land. These ranges are the real and only rightful heirs to the title of “the everlasting hills.” And not only this, but their entire adamantine mass is of the same substance which forms the roots of all the other mountains in the world. They are not very high where you see them from the Gulf. But they rise, ledge after ledge, towards the remote interior; and they and the whole country are, in another sense, still rising from the depths, with such irresistible, though gradual, force that archipelagoes of islands break away from the margin, like loose pebbles, as each new ledge emerges.

The sea has always been the same. But the two thousand miles of the Laurentians, with the far-spreading country beyond, are the only lands still remaining “such as creation’s dawn beheld.” So here, as nowhere else, each sunset takes us back to the childhood of Earth and the beginning of Time.

Nature mourned when sank the first Day’s light,
With stars, unseen before, spangling her robe of Night.

What a dread obsession this would be—what a numbing weight of horror on the wings of the spirit, and what an image of abysmal things, if we ever did attempt to soar—were it not that we feel salvation in the mere power of flight, which reveals us to ourselves as primordially one with all Earth was, and is, and is to be:

The presences of Nature in the sky
And on the Earth; the Visions of the hills
And souls of lonely places.

And, knowing this, I do not fear, but welcome, the spell of the Laurentian hills, which draws me back to them, again and again, with the same keen spring of desire that I felt when, as a boy, I first anchored one twilight within sound of their solitudes, and

.... they to me
Were foreign, as when seamen at the dawn
Descry a land far oft' and know not which.
So I approached uncertain; so I cruised
Round those mysterious islands, and beheld
Surf and long ledges and loud river bars,
And from the shore heard inland voices call.

And, in the selfsame way, I welcome the spell of the Laurentian sea, off shores that have borne her company since before the very peopling of her waters.

Who hath desired the Sea?
Her excellent loneliness rather

Than forecourts of Kings, and her outermost pits than the streets where men gather Inland, among dust, under trees—inland where the slayer may slay him Inland, out of reach of her arms and the bosom whereon he must lay him.

His Sea at the first which betrayed—
at the last which shall never betray him, His Sea that his being fulfils—

So, and no otherwise, so and no otherwise, hillmen desire their hills.

The long, bare Labrador coast line becomes less thinly wooded as it runs south-west; and, every now and then, it is vividly brightened by a magnificent seascape. The big, bewildered rivers of the interior generally find a decided course to run some time before they reach salt water, and come down strengthened by each tributary and quickened by every rapid till they are eager to slash their way into the thick of the opposing tidal streams of the St. Lawrence. The last of them is the greatest of all. The Saguenay is a river and a fiord both in one. Five large and many smaller rivers run into Lake St.John; but only one runs out, and that one is the Saguenay. Through its tumultuous Grand Discharge it soon rushes down nearly three hundred feet to sea level, where it enters its fiord and ebbs and flows its remaining sixty miles in a stream a thousand feet deep between precipitous Laurentian banks two thousand feet high. Its flood currents arc comparatively weak; but on the ebb of a full spring tide it comes straight down with tremendous force and without a single check, over a mile wide and a hundred fathoms deepen’ than the St. Lawrence, till its vast impetuous mass suddenly charges full tilt against the submarine cliffs that bar its direct way out to sea. Tire baffled rapids underneath shoot madly to the surface, through which they leap in a seething welter of whirlpools and breakers, to dash themselves, with renewed fury, against all surrounding obstacles. A contrary gale, when this tide is running its worst—and there’s war to the death between the demons of sea and sky in all that hell of waters.

But this is at the inland end of the estuary. The seaward end meets the Gulf round the shores of Anticosti, between three and four hundred miles below the Saguenay. To whom can Anticosti be a land of desire, except as a game preserve in the interior? From the sea it is one long, low, bleak weariness of hard flat rock and starveling vegetation. The woods look like senile wrinkles on the face of the land. They are stunted, gnarled and distorted by their convulsive struggles to keep a foothold against the relentless wind. They have to interlock their limbs to do so successfully, and this to such an extent that you may walk over their densely matted tops.

To the south lies a stretch of the Gaspe cliffs, longer than Anticosti, sterner than Labrador, and higher than the canyon of the Saguenay. The peninsula of Gaspe, with its solid backbone of the Shickshocks rising four thousand feet above ground, is like the odd half of a range on the Atlantic Labrador, broken off lengthwise and sheer, and then set into the softer South, with its sheer side turned towards the St. Lawrence. For a hundred and thirty-seven miles there is not a sign of an inlet on that iron coast. There are a few tiny rills spurting through narrow clefts, and with perhaps a fishing hut or two beside their mouths. But there is no landing-place for anything larger than an open boat, though the deep sea flows against the very precipice, so that you might lay whole fleets alongside. No wonder seamen give it a wide berth! The rocks are sharpened to fangs where wind and water meet ; and once they flesh their teeth in you--!

Halfway up from Anticosti is Pointe de Monts, on the north shore, where the Estuary narrows very suddenly, the mountains on the GaspS side diminish and recede, and the curious double-topped hill called the Paps of Matane serves to show that the bank of soundings and line of settlements are beginning. The rest of the south shore has now softened into gentler outlines, forested on top, cultivated below, and humanized by a succession of white little villages gathered round their guardian churches: flocking houses and a shepherding church. At Green Island we are opposite the Saguenay, where the Estuary ends and the River begins.

III. From main to main, from the mouth of the Saguenay to Cacouna Island, is only eighteen miles across: and the hitherto wide, clear and single deep-sea channel suddenly becomes comparatively narrow, obstructed, double and shallow. There are the Saguenay headlands and reefs on the north, Red Island with its big and dangerous two-pronged bank in mid-stream, and Green Island with its own terrific triangular death-trap on the south. The Saguenay dashes against and over and round the reef that partly bars its mouth. Red Island Bank stands straight in the way of the flood of the St. Lawrence, which comes up, unobstructed the whole way and two hundred fathoms deep,- till it reaches these sudden narrows. And Green Island Reef is thrust out into the centre of swirling currents that change so much and so often as to go completely round the compass twice in every day. What with the great depths and quick shoalings, the immense widths and sudden contractions, the reefs, the islands, the Saguenay, the tides, the ten differents currents, and all the other restless things that make wild water —there is no other place to compare with this for the wonder of its seascapes. Here, in a single panorama, from the Tadousac hills or the crags of Cacouna Island, you can see a hundred seascapes come to birth, live and die in glory, all in one day and night. How often have I watched them shift and change, like floating-opals! I have watched the literal “ meeting of the waters,” where the last of the River ebb meets the first of the Estuary flood, and have seen the league-long snake writhing in foam between them. And, here again, in calm, unclouded weather, I have seen blade after blade of light flash along the surface, as if the sun had damascened them.

Nature has divided the whole St. Lawrence into seven distinctive parts. But man has not given them seven distinctive names; and no part requires a name more than the part between Quebec and the Saguenay, the part of all others that Nature and Man have united in making unique. In default of a better, let us call it “The Quebec Channel,” as the next part above it is sometimes, and usefully, known as “The Montreal Channel.” Then, if we acknowledge all the straits connecting the Gulf with the sea as the real mouth, we shall have our seven names complete. “The Routh” should cover all the lands and waters of the actual outlets, that is, the Atlantic straits of Canso, Cabot and Belle Isle, and the islands of Cape Breton and Newfoundland. “The Gulf” is too well known to need defining. “The Estuary” runs up from Anticosti to the Saguenay; “The Quebec Channel” from the Saguenay to Quebec; “The Montreal Channel” from Quebec to Montreal; and “The Upper St. Lawrence” from Montreal to the “Lakes,” which speak for themselves.

IV. For scenery and historic fame together the Quebec Channel easily bears the palm. The south shore, with its picturesquely settled foreground, undulating up to wooded hills behind, and the north, with its forest-clad mountains rising sheer from the water’s edge, are admirably contrasted and harmonized by the ten-mile breadth of the River which divides them. Opposite the lower end of the Island of Orleans, thirty miles below Quebec, both north and south shore ranges sweep back in gigantic semicircles, which only approach each other again the same distance above the city; so that when you stand upon the Heights of Abraham you find yourself on a Titanic stage in the midst of a natural amphitheatre two hundred miles around. Here the salt water meets the fresh, the Old World meets the New, and more than half the history of Canada was made.

The Montreal Channel flows between almost continuous villages on both banks; the hills recede to the far horizon; and there are touches of Holland in occasional flats, with trim lines of uniform trees and a windmill or two against the sky. In Lake St. Peter, half way up the Channel, the last throb of the tide dies out. At the end of the Channel, and from the top of Mount Royal, you again see the panorama of the hills. On fine days you can make out the crest of the Adirondacks, the southern outpost of the Laurentians, nearly ninety miles away. The view at your feet is very different. It is that of a teeming city, already well on its triumphant way into its second half-million of citizens. Having looked down upon its present extent, and then all round, at the enormously larger area of contiguous country over which it can expand, you might remember that this city, the Mountain itself, and the open lands behind, form, after all, only a single island among an archipelago at the Mouth of the Ottawa, which is by no means the greatest among the tributary streams of the St. Lawrence.

The Upper St. Lawrence is full of exultant life, showing its primeval vigour in a long series of splendid rapids. Rapids always look to me like the muscles of a river, strained for a supreme effort. But man has accepted the challenge, running the rapids when going down stream and working his way up by canals, which are as worthy of admiration for their disciplined, traffic-bearing strength as the rapids are for their own strenuous untutored beauty. The banks are nowhere very bold or striking. But there is plenty of human variety blended with pleasant vestiges of Nature. Farms, orchards, villages, parks, towns, meadows, trees and rocks and woodlands, alternate with each other till the Thousand Islands are reached, at the beginning of the Lakes. Here there are hundreds of channels, great or small, eddies innumerable, ripples, calms, and a few secluded backwaters—all threading their way, fast or slowly, through a maze of rocky, tree-crested islets, and glinting or dappled in the sun and shade. Nature must have been making holiday when she laid out this labyrinth of water-gardens for her own and her devotees’ delight. And man makes holiday here himself. But what a holiday! Half the scene is defaced by sham palaces and sham castles and other brick and stone abominations in the style that’s advertised as “real baronial.” All of it is worried by fidgetty motor boats, the reek of suburbia, and every other jarring note that millionairish shoddydom can make most stridently out of harmony with the natural surroundings. The pity of it is that once the Philistines have made the place more than half their own they have not gone on to make it wholly so. There might, then, be at least something more or less in harmony with itself. Why should not all the islands, buildings, boats and everything else that can be labelled, be appropriately marked with the net cash prices paid for them? This would save so much art criticism! Would it not, indeed, be the very last word of all criticism?

V. The five great Laurentian lakes are so immeasurably greater than any other lakes in the world that when you say, simply, “The Great Lakes,” you are universally understood to mean these and no others. Except for mountain shores with snow-crowned summits, such as enfold many a lake in the Alps and Rockies, they lack no element of grandeur. Their triumphal march takes them through hill and plain, wilderness and cities; while the charge of their hosts shakes the very earth at Niagara, and shows their might to all her peoples.

It is hard to realize now that Niagara was never seen by a white man till nearly two centuries after John Cabot first set foot on Laurentian soil. The Falls were never heard of by the earliest discoverers. Then they became a rumour, a name, a mystery, an object of wonder and desire. The Senecas who lived near them were as fierce as their rapids, and the French pioneers kept aloof. Even so late as 1669 La Salle only heard their thunderous roar, without seeing them, as he passed by on his way to the West; and it was not till nine years later that he stood among the four white men who had the first view of this stupendous work of Nature.

Lake Huron is the second wonder of the Lakes; and not a modem scenic wonder only; for the Great Spirit, the Manitou, has always taken up his abode upon the island called after him whenever he has come to earth. Georgian Bay is almost another Great Lake, and contains not thousands but tens of thousands of islands. Yet this mere size is nothing to the beauty of sky and pellucid water on a still midsummer afternoon; when the Huronian blue of each seems to blend into a third and more ethereal element, light as the air yet buoyant as the water, in which canoes seem, fairy-like, afloat between them.

The third wonder is Lake Superior, a clear, cool, blue immensity and sheer depth of waters like the sea. Its surface is six hundred feet above the Atlantic, but its bottom has soundings as much again below. Its north shore is a crescent of stern and wild Laurentians, as high as the Saguenay’s and hundreds of miles long. And, as the St. Lawrence fronts the ocean with portals that can be plainly made out from the deck of a ship a whole degree away, so here, two thousand miles inland, it has another and an inner gateway to a farther west, in the huge lion-like mass of Thunder Cape, a second Gibraltar in size and strength and actual form.

VI. East and west it is a far cry from the salt sea to the fresh. But, in the life of north and south, it is a farther still, even at the same time of year, from Belle Isle to Pelee in Ontario. In the height of the summer at Belle Isle death-cold icebergs, hundreds of feet thick and acres in extent, are often to be seen; while at Pelee Island luxuriant vineyards are ripening for the wine-press, in the latitude of Oporto, Naples and Constantinople. Yet from Belle Isle to Pelee Island is only half the way between the Straits and the innermost headwaters of the St. Lawrence!

But again, the essential unity of the great River is no less wonderful than the striking diversities of its seven parts. Winter lays the same tranquillizing hand upon it everywhere, stilling it into the regenerative sleep from which it is awakened by the touch of Spring. And everywhere, along the headwaters, lakes and river channels, and thence to the sea, along the South Shore and its tributaries, over unnumbered leagues of waterway, and through every imaginable scene of woodland and meadow, plain, hill, valley, crag and mountain, the three open seasons bear sway sufficiently alike to find true voice in one and the same song of spring, another of summer, and yet another of the fall.

LAURENTIAN SPRING.

The lyric April time is forth,
With lyric mornings, frost and sun;
From leaguers vast of night undone
Auroral mild new stars are bom.

And ever, at the year’s return,
Along the valley grey with rime,
Thou leadest, as of yore, where
Time Can nought but follow to thy sway—

The trail is far through leagues of Spring,
And long the quest to the white core
Of harvest quiet, yet once more
I gird me to the old unrest.

So another year has passed,
And to-day the gardener
Sun Wanders forth to lay his finger
On the blossoms, one by one;

Then will come the whitethroat’s cry—
That far, lonely, silver strain,
Piercing, like a sweet desire,
The seclusion of the rain—

And, though I be far away
When the early violets come
Smiling at the door with Spring,
Say—“The Vagabonds have come!”

LAURENTIA: A SUMMER.

I am sailing to the leeward,
Where the current runs to seaward,
Soft and slow;
Where the sleeping river-grasses
Brush my paddle as it passes
To and fro.
 

On the shore the heat is shaking,
All the golden sands awaking
In the cove;
And the quaint sandpiper, winging
O’er the shallows, ceases singing
When I move.

On the water's idle pillow
Sleeps the overhanging willow,
Green and cool;
Where the rushes lift their burnished
Oval heads from out the tarnished
Emerald pool.

Where the very water slumbers,
Water-lilies grow in numbers,
Pure and pale;
All the morning they have rested,
Amber-crowned and pearly-crested,
Fair and frail.

Here, impossible romances,
Indefinable sweet fancies,
Cluster round;
But they do not mar the sweetness
Of this still, mid-summer lleetness
With a sound.

I can scarce discern the meeting
Of the shore and stream retreating
So remote;
For the laggard river, dozing,
Only wakes from its reposing
Where I float.

Where the river mists are rising,
All the foliage baptizing
With their spray,
There the sun gleams far and faintly,
With a shadow soft and saintly
In its ray.

And the perfume of some burning
Far-off brushwood, ever turning
To exhale;
All its smoky fragrance dying,
In the arms of evening lying,
Where I sail.

My canoe is growing lazy
In the atmosphere so hazy,
While I dream;
Half in slumber I am guiding,
Eastward, indistinctly gliding
Down the stream.

LAURENTIAN FALL.

Along the lines of smoky hills
The crimson forest stands,
And all the day the blue-jay calls
Throughout the autumn lands.

Now by the brook the maple leans,
With all her glory spread;
And all the sumachs on the hills
Have turned their green to red.

Now, by great marshes wrapt in mist,
Or past some river’s mouth,
Throughout the long, still, autumn day,
Wild birds are flying south.

VII. I rejoice to the full in the glories of our Laurentian seasons; and rejoice in especial with Bliss Carman, Pauline Johnson and Wilfred Campbell. Yet their three poems remind me how much more we think of the scenes than of the sounds in Nature. Why is this; for, in all Nature, we have nothing more deeply varied than the sounds of water, from the softest breath drawn by a little infant lowland river to the cataclysmal roar of a hurricane at sea? If we have an inward eye that is the bliss of solitude, have we not also an inward ear, through which Nature may call our soul of memory? I think it must be so; for Nature is visible spirit, spirit invisible Nature; and though there is neither speech nor language, their voices are heard among them. . . . twin voices: the inward voice of the human soul and the outward voice of many waters. These things are a mystery, a symbol and a name— the thread of life between the macrocohin of Earth and Sea and the microcosm of Man and the Soul. The Eleusinian mysteries were wrought within sound of the sea, which beats through all the religious poetry of the old free Greeks. The first Teutonic name for the soul was taken from the symbol of the sea—sahvs, the sea; saiwala, a little sea, a soul. And this symbolic connection has never been broken by the poets of Teutonic race.—

Scele des Mensehen,
Wie gleichst du dem Wasser!
Schicksal des Menschen,
Wie gleichst du dem Wind!

The mind, that ocean where each kind
Doth straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates—transcending these—
Far other worlds and other seas.

Can it be that the ear is duller than the eye to the infinite appeal of water? At least, 1 like to think it is not always so. Each year, when I go down the River, the different currents, eddies, reef-tail swirls and tide-rips greet me with voices as individual as those of any other life-long friends. I recognize them in the dark, as I should recognize the voices of my own relations. I know them in ebb and flood, in calm and storm, exactly as I know the varying moods and tones of men. And, knowing them thus, I love, them through all their changes. And often, of a winter’s evening, they wake the ear of memory within me by a symphony of sound that has now become almost like a concerted piece of music. It steals in on me; swells, vibrates and thunders; and finally dies away again—much as a "Patrol” grows from pianissimo, through moderato, to fortissimo, and then diminuen-does slowly into silence.

Always, when it begins, I am in my canoe, and there is a universal calm. All I hear, aft, is the silken whisper of the tiny eddies drawn through the water by the paddle, and, forward, the intermittent purl of the cutwater, as it quickens and cleaves in response to every stroke. Next, alongshore, I hear the flood tide lipping the sand, pulsing slowly through reeds and sedges, and gurgling contentedly into a little halffilled cave. Then the stronger tidal currents join in, with the greater eddies, reef-tail swirls and tide-rips, "and all the choral waters sing.” Then comes the breeze; and, with it, I am in my yawl. It comes at first like that single sigh of the air which drifts across the stillest night, making the halyards tap the mast a little, the yacht sheer almost imperceptibly, and the rudder swing just enough to make the main-piece and pintles whimper gently in their sleep. But it soon pipes up, and I am off, with the ripples lapping fast and faster as the yacht gathers way. Presently I am past the forelands, where the angry waves hiss away to leeward. Then, an ominous smooth and an apprehensive hush, as the huge, black-shrouded squall bears down on the wings of the wind, with a line; of flying foam underneath, where its myriad feet are racing along the surface. And then the storm—the splendid, thrilling storm:—the roar, the howls, the piercing screams, the buffetings, the lulls—those lulls in which you hear the swingeing lash on shore and the hoarse anguish of the excoriated beach:—and then the swelling, thunderous crescendo and the culminating crash. And, after that, the wind diminishes, little by little, and finally dies away. And, when it ceases, all the choral waters sing again. And when these, in their turn, have played their part, I hear the half-muffled gurgle that tells me the tidal cave is almost full. And, at the Ihst, I hear the reeds and sedges rustle softly, as the end of the flood quivers between their stems; and tide, and reed, and sedge, and the lipping on the sand, the purl of the canoe, and the silken, whispering eddies from my paddle, all mingle, faint, and melt away once more into the silence out of which they came.

VIII. This is the voice I hear so often—the natural “voice of many waters,” which, like the divine one that spoke in revelation, also proceeds out of a throne. For the St. Lawrence, this King of Waterways, is more than royal, more, even, than imperial—it is the acknowledged suzerain of every other waterway, from the Mountains to the Sea, and from the Tropics to the Pole.

The farther afield the old discoverers went the more they found that the St. Lawrence was the royal road to the gateways of the continent. For its own basin is so intimately connected with the subordinate basins of all the other rivers that these men could go,.in the same canoe, by paddle and portage, from any part of its course to any part of the coast—eastward to the Atlantic, between the Bay of Fundy and New York; southward, along the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico; and northward, either to Hudson’s Bay or, down the Mackenzie, to the Arctic Ocean. Only the western divides were too great a barrier. But you could come within sight of their summits, which themselves looked down on the Pacific. So east and west, and north and south, you could go freely, through whole kingdoms of vassal streams, by the sole virtue of one passport from the suzerain River.

And what men they were, who went these endlessly venturesome ways, who forced every gate they came to, and then pushed on, undaunted, into other realms of the unknown!

Cabot and his Englishmen were the first to tread the mainland of America, and they did so on Laurentian soil. Their year, 1497, was just four centuries before the one in which a Dominion of Canada, historically based on the St. Lawrence, sent its representatives to the Diamond Jubilee of the Queen of Cabot’s land. And their day, the 3rd of July, was the very one on which, a hundred and eleven years later, Champlain founded Quebec, from which these representatives sailed.

But the English, true to their traditions, were satisfied with the seaboard so long as it served the purpose of their trade. Thirty years after Cabot’s landfall at Cape Breton, the first letter ever sent from the New World to the Old was,_ so to speak, “posted” at St.John’s, Newfoundland, on the 3rd of August, 1527. Nine years later Newfoundland was still the happy hunting ground of English exploitation, when 11 Master Hore” and thirty lawyers of the “Innes of Court and Chan-eerie” came out to make their fortune. Were any briefless barristers, before or sincQ, ever engaged in such extravaganza? How on earth did they expect to make money when there were no other people to make it out of? They acquired some useful experience; but everything else was a disastrous failure. They stole a ship to get home, and only ate one lawyer for the general good when forced to live on each other.

IX. We are so accustomed to Newfoundland as the oldest of English colonies, and to Canada as the senior British Dominion beyond the Seas that we forget how long the St. Lawrence was a French river. It has been British for only one hundred and fifty years; but it was French for two hundred and twenty-five, just half as long again. And those parts of it which were most intimately associated with the four French heroes—Cartier, Champlain, Frontenac and Montcalm—are full of French speech and memories to the present day.

What a seaman Cartier was! Think of the tiny flotilla with which he explored the St. Lawrence in 1535,—three vessels, with a combined tonnage less than that of a modern ferry-boat! He coasted Labrador without a graze, searching everywhere to find the westward passage to Cathay; for he actually intended to sail through an unexplored New World, with his handful of men, to reach the most distant part of the Old! If anyone with seafaring tastes would like to read a pithy book of adventure, let me recommend him to try Jacques Cartier’s Brief Recit, A succincte narration, de la navigation faictecs yslesdc Canada, Hochclage & Saguenay & autres, avec particulieres meurs, langaige, A ceremonies des habitans dCcclles: fort delectable a veoir. Paris, 1545. There is a good reprint by TrosS: Paris: 1SG3. This famous book is really quite as fort delectable to read as Cartier thought the country was to see. It is short enough to finish at one steady sitting, and no harder in French than Shakespeare is in English.

Jacques Cartier is one of those men you can’t help liking. You would somehow infer that he was “a jolly good fellow,” even if you had never heard of the entry respecting him at a baptismal fete:— Jacques Cartier et autres bons biberons. Yet he was as careful ami skilful as he was bold and genial. The mere record of his voyages is proof positive of his having been a born leader of men. He never lost a vessel, though many were the ones he piloted through unknown waters. His eye was quick, his judgment sound, his pen terse. He says he couldn’t find a cartload of good earth in the whole of Labrador, and that it must be the country God had reserved for Cain. This was true enough of a land that had never borne a harvest since it rose from the depths. But Cartier’s interests were navigational; and, making due allowance for difference of opportunity, his hydrographical descriptions will bear comparison with those of the Admiralty surveys of our own time. Compare, for instance, the description he gives of Cumberland Harbour with the one in the last edition of The St. Lawrence Pilot. A casual entry in his log about another Labrador harbour had a most momentous result in geographical nomenclature. On the 10th of August he happened into a little salt-water bay of no particular importance. Yet from this stray circumstance more than half the fresh waters in the world have taken their general name! He was a pious soul, observant of saints’ days; and so his entry runs: Nous nommasmes la dicte baye la baye Sainct Laurens. Nobody knows how or why this name left its first home, in what is now called Pillage Bay, and set out to conquer the whole of what is now the Saint Lawrence. But so it was. Those were great days for sporting chances in the matter of names and places. Cartier gravely enters the names of the three “ Kingdoms ” which he passed through in as many hundred miles on his way to Montreal, the Kingdoms of Saguenay, Canada and Hochelaga. What different destinies these three names have had since then! Saguenay has now shrunk to a single stream, Canada has grown to a Dominion the size of Europe, and Hochelaga has faded away into a memory and nothing more!

On the 8th of September, the anniversary of the day on which the pettifogging politician Vaudreuil surrendered New France to Amherst at Montreal two hundred and twenty-five years later, the staunch sailor Jacques Cartier landed at St. Joachim to meet Donnacona, the “King of Canada,” whose capital was at Kebek, the “Narrows” of “The Great River.” It is a curious reflection that if Sir John Macdonald’s suggestion had not been over-ruled by a timid Colonial Secretary we should now be living under another “ King of Canada,” George V. Cartier had two “Canadians” with him, Taignoagny and Domagaya, whom he had taken home from Gaspe the year before and now brought back as interpreters. And here we might remember something else to his credit. All the whites treated all the Indians as their natural subjects. But, while Columbus and the Spaniards enslaved or butchered them on all occasions, Cartier and the French treated them more as foundlings, to be made the obedient servants of both the King of France and the King of Heaven. Donnacona, like all the chief men in Canada, excelled in florid oratory; and the country of the Ottawas was even then marked on European maps as the scene of action between the cranes and pigmies. But any Indian might well wax eloquent over such an astounding event, which he must have found quite as wonderful as we should find the arrival of a couple of lost friends in a flotilla of airships manned by a crew from Mars. Don-naeona was friendly, and did his best to dissuade Cartier from going higher up the River by telling him how ferocious the people were in the next kingdom. Cartier, however, pushed on till he arrived off the fortified capital of Hochelaga, where his fearless yet kindly bearing and his marvellous equipment won him the unbounded admiration of the Indians, who, like all virile people, thought highly of a leader that looked fit for either peace or war. V\ hat a sight it was; that handful of hardy pioneers among those thousands of savages, who sang and danced round enormous bonfires, in token of welcome, all night long, close beside the two little open boats which were the only link of connection with civilization in all that illimitable wild! When Cartier landed, the inhabitants brought their sick and maimed for him to touch, “as if,” he says, “they thought that God had sent me to cure them.” True to his principles and faith, he opened his Testament at the Gospel of St.John and read aloud to the awestruck multitude: In principle erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum,et Deus erat Verbum. Then he climbed the Mont Real, which has ever since borne the regal name he gave it, when, first of all the white men, he gazed from its summit, on a still October afternoon, at that wide magnificence of mountain and plain, brightened by the long sheen of the River, and all aglow with the crimson forest, as if the sunset lived the whole autumnal day in the glory of the maple leaves.

X. Turn where we may to Jacques Cartier’s log-book, we are sure to find his unfailing touch of human interest. But there’s an equally interesting touch whenever he refers to our other fellow-beings; and I cannot leave him without a word about what he saw of them.

When he first came up he found the River swarming with animal life. The walrus was common all over the northern part of the Gulf. Whales of the largest kind were plentiful, and the smallest, the Little White Whale, known as the White Porpoise, made inland runs as crowded as those the salmon used to make in the early days of British Columbia. Seals innumerable flocked together along the shores. And fish—well, the waters were far more alive with them then than they are in the choicest spots during the best seasons now. Cartier’s keen eye noted all this, as well as many birds, which he described with such discriminating touches that they can be easily identified to-day. The apponatz is the unfortunate Great Auk, big as a Michaelmas goose, black and white in plumage, with a crow-like beak, and unable to fly. The godez were the guillemots, still locally called “guds.” The richars are puffins, queer owl-parrot-like sea-birds, red-beaked and footed, and nesting like rabbits.

The Great Auk is extinct; so is the Labrador duck. The walrus has long been exterminated in Laurentian waters. The whale, too, will soon be as extinct as the auk and the dodo, if modern whaling goes on much longer. And all at the hands of that most wanton of the beasts of prey, “ civilized man.”

Now, I do not at all mean to range myself among the sentimentalists by putting “civilized man” into the pillory of inverted commas. I am a firm believer in war, sport and meat. I believe in war because all the best breeds of men have excelled in war, because war is a great and good factor in evolution, and because excessive peace tends to rot the body politic away in the midst of the smug materialism of its “average man.” Besides—apart from some really whole-souled enthusiasts—most pacifists are those who, as individuals, dislike all risks to their comforts or their skins, who, as classes, hate whatever enhances the value of the hero, and who, as peoples, naturally shrink from any ordeal which may prove them unfit. I believe in sport, in any form of true sport which means fair play and no favour to either side, and which requires exceptional skill or courage or both. A man is within the pale when he never indulges in wanton slaughter or individual cruelty, and when he instinctively observes the indefinable difference between a sportsman and a “sport,” which is exactly the same as between a gentleman and a “gent.” Wild animals don’t die what we call natural deaths; they starve or get killed. And they don’t suffer from nerves, like town-bred humanitarians. An animal that has just escaped death will resume its feeding or fighting or play as if nothing had happened. So the sportsman is only one more incident in the day’s work, and his clean shot the happiest of deaths in the wild. No true sportsman would ever wound without killing as soon as possible, no matter if he lost the rest of his bag by doing so. Nor would he ever kill, even beyond the reach of any game laws, at a season when the loss of a parent might cause the lingering death of the young. So, within these limits, I believe in sport as, within its own righteous limits, I believe in war. I also believe in meat, simply because we are the great omnivora — a good and sufficient reason by itself.

Yet my whole heart goes out to all my fellow-subjects in the Animal Kingdom. I am an evolutionist, through and through, and fully recognize that every other animal is essentially the same as myself in kind, whatever vast distinctions there are between us in degree. I cannot imagine, much less desire, a dogless heaven. I rarely pull a trigger. I am a perfect exemplification of the sarcastic definition of fishing as a hook at one end and a fool at the other. I delight in being a sympathetic soul in the natural life of my non-human kindred. I would gladly stop every form of human interference that involves unnecessary pain—such as trapping and bull-fights, and anything else in which man is able to torture his fellow-beings without risking his own skin, except in brutal bravado, like the matador. I would also stop all butchery, cruelty and extermination for which the caprices of fashion are responsible. Down at Cobb’s Island they butchered twenty-eight thousand beautiful sea-swallows for ten cents a head, wholesale. In Asrakh® they kill the pregnant mother with every refinement of cruelty, so that her agonies may give the fur of her unborn offspring a more fashionable curl. And in Florida the snowy egret is threatened with extermination by plume-hunters in the breeding season, when the birds are in their most attractive feather, and death is more cruel than at any other time. These plume hunters will stick at nothing, even murder—they killed Bradley, the bird warden the other day—in order to get dollars from the dealers, who supply the milliners, who both stimulate and pander to the whims of fashion. Beauty in dress is good; just as beauty of person is entirely excellent. But beauty in dress is not worth having in the mere matter of a particular ornament at the expense of butchery and torture; and, in cases of extermination, the very thing for which our human greed kills out the species that produces it must itself be lost. Man, being in the machinery age, is able to destroy every strong and beautiful animal in the whole world, if he so decides. But when he can feed, clothe and adorn himself and womankind without such destruction; and when he can have legitimate sport as well, without upsetting the balance of Nature, what an arrant fool and vile knave he would be to break the spell of the wild and, with it, half the joy of the Earth!

I say this and I mean it, every word. But I entirely believe in the struggle for existence, all the same. And I think it wholly justifiable to fight on all occasions when two contestants inevitably cross each other’s path and neither will give way, whether they be empires, masses or individuals. So, when man and other animals clash, man is right to fight for his own hand. This is, in fact, a kind of war, and quite as justifiable. But it should be conducted under the most humane conditions possible—what a difference the single letter e makes between human and humane\ There is a time for war and a time for peace; and both are right in this life of ours, with its endless opposites and compromises. But, while war is war, between whatever parties it is waged, so murder is murder, throughout the whole animal creation, and all avoidable pain is a criminal offence in the eyes of universal justice, even when inflicted on what we call pests and vermin.

XI. I can never read books like Jacques Cartier’s log and Audubon’s Journals, and then compare their day with ours on the actual ground, without feeling the keenest pangs of regret for all we have lost. By this I don’t mean to cry for the moon, or wish for an impossible return to incompatible conditions. And I know perfectly well that human history is the most interesting, human development the most important, and human life the most valuable. But it is in our own civilised human interest that I most regret the wanton and shameless destruction of wild life that has so often taken place, and that is still taking place, in Canada, as in all new countries. There are three stages in our attitude toward wild life, corresponding to the three stages in our own historical development—the pioneering, the exploiting, and the national. Of course these stages overlap and intermingle, and all of them exist side by side to-day in different parts of the country. But each has a spirit of its own. The pioneering age is frankly at war with the wilderness. The exploiting age is heedless, wasteful and wantonly destructive in its overmastering desire to get rich quickly at all costs. And the national age at last produces a leading public, wise enough to follow the foresightful few in saving what is left. We are just reaching the national age at a few centres of population, and we should nowr do our utmost to check the excesses of the exploiting and pioneering ages, without hampering their legitimate growth. e can do this by preserves and sanctuaries. Game preserves appeal to influential bodies of well-to-do sportsmen; and the preservation of all wild animals that have a commercial value appeals to strong business interests; so that public and private preserves have a double chance. But sanctuaries hardly touch the fringe of practical Canadian politics, as they cannot be justified to the ordinary man in easy terms of dollars and cents, and most people who do think them worth while are inclined to suppose that we can afford to leave their actual establishment to the next generation. Yet this is precisely what we cannot do, without grave risk of losing the opportunity for ever.

There are two kinds of sanctuary. One is to protect certain animals anywhere in town and country. The other is to protect a certain part of wild nature for all the animals whose habitat it is. The Americans have already set us noble examples of both kinds, and the sooner we follow them on a larger scale than hitherto the better for us and our posterity. Let us take the great waste places that remain before it becomes too late, and choose those parts of them which commercial man covets least and wild life needs most. The surplus inhabitants of these sanctuaries will help to replenish the neighbouring preserves—an argument that will go home to sportsmen and those who are economically interested in sport. But the highest of all arguments in favour of sanctuaries is that they will soon be the only places where the spell of Nature will have any force at all. And it is good for man to feel this penetrating spell from time to time. It is good, even if only for the one reason that anything with a touch of native distinction is worth preserving from those dull levellers who think it so progressive to make everything disgustingly like everything else. We cannot live without bread or dollars—granted, and with both hands. But man no more lives by dollars alone than he lives by bread alone. And if he is to have any spot left on the face of the Earth where he can refresh his soul by communion with a world different from his artificial own, he must establish sanctuaries.

And sanctuaries, to be worth while, must be really sanctuaries. Let us make up our minds about those parts of wild Nature that should be absolutely set apart from exploitation, in exactly the same way as we make up our minds that a certain part of our time and money and attention is better spent on the soul and spirit of our life rather than on its material body. So we should take most of our forests for timber, most of our waterfalls for use as “white coal,” most of our land for farming, and most of our wilds for food, fur or sport. But there cannot be a shadow of a doubt that we should greatly enrich our lives as a whole, and the exaltable side of them in particular, by leaving a few wild spots in Nature’s keeping. And if someone should object that, after all, these wilds and their appeal are only for the few, I should point to the ever-increasing public who delight in the call of the wild, even though they may only have heard it through word and picture. And, finally, if it should be objected that no natural products could, under any circumstances, do as good service to man in a sanctuary as in the way of trade, I should point to the worst of forests and ask whether it is not serving a higher purpose on its native soil than when it is converted into the best of pulpwood for the Yellow Press.

The Laurentian waters have many a place well fitted for a sanctuary:—in Newfoundland, on the Magdalens, Bird Rocks and Bonaventure Island; along the North Shore in several spots, from the sea to the Saguenay; and, again, on Lakes Huron and Superior. My own, if I could make one, should be along some great reach of northern coastline, far down the Lower St. Lawrence.

Here I would have seals and whales of all kinds, from the common but timid little harbour seal to the big horse-heads and the gigantic hooded seals, the grizzlies of the water; and from the smallest of all whales, the twenty-foot little white whale, miscalled the porpoise, all the way up to the “right” or Greenland whale, big as any monster of old romance. The white whales are still comparatively plentiful in certain spots. I have seen a run of them go by, uninterruptedly, for over an hour, many abreast, all swimming straight ahead and making the air tumultuous with the snorts and plunges that accompanied every breath. This, however, is rare. You will generally see them at their individual best in bright, sunny weather, when their glistening white, fish-shaped bodies come curvetting out of the water in all directions; or when they play follow-my-leader and look like a dazzling sea-serpent half-a-mile long. But, in the middle of all this and the corresponding flip-flop game of the seals, you may see both white whales and seals streaking away for dear life. And no wonder, for over there is that unmistakable dorsal fin, clean-cut and high, jet black and wickedlooking, like the flag of the nethermost pirate. It belongs to the well-named Killer, the Orca Gladiator of zoology, often miscalled the grampus. He is at once the bull-dog, the wolf and the lion of the sea; but stronger than any thirty-foot lion, hungrier than a whole pack of wolves, readier to fight to the death than any bull-dog, and, with all this, of such lightning speed that he can catch the white whale, who can overhaul the swiftest seal, who, in his turn, can catch the fastest fish that swims. He is the champion fighter and feeder of all creation. A dozen fat seals will only whet his appetite for more. With a single comrade he will bite the biggest "right” whale to death in no time. I have known him catch a white whale off Green Island Reef and be away again like a flash, gripping it thwartwise in his mouth. Think of a beast of prey that can run off with an elephant and still outpace a motor boat! Fortunately for the rest of the seafolk the Killer is not very plentiful, since he is almost as destructive as civilised man. Bigger again than the killer, twice his size at least, is the great fat, good-natured humpback, the clown of the sea. On a fine, calm day, the humpbacks will gambol to their hearts’ content, lol-lopping about on the surface, or shooting up from the depths with a tremendous leap that carries their enormous bodies clear out of the water and high into the air, and shows the whole of their immense black-and-white-striped bellies. Then they turn over forwards, to come down with a sumphing smacker that sets the waves rocking and drenches an acre or two with flying spray. And last, and biggest of all, bigger than any other living creature, is the Greenland whale, the “ Right Whale ” par excellence; and nothing the animal kingdom has to show is so impressive in its way as to see the waters suddenly parted by his gleaming black bulk, which in a moment grows to leviathan proportions before your astonished eyes.

Would you barter the lasting companionship of all this magnificent strength for one mess of commercial pottage, especially when it is the fitting counterpart to the soaring beauty of the birds? Go out before dawn on any reef where fish are plentiful, and you’ll feel the whole air astir with dim white wings. Look up above the Bird Rocks in clear weather, and you’ll sec the myriads of gannets, each the size of an eagle, actually greying the sky with their white bodies and black-tipped wings. Or watch the gulls wherever they congregate—the big Blackbacks, with their stentorian “Ha! hah!”, the Glaucus, the vociferous herring gulls, and the little Kittiwakes, calling out their name persistently, “keet-a-wake, keet-a-wake.” Their voices are not musical—no seabirds’ voices are—though they sound very appealing notes to anyone uho loves the sea. But all the winged beauty that poets and painters have ever dreamt of is in their flight. Lateen sails on Mediterranean blue are the most beautiful of sea forms made by man. But what is the finest felucca compared with a seagull alighting on the water with its wings a-peak? And what are seagulls on the water to those circling overhead, when you can lie on the top of an island crag looking up at them, and they are the only things afloat between you and the infinite deep of Heaven?

Nearer down in my sanctuary there would be plenty of terns or sea-swallows, with their keen bills poised like a lance in rest. They are perpetually on the alert, these light cavalry of the seagull army; and very smart they look, with their black caps, pearl-grey jackets and white bodies, set off by red bills and feet. They become lancer and lance in one, when they suddenly fold their sweeping wings close in to their bodies and make their darting dive into the water, which spurts up in a jet and falls back with a “plop” as they pierce it. Just skimming the surface are the noisy, sooty, gluttonous, quarrelsome shearwaters, or “haglets,” who have got so much into the habit of making three flaps to clear the crest of a wave, and then a glide to cross the trough, that they keep up this sort of a hop-skip-and-a-jump even when the sea is as smooth as a mill pond I would throw them a bucketful of chopped liver and watch the fun, camera in hand. Actually on the water are long lines of ducks. My sanctuary would be full of them. From a canoe I have seen them in the distance stretching out for a mile, like a long, low reef. From the top of a big cliff I have seen them look like an immense strip of carpet, undulated by a draft, as they rose and fell on the waves. And when they took flight in their thousands, their pattering feet and the drumming whir of their wings were like hail on the grass and thunder beyond the hills. As you paddle alongside a crannied cliff you wonder where all the kittens come from, for the rocks are fairly sibilant with their mowings. These are the young Black Guillemots, or sea-pigeons, whose busy parents are flying about, showing a winking flash of white on their shoulders and carrying their bright carmine feet like a stern light. I would choose cliffs for a sea-pigeon loft, a mile or two long. The higher ledges of other suitable cliffs would certainly be lined with whitebreasted puffins, murres and razor-billed auks. The auks and murres stand up as if they were at a real review, but the puffins, or “ sea-parrots,” with their grotesque red beaks—like a false nose at a fancy dress ball— and pursy bodies set low on stumpy red legs, always look like a stage army in comic opera. And there’s a deal of talking in the ranks— the puffins croak, the auks grunt, and the murres keep repeating their gutteral name—“murre, murre.”

Now look along the sanctuary shore, where you have been hearing the plaintive “ ter-lee ” of the plover, the triple whistle of the yellowleg, and the quick “peet-weet” of the sandpiper or “alouette.” In the season you will always find the little sandpipers running about like nimble atoms of the grey-brown beach, as if its very pebbles bred them. No birds have a more changeful appearance on the wing. Some distance off, with their backs to you, they are a mere swarm of black midges. But when, at the inner end of their loop of flight, they see you and turn, all together, they instantly flash white as gulls and large as swallows.

If you have a stealthy foot and a quick eye you will have a good chance of getting near my Great Blue Heron, when he is stooping forward over promising water, intent as any other angler over a likely pool. He is a splendid fellow, tall as you are when he stands on tip-toe looking out for danger. And I always enjoy his high disdain for the company of intrusive man, when he flaps silently away, with his grand head thrown back, his neck curved down, and his legs listlessly trailing. A very different bird is the clamorous Canada goose or “Outarde,” during migration. I would choose a likely spot for the lines of migration to pass over. On a still day you can hear the vibrant, penetrating honk\ honk\ long before the black, spreading V of the hurrying flock appears on the horizon. As they get nearer they sound more like a pack in full cry. And when they are overhead they might be a mass-meeting ripe for a riot.

Very different, again, are the hawks and eagles. They would be represented by the osprey, which we call the “fish hawk,” and the bald-headed eagle, who surely ought to be a sacred beast in the United States, because his image appears on their adorable money. Of course I would protect both Killers and eagles, to give the same spice to sea and sky as the old robber barons used to give to the land. Besides, they help to preserve the balance of Nature by destroying the weaklings; unlike the sportsman, who upsets it by killing off the finest specimens. It is a common sight enough, but one of unfailing interest, to watch an osprey hover expectantly, and then plunge, like a javelin, straight into the back of the fish he has marked down, checking his impetuous way, just as he reaches the water, by a tremendous downsweep of his wings and a simultaneous curve of his fanned-out tail. But the eagle beats this by swooping for the fish he makes the osprey drop and catching it easily before it has reached the surface. Our eagles, however, do most of their own hunting, and prey on anything up to a goose three feet long and bulky in proportion. But it is not close-to that the eagle looks his kingly best. And I like to see him majestically at home in the high heavens, and to think of him as resting on nothing lower than a mountain peak lofty enough to wear the royal blue by right divine.

He clasps the crags with crooked hands,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world he stands.

And now it is sunset:—

Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose,
Withers once more the old blue flower of day.
There, where the ether like a diamond glows,
Its petals fade away.

A shadowy tumult stirs the dusky air;
Sparkle the delicate dews, the distant snows;
The great deep thrills—for through it everywhere
The breath of Beauty blows.

But the sea-bird hours are not yet over. From out of the darkness comes the long, far-thrown, re-echoing cry of the Great Loon, pulsing through the veins of the night and charged with I know not what weird call of the great wild places of the Earth. And as it lingers, dies away, and is caught up again, I remember those dim white wings of dawn; and I lie down to sleep richly content with all the long day’s wealth that Nature gives me.

Such is the sanctuary I dream of—a place where man is passive and the rest of Nature active. But on each side of it I would have model game preserves where man would not be allowed to interfere with the desirable natural balance of the species, but where, within this limit, he could exercise in sport that glorious instinct of the chase which he once had to exercise in earnest for his daily food. And first among all forms of sport I would choose harpooning—I mean real harpooning, by hand alone; as I would entirely forbid the use of the modern battery or any other implement of commercial butchery. If you want proper sport, with a minimum of dependence on machinery and a maximum of demand on your own strong arm, clear eye and steady nerve, then try harpooning the white whale from a North-Shore canoe. To begin with, the canoe is, of all possible craft, the nearest to Nature. There is no apparatus between you and it and the water, except a paddle, and the paddle gets its fulcrum and leverage directly from your own body. Every motion,—fast or slow, ahead, astern, or veering—is also directly due to your own bodily self. And your pleasure, your sport, and often your very life, entirely depend upon the courage, skill and strength with which you use your muscles. The canoe must be seaworthy enough to ride out a storm; yet light enough for two men to handle under all circumstances, and for one man to handle alone when working for a throw. If you would see man to perfection as a beast of prey, take the stern paddle and watch the harpooner forward—his every faculty intent, his every muscle full-charged for a spring, and his whole tense body the same to the harpoon as the bow is to the arrow. But if you would actually feel what it is to be this human bow and -arrow, you had better begin by making sure that you are absolutely at home in a canoe in all emergencies. Then take the harpoon and poise it so that the rocking water, your comrade in the stern, the mettlesome canoe, yourself, your line and your harpoon can all become one single point of energy whenever that sudden white-domed gleam tells you the whale is head-on and close-to for just one thrilling flash of a second.

Thus, sanctuaries and game preserves each have their own peculiar interests and delights. But there is one supreme interest and delight they share together. This is the Pageant of Evolution—a pageant now being played under the eye of the flesh, but only as part of an infinitely greater whole, that began we know not when nor where, that is tending we know not whither, and that will end we know not how. It is a pageant always growing greater and greater, as the mind’s eye finds higher and ever higher points of view. And it is a pageant with the same setting all over the World—except on the St. Lawrence. I have dwelt on this difference before; but I return to it, because it gives us one deep note of significance that is lacking everywhere else. It consists, of course, in the immeasurable age of the Laurentians, which, being older than Life, are, therefore, a land co-eval with the sea and sky. Think of this triune stage of sky and sea and primal land, set up by God so long before He put his creatures there, these millions of years ago! Then watch the actors. First, and slowest of all in their simplicity, the plants; and animals so lowly that they have hardly got beyond the frontiers of the vegetable kingdom. Next, the rest of the immense sub-kingdom of Invertebrata. And, after them, the fishes and reptilia, and the birds, who are directly of reptilian origin. And then the mammals, who, after infinite travail, have produced one species which we, in our human conceit, call homo sapiens. But this is a ridiculous name for the mass of mankind. It ought to be applied only to those very few original and creative minds whom we acknowledge as men of genius, and without whom the root and stem of all our life could never have brought forth its flower.

XII. With man we come back again to history. And the St. Lawrence is historic, so historic, indeed, that the mere names on its roll of honour are alone enough to stir the hearts of all who live along its shores—Jacques Cartier, Champlain and Laval; Frontenac, Wolfe and Montcalm; Levis, Murray and Carleton; de Salaberry, Brock and Tecumseh; the Fathers of Confederation, the South African Contingents, the Quebec Tercentenary,—these are the men and events whose names will go down to posterity, when all the merely material triumphs of which we make so much ado will be as totally forgotten as such triumphs have always been before, except in so far as they formed part of things beyond and above themselves.

And for those who are thinking about these greater things at all .....let them work on in the faith that an appreciative posterity will be brought a little nearer by what they are doing now, that this “Great River,” this “River of Canada,” will presently give birth to the genius who will reveal its soul, and that its people will then divine its presences of Nature, see the visions of its everlasting hills, and be themselves regenerate in the consecration and the dream of it forever.

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