No More Learning

I want nothing better than a good word.
The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least
natural fact, and the allying his life to it. All the world
reiterating this slender truth, that aspens once grew there; and the
swift inference is that men were there to see them. And so it would be
with the names of our native and neighboring villages, if we had not
profaned them.

The daylight now failed us, and we went below; but I endeavored to
console myself for being obliged to make this voyage by night, by
thinking that I did not lose a great deal, the shores being low and
rather unattractive, and that the river itself was much the more
interesting object. I heard something in the night about the boat
being at William Henry, Three Rivers, and in the Richelieu Rapids, but
I was still where I had been when I lost sight of Pointe aux Trembles.
To hear a man who has been waked up at midnight in the cabin of a
steamboat inquiring, "Waiter, where are we now? " is as if, at any
moment of the earth's revolution round the sun, or of the system round
its centre, one were to raise himself up and inquire of one of the
deck hands, "Where are we now? "

I went on deck at daybreak, when we were thirty or forty miles above
Quebec. The banks were now higher and more interesting. There was an
"uninterrupted succession of whitewashed cottages," on each side of
the river. This is what every traveler tells. But it is not to be
taken as an evidence of the populousness of the country in general,
hardly even of the river-banks. They have presented a similar
appearance for a hundred years.
The Swedish traveler and naturalist
Kalm, who descended the river in 1749, says, "It could really be
called a village, beginning at Montreal and ending at Quebec, which is
a distance of more than one hundred and eighty miles; for the
farmhouses are never above five arpents, and sometimes but three
asunder, a few places excepted. " Even in 1684 Hontan said that the
houses were not more than a gunshot apart at most. Ere long we passed
Cape Rouge, eight miles above Quebec, the mouth of the Chaudiere on
the opposite or south side; New Liverpool Cove with its lumber-rafts
and some shipping; then Sillery and Wolfe's Cove and the Heights of
Abraham on the north, with now a view of Cape Diamond, and the citadel
in front. The approach to Quebec was very imposing. It was about six
o'clock in the morning when we arrived. There is but a single street
under the cliff on the south side of the cape, which was made by
blasting the rocks and filling up the river. Three-story houses did
not rise more than one fifth or one sixth the way up the nearly
perpendicular rock, whose summit is three hundred and forty-five feet
above the water. We saw, as we glided past, the sign on the side of
the precipice, part way up, pointing to the spot where Montgomery was
killed in 1775. Formerly it was the custom for those who went to
Quebec for the first time to be ducked, or else pay a fine. Not even
the Governor-General escaped. But we were too many to be ducked, even
if the custom had not been abolished. [1]

Here we were, in the harbor of Quebec, still three hundred and sixty
miles from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in a basin two miles across,
where the greatest depth is twenty-eight fathoms, and though the water
is fresh, the tide rises seventeen to twenty-four feet,--a harbor
"large and deep enough," says a British traveler, "to hold the English
navy. " I may as well state that, in 1844, the county of Quebec
contained about forty-five thousand inhabitants (the city and suburbs
having about forty-three thousand),--about twenty-eight thousand being
Canadians of French origin; eight thousand British; over seven
thousand natives of Ireland; one thousand five hundred natives of
England; the rest Scotch and others. Thirty-six thousand belong to the
Church of Rome.

Separating ourselves from the crowd, we walked up a narrow street,
thence ascended by some wooden steps, called the Break-neck Stairs,
into another steep, narrow, and zigzag street, blasted through the
rock, which last led through a low, massive stone portal, called
Prescott Gate, the principal thoroughfare into the Upper Town.