The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and
forest, mountain-height and water, which lies stretched out before
the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white
streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of
gables, roofs, and chimney tops in the old hilly town immediately
at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the
sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze,
whose distant rigging looks like spiders' webs against the light,
while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy
mariners become so many puppets; all this, framed by a sunken
window in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within,
forms one of the brightest and most enchanting pictures that the
eye can rest upon.
In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have newly
arrived from England or from Ireland, pass between Quebec and
Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements of
Canada. If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often found it)
to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal, and see them
grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about their chests and
boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be their fellow-passenger
on one of these steamboats, and mingling with the concourse, see
and hear them unobserved.
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