d,
lying in the broad limestone basin north of the Laurentian Mountains.
The southern and eastern shores have been settled for twenty or thirty
years; and the rich farm-land yields abundant crops of wheat and oats
and potatoes to a community of industrious habitants, who live in little
modern villages, named after the saints and gathered as closely as
possible around big gray stone churches, and thank the good Lord that
he has given them a climate at least four or five degrees milder than
Quebec. A railroad, built through a region of granite hills, which will
never be tamed to the plough, links this outlying settlement to the
civilised world; and at the end of the railroad the Hotel Roberval,
standing on a hill above the lake, offers to the pampered tourist
electric lights, and spring-beds, and a wide veranda from which he can
look out across the water into the face of the wilderness.

Northward and westward the interminable forest rolls away to the shores
of Hudson's Bay and the frozen wastes of Labrador. It is an immense
solitude. A score of rivers empty into the lake; little ones like the
Pikouabi and La Pipe, and middle-sized ones like the Ouiatehouan and La
Belle Riviere, and big ones like the Mistassini and the Peribonca; and
each of these streams is the clue to a labyrinth of woods and waters.
The canoe-man who follows it far enough will find himself among lakes
that are not named on any map; he will camp on virgin ground, and make
the acquaintance of unsophisticated fish; perhaps even, like the
maiden in the fairy-tale, he will meet with the little bear, and the
middle-sized bear, and the great big bear.

Damon and I set out on such an expedition shortly after the nodding
lilies in the Connecticut meadows had rung the noon-tide bell of summer,
and when the raspberry bushes along the line of the Quebec and Lake St.
John Railway had spread their afternoon collation for birds and men. At
Roberval we found our four guides waiting for us, and the steamboat took
us all across the lake to the Island House, at the northeast corner.
There we embarked our tents and blankets, our pots and pans, and bags
of flour and potatoes and bacon and other delicacies, our rods and guns,
and last, but not least, our axes (without which man in the woods is a
helpless creature), in two birch-bark canoes, and went flying down the
Grande Decharge.

It is a wonderful place, this outlet of Lake St. John. All the floods
of twenty rivers ar