No More Learning

Looking on the map, I find that the first country on the
north which bears a name is that part of Rupert's Land called East
Main. This river, called after the holy Anne, flowing from such a
direction, here tumbled over a precipice, at present by three
channels, how far down I do not know, but far enough for all our
purposes, and to as good a distance as if twice as far. It matters
little whether you call it one, or two, or three hundred feet; at any
rate, it was a sufficient water privilege for us. I crossed the
principal channel directly over the verge of the fall, where it was
contracted to about fifteen feet in width, by a dead tree which had
been dropped across and secured in a cleft of the opposite rock, and
a smaller one a few feet higher, which served for a hand-rail. This
bridge was rotten as well as small and slippery, being stripped of
bark, and I was obliged to seize a moment to pass when the falling
water did not surge over it, and midway, though at the expense of wet
feet, I looked down probably more than a hundred feet, into the mist
and foam below. This gave me the freedom of an island of precipitous
rock by which I descended as by giant steps,--the rock being composed
of large cubical masses, clothed with delicate close-hugging lichens
of various colors, kept fresh and bright by the moisture,--till I
viewed the first fall from the front, and looked down still deeper to
where the second and third channels fell into a remarkably large
circular basin worn in the stone. The falling water seemed to jar the
very rocks, and the noise to be ever increasing. The vista down-stream
was through a narrow and deep cleft in the mountain, all white suds at
the bottom; but a sudden angle in this gorge prevented my seeing
through to the bottom of the fall. Returning to the shore, I made my
way down-stream through the forest to see how far the fall extended,
and how the river came out of that adventure. It was to clamber along
the side of a precipitous mountain of loose mossy rocks, covered with
a damp primitive forest, and terminating at the bottom in an abrupt
precipice over the stream. This was the east side of the fall. At
length, after a quarter of a mile, I got down to still water, and, on
looking up through the winding gorge, I could just see to the foot of
the fall which I had before examined; while from the opposite side of
the stream, here much contracted, rose a perpendicular wall, I will
not venture to say how many hundred feet, but only that it was the
highest perpendicular wall of bare rock that I ever saw. In front of
me tumbled in from the summit of the cliff a tributary stream, making
a beautiful cascade, which was a remarkable fall in itself, and there
was a cleft in this precipice, apparently four or five feet wide,
perfectly straight up and down from top to bottom, which, from its
cavernous depth and darkness, appeared merely as _a black streak_.
This precipice is not sloped, nor is the material soft and crumbling
slate as at Montmorenci, but it rises perpendicular, like the side of
a mountain fortress, and is cracked into vast cubical masses of gray
and black rock shining with moisture, as if it were the ruin of an
ancient wall built by Titans. Birches, spruces, mountain-ashes with
their bright red berries, arbor-vitaes, white pines, alders, etc.
,
overhung this chasm on the very verge of the cliff and in the
crevices, and here and there were buttresses of rock supporting trees
part way down, yet so as to enhance, not injure, the effect of the
bare rock. Take it altogether, it was a most wild and rugged and
stupendous chasm, so deep and narrow, where a river had worn itself a
passage through a mountain of rock, and all around was the
comparatively untrodden wilderness.

This was the limit of our walk down the St. Lawrence. Early in the
afternoon we began to retrace our steps, not being able to cross the
north channel and return by the Isle of Orleans, on account of the
_trop grand vent_, or too great wind. Though the waves did run pretty
high, it was evident that the inhabitants of Montmorenci County were
no sailors, and made but little use of the river. When we reached the
bridge between St. Anne and Chateau Richer, I ran back a little way to
ask a man in the field the name of the river which we were crossing,
but for a long time I could not make out what he said, for he was one
of the more unintelligible Jacques Cartier men. At last it flashed
upon me that it was _La Riviere au Chien_, or the Dog River, which my
eyes beheld, which brought to my mind the life of the Canadian
voyageur and _coureur de bois_, a more western and wilder Arcadia,
methinks, than the world has ever seen; for the Greeks, with all their
wood and river gods, were not so qualified to name the natural
features of a country as the ancestors of these French Canadians; and
if any people had a right to substitute their own for the Indian
names, it was they. They have preceded the pioneer on our own
frontiers, and named the _prairie_ for us. _La Riviere au Chien_
cannot, by any license of language, be translated into Dog River, for
that is not such a giving it to the dogs, and recognizing their place
in creation, as the French implies. One of the tributaries of the St.
Anne is named _La Riviere de la Rose_; and farther east are _La
Riviere de la Blondelle_ and _La Riviere de la Friponne_. Their very
_riviere_ meanders more than our _river_.

Yet the impression which this country made on me was commonly
different from this. To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may
appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to
me, coming from New England and being a very green traveler
withal,--notwithstanding what I have said about Hudson's Bay,--it
appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard
of Europe and the Middle Ages.