shows sympathy with
some disturbing element, the cause of which he believes to exist in
the mountains which rise along the shore. He repeats the stories of
ancient skippers, of vessels having been lured out of their course
by the deviation of the guiding-needle, which succumbed to the potent
influence exerted in those hills of iron ore; heeding not the fact
that the disturbing agent is the iron on board of his own ship, and
not the magnetic oxide of the distant mines.

The ship being now within the estuary of the St. Lawrence River, must
encounter many risks before she reaches the true mouth of the river,
at the Bic Islands.

The shores along this arm of the gulf are wild and sombre. Rocky
precipices frown upon the swift tidal current that rushes past their
bases. A few small settlements of fishermen and pilots, like Metis,
Father Point, and Rimousky, are discovered at long intervals along
the coast.

In these St. Lawrence hamlets, and throughout Lower Canada, a patois is
spoken which is unintelligible to the Londoner or Parisian; and these
villagers, the descendants of the French colonists, may be said to be a
people destitute of a written language, and strangers to a literature.

While holding a commission from Francis the First, king of France,
Jacques Cartier discovered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, during his first
voyage of exploration in the new world. He entered the gulf on St.
Lawrence's day, in the spring of 1534, and named it in honor of the
event. Cartier explored no farther to the west than about the mouth of
the estuary which is divided by the island of Anticosti. It was during
his second voyage, in the following year, that he discovered and
explored the great river. Of the desolate shores of Labrador, on the
north coast, he said, "It might as well as not be taken for the country
assigned by God to Cain."

The distance from Quebec to Cape Gaspe, measured upon a course which a
steamer would be compelled to take, is four hundred and seven statute
miles. The ship first enters the current of the river St. Lawrence at
the two Bic Islands, where it has a width of about twenty miles. By
consulting most maps the reader will find that geographers carry the
_river_ nearly two hundred miles beyond its usual current. In fact,
they appropriate the whole estuary, which, in places, is nearly one
hundred miles in width, and call it a river--a river which lacks the
characteristics of a river, the currents of which vary