river, are crowded with tourists from all parts of the world.

Yankees, who come by the early express, and go away satisfied at night by the mail, tear about in carriages from Table Rock to the rapids below Chippewa, and from thence to the whirlpool below the bridge-with iced champagne in a basket under the driver's knees, and materials for a pic-nic on Goat Island inside-Idon't think they ever look at the view. Some do not even go sight-seeing, but think the Falls a bore, and care for nothing but bowls, billiards, brandy cocktails by day, and dancing by night. Learned Germans gaze at the river through their spectacles and pipe-smoke for hours, and write transcendental reflections upon it in the Table Rock Album, with beery enthusiasm. English travellers creep between the waters and the rock, to cut their names on the stone six inches further on than anybody else has been able to get. I must not, too, forget to mention an American gentleman who was unable to remain long enough to look at the Falls by daylight. He arrived about eight in the evening, and the night was so dark that he was obliged to borrow a lantern, by the light of which, to use his own expression, he viewed the waterfall, and after that hadn't only just time to get through supper afore it was time to start, to catch the lightning run (Ang. Express train) for New York! But when the tourists have gone off with the summer, when the hotels are shut up, and the deep snow hides the glitter of the mushroom edifices that are erected near the banks, and the Falls are left to solitude and frozen nature,-then is the time to visit them.

Great masses of ice from Lake Erie come thundering and leaping down the rapids, and smash to pieces as they go over. As the land-springs drip and freeze, huge icicles form gradually from the tops of the rocks, and gleam with prismatic colours in the cold sunlight. You may climb with spiked shoes and icepoles over the slippery ice below the cliff, and look upwards at these frozen pillars, which appear to support its summit: some of them are twenty feet in diameter, and near two hundred in height.

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On the boulders at the base of the American Fall, and on the American side of the Canadian Fall, the spray congeals, and the snow freezes upon it till huge cones of ice creep up in front of the Fall, and muffle the roar of the water that tumbles behind. The smashed and pounded ice that floats in the eddies of the basin below, freezes together and forms a dam across the river. The pressure of the water upheaves huge blocks of ice, and piles them on each other till an ice-bridge is formed from one shore to the other. The passage is dangerous, for the water may sweep it away in a moment, and carry everything upon it to destruction in the horrible whirlpool further down, even if the rapids at the bridge did not smash it to atoms long before it got there.

Due east from his elevated point of observation, the aëronaut would look along the national boundary line that bisects Ontario, through Sackett's Harbour, the scene of hard fighting in the last American war, to the chain of lakes, known to most readers as the scene of Cooper's thrilling Indian story of The Last of the Mohicans, and across the White Mountains to Portland.

Northwards, a thin fringe of settlements is succeeded by a wooded and unexplored region, traversed by the fertile valley of the Madawaska, and bounded by the easterly course of the Ottawa. On the northeastern shoulder of Ontario sits Kingston, a lively and enterprising town, carrying on a brisk trade with the lake ports and the United States. Its appearance may be described in the words of one of its Scotch inhabitants, with whom I once travelled up the St. Lawrence in a steamer. He was talking to a friend who had just arrived from home, and who asked him what sort of a place it was. 'Well,' he said, 'ye mind the lang toun of Kirkaldy, in Fife.'

Ay! I mind it weel,' said his friend, with a regretful sigh.

"Then Kingston is no that unlike Kirkaldy, forby it is na' a lang toun, and ye canna see the Firth'two important exceptions, but the simile gives a good idea of the

place. Its detractors call the fertility of its soil in question; they say that it grows nothing but radishes, and that they shoot off at right angles in consequence of meeting rock an inch below the surface.

At Montreal the St. Lawrence receives the Ottawa from the west, and, at the old French Canadian town of Three Rivers, the St. Maurice. The district is rich in minerals-iron, black-lead, and tin are found there; the former metal is the means of giving employment to a great number of hands, as it enables its possessors to contract with the Grand Trunk Railway for a large quantity of iron wheels.

Mineral wealth is, however, not its only resource. The St. Maurice has lately been opened up for lumbering operations; white and yellow pine, maple, and birch can be obtained along its tributaries.

The

usual result of lumbering operations is seen in the impulse given to agriculture; many farmers have settled there, and they can command for their produce as high a rate as in most of the agricultural districts. The Falls of Shawanegan and Grande Mere are magnificent either of them would make the fortune of a country in Europe as a bait for tourists, though here of course thrown into the shade by the unapproachable grandeur of Niagara; and the scenery on the richly-wooded banks of the St. Maurice is another of the charms so lavishly bestowed by Nature on this favoured land.

Next, the widening river rolls past Quebec, the strongest fortress in America. The lumberers, whose perils and labours were described in our former paper, look forward to it as the end of their toilsome journey.

The traveller who glides streamimpelled through some wild lake or broad river under the Canadian summer sun, remarks the raft, as it floats double with its shadow on the waters, as a fitting foreground to a fair picture, and forgets it ere the next headland hides it from his sight. Little he recks of the comedies of real life-ay, and the tragedies too-that take place on the acres of timber he passes by so carelessly. Long after he has reached his desti

nation, long perhaps after months of business have swept his summer journey from his mind, that raft, with the houses upon it, the flags, the dogs, the children, and the same wild and picturesque assemblage that formed the foreground of his transient steam-boat picture, is still wending down its slow and toilsome way, a self-contained society.

On the south shore of the St. Lawrence, from the wharves below the citadel of Quebec, to Carouge, some five miles up the river, great booms are moored, inside which the rafts as they reach their destination are stored, till the logs composing them are wanted for shipment.

If, according to the fanciful theory of the old mythology, weeping wood nymphs accompany their favourite trees from their home in the distant woods, to take a last leave of them ere they quit the Western shores for ever, they could hardly bid them farewell in a more lovely spot.

Between the valley of the St. Charles and the St. Lawrence, a high promontory runs forward, on which Quebec is built. The river widens at the junction to a noble lake, where the whole navy of England might anchor. From the Citadel on Cape Diamond, you may trace the river, as it winds away towards the sea, and is lost to view in the blue distance behind the Laurentine hills: at your feet the quaint old French town, with narrow streets, like an importation from Normandy on the left the St. Charles rolls down through a wooded country, rich with corn-fields, and dotted with white villages, on whose tin-covered church spires the sun shines as on burnished silver.

Behind you, as you stand looking down the river, lie the Plains of Abraham; further on, beautiful pleasure-grounds crown the high and precipitous bank. At its base a long suburb (created by the necessities of the numerous labourers who work in the coves') follows the windings of the river. Thousands of acres of rafts teem with life, and resound with the hum of men and the far-off ring of axes. On the opposite bank is the town, called, after the friend and colleague of Montcalm, De Levi. On the bosom

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of the sunny waters lie richlyfreighted merchantmen, and busy steamers leave behind them widening tracks of foam. Not the least interesting object to British eyes is the high rock where, surrounded by the guns of the strongest fortress of America, the Union Jack floats proudly from sunrise to sunset.

At Grosse Isle, some distance below Quebec, is the emigrants' Quarantine Station. Still further down are situated the watering-places at which the Canadian gentry vegetate when the summer heats drive them out of town.' The Yankee resorts of Saratoga and Newport seduce away from them a great number of summer tourists, and a trip to England and the Continent of Europe as many more. The sprightliness of Saratoga balls and society generally, and the delights of Newport bathing parties, have been chronieled again and again by innumerable tourists.

The scenery of the lower part of the river is comparatively uninteresting; but the Saguenay, one of its tributaries, navigable for many miles from its mouth, and supposed to be in the latter part of its course unfathomable, is a most curious and beautiful stream. Doubtless some great convulsion in the early years of creation rent the high granite cliff in two, and the chasm, which no plumb-line has ever been able to fathom, has been adopted as the outlet of the river, which runs through an immense extent of country. At the mouth of the St. Lawrence is situated the stern and rock-bound island of Anticosti. It is as yet uninhabited, except by the lighthouse men who attend the signal stations recently established there; but a gloomy interest attaches to it, from the tales of shipwreck and starvation of which its rocks are the scene. In 1828, the shipwrecked mariners of the Granicus were forced to cannibalism, until the last wretch perished for want of any victim to prey upon. The bones and mangled remains were found scattered about the wild shores of Anticosti, as if a struggle had taken place in the last extremity. The river (at this point ninety miles wide) here ends its course-a fitting exit for so grand a stream.

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The part of the country which has as yet been brought under cultivation, and thickly inhabited, is a mere strip of land stretching along the north bank of the St. Lawrence from Quebec to Kingston, and the shores of Lake Ontario, diverging along the margin of their tributary streams. The only place where civilization has gone inland is on the peninsula contained by Lakes Huron and Erie and the St. Clair River. The extreme fertility of the soil in this part of the country, and the ready, almost precocious, energy of its first settlers, who have run a railway along the whole line of the peninsula, have secured to the agricultural inhabitants of this district a large measure of prosperity.

The towns along this line-the great western-have at once seen the peculiarity of this position, and made the most of it. They have not, like many other parts of the country, to depend on the opening out of some great route, whose produce is to enrich them in passing: their mission is self-contained, and though of course sharing in the increase of general prosperity, they can, unassisted, devote their whole energies to the production of food and the trade consequent upon it.'

Nature has evidently intended Canada as a carrying, not as a producing, country. For this purpose her grand highway, the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, will stand in good stead, and the Canadians will no doubt become the great carriers of the Western world. They have from various causes entered late into the field; and their magnificent system of canals now completed, shows that they have entered with spirit into the contest which must end in restoring to the St. Lawrence the position it has lost. The Canada Corn Act of 1843, giving a preference in British markets to produce conveyed by way of the St. Lawrence, gave a temporary and artificial stimulus to the trade; but that preference was withdrawn in 1846, and Montreal and Quebec then lost the temporary advantage they had enjoyed.

They had no railroads to compete with the United States, and the freights by the St. Lawrence, unassisted by differential duties, ex

ceeded those by way of the United States. Merchandize, as a natural consequence, was forced through American channels.

Of course the repeal of the differential duties was assailed with vehement abuse by a certain class of politicians. Experience has however shown that the beginning of Canadian prosperity is coincident with the destruction of the false support on which she leaned. Her merchants have from that eventful moment devoted their whole energies to the task of raising her in the scale of nations, with a patriotism and unanimity unexampled, and with success which has well repaid them. But they have contended against enormous odds, and have had to engage their enterprising neighbours across the lines on very unequal terms.

The machinery which the United States was enabled to put in motion in 1846, has even now hardly been equalled in Canada. The Americans have consequently had at least ten years' clear start.

Lakes Ontario and Erie had been connected with the Hudson River more than twenty years, and a network of railways united New York and various points intermediate and remote, with the Great Lakes, at Buffalo. Canada had then -as was shown by an extract, quoted in the first part of these

Notes,' from Lord Durham's Report-only fifteen miles of railroad in the whole province. The canals which now surmount the rapids of the St. Lawrence were not nearly completed.

It may, therefore, be stated, that the United States had no rival which could contest with her the carrying trade of the West; and when that trade began to acquire its great and rapidly increasing importance, it found its way naturally over the beaten tracks.

Looking at the helpless state of Canada at that time, the British Government, on establishing the North American mail steamers in 1839, had no option but to send them into the American ports of New York and Boston.

The assistance enjoyed by this company amounts to the large sum of £186,000 a year. The United

States subsidize an American line at about an equal annual cost.

Canadian enterprize, assisted by private British capital, has now placed her in a position to compete with the States, if unfettered: but she finds herself totally unable to contend against two subsidized rivals -one assisted by a foreign Government, and one by her own. It behoves British capitalists-especially those who have invested in Canadian Grand Trunk Railway Stock, much of which is held in this country, and the value of which will depend much on the success which may attend the endeavour of the St. Lawrence route to attract the increasing Western trade-to examine this question with attention, and to see whether the burdens entailed on Canada by the unmaternal attitude of the Home Government will not militate against the success of the undertaking they have engaged in. The last few years have seen an enormous difference in the value of imports and exports from the Western States and Upper Canada, but the portion of that trade which passed through the St. Lawrence is almost the same now as it was ten years ago.

Canada, then, is overweighted in the race. It would be an anomalous spectacle to see a mother country throw her influence into the scale to crush the rising trade of one of her colonies. The justice of England I would not tolerate such a course. The only excuse for continuing the system would be the impracticability of any other. If, however, the Canadians can show that the St. Lawrence route affords greater facilities in every respect than that by the United States, they will have made out their case, and be fully justified in praying for the non-renewal of the Cunard contract, which expires in 1862. Our colonists rightly imagine that it would be useless to advocate the only really fair course

viz., that the English Government should subsidize a Canadian line to the same amount as they now do that to the United States. Of the £800,000 annually paid for the Mail Steam Packet Service to our various colonies, Canada, they say, has never yet received anything, which, as such matters are arranged, is an à priori argument that she

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never will. Setting aside, then, that full measure of justice, the next best thing would be to adopt the cheap plan of not favouring either. Meantime, Canada must go on as she can -only it will be lucky for British, and other shareholders of Canadian Stock, if the finances of the country —which have already been strongly tried to build the railroads now in operation stand the continued strain of un-free competition.

The case in point is thus ably stated by the Honourable John Young,* one of the members of the Canadian Parliament for Montreal, and one of the most straightforward and far-seeing guides of the commercial policy of his country :

I shall now show (he says) that with vessels of equal speed to those running to New York and Boston, the mails between Britain and any part of the United States can be delivered in less time by the St. Lawrence during navigation, and in winter by way of Portland.

The

A careful examination of the matter will demonstrate that, in order to secure the most rapid delivery of the mails between any part of America and Great Britain, the voyage of the Atlantic steamer should terminate at that point the least distant from Britain, and which also shall be in connexion by railroad with other parts of the interior. distance from Liverpool to New York -I obtain my figures from Mr. Wyld of Charing-cross-is computed to be 2980 geographical miles; from Liverpool to Quebec, 2502 miles via the Straits of Belle Isle. If therefore the Persia, or any other vessel, makes the voyage to New York in ten days, it follows that the same vessel would have run to Quebec in eight days and ten hours; and as the distance from Quebec to New York by railroad is 570 miles, or nineteen hours at the rate of thirty miles an hour, it is evident that the mails by the steamer to Quebec would be in New York nineteen hours earlier than if the Persia, or other steamer, had gone direct from Liverpool to New York. Boston, the nearest eastern American port to Great Britain, under the present mail contract, is 2790 miles from Liverpool. Suppose such a vessel as the Persia able to make the voyage in nine and a half days, Quebec could by the same vessel be reached in eight days and fourteen hours; and with fourteen and a half hours to pass over 430 miles of railway

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from Quebec, it is clear that the mails, even to this point, could be delivered in eight hours and a half less time than by steamer direct from Liverpool to Boston.

Mr. Young in his letter touches but incidentally on the objection which is always made to such a suggestion in this country. The present writer, for instance, advanced the facts here set down, in conversation with a distinguished political economist and politician.

The man of science chuckled out, between two long pinches of snuff, 'Well, the argument's not bad. But supposing the distance to be shorter, the St. Lawrence is frozen over-how many months in the year?' 'Five.'

'Nearer seven, I should say; and' (with a still more triumphant chuckle) what is the good of your route being four hundred miles shorter, when for half the year or more you can't get within four hundred miles of Quebec ?'

'While the navigation is closed they will go to Portland,' said I, rather humbly. I knew by experience what was coming next.

'Oh, then you will go half the year to an American port, after all; and I just doubt very considerably whether you wont be obliged to go always to Portland, and never to Quebec at all; for the hydrographer to the Admiralty says that, what with floating ice and want of lighthouses, you never can count on the St. Lawrence navigation at all.'

'Well, but the Canadians have built lighthouses, and are already running a line of steamers which have carried the mails quicker than the New York route, though their vessels are neither so large nor so swift; only for want of funds they are at the mercy of the American and English lines. If they could get a subsidy

'Hout, man; it's all very well talking about your subsidies and lighthouses and the like; but you're just taking up a line of argument that will never be acted upon. Doubtless we will be very happy to take away the other man's subsidy, very happy indeed, if that will please your friends the Canadians; but you