more fertile. Scattered
farms, with square, unpainted houses, and long, thatched barns, began
to creep over the hills toward the river. There was a hamlet, called St.
Charles, with a rude little church and a campanile of logs. The cure,
robed in decent black and wearing a tall silk hat of the vintage of
1860, sat on the veranda of his trim presbytery, looking down upon us,
like an image of propriety smiling at Bohemianism. Other craft appeared
on the river. A man and his wife paddling an old dugout, with half a
dozen children packed in amidships a crew of lumbermen, in a sharp-nosed
bateau, picking up stray logs along the banks; a couple of boatloads
of young people returning merrily from a holiday visit; a party of
berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the country-side
was in evidence on the river. We felt quite as if we had been "in the
swim" of society, when at length we reached the point where the Riviere
des Aunes came tumbling down a hundred-foot ladder of broken black
rocks. There we pitched our tents in a strip of meadow by the
water-side, where we could have the sound of the falls for a
slumber-song all night and the whole river for a bath at sunrise.

A sparkling draught of crystal weather was poured into our stirrup-cup
in the morning, as we set out for a drive of fifteen miles across
country to the Riviere a l'Ours, a tributary of the crooked, unnavigable
river of Alders. The canoes and luggage were loaded on a couple of
charrettes, or two-wheeled carts. But for us and the guides there were
two quatre-roues, the typical vehicles of the century, as characteristic
of Canada as the carriole is of Norway. It is a two-seated buckboard,
drawn by one horse, and the back seat is covered with a hood like an
old-fashioned poke bonnet. The road is of clay and always rutty. It runs
level for a while, and then jumps up a steep ridge and down again, or
into a deep gully and out again. The habitant's idea of good driving
is to let his horse slide down the hill and gallop up. This imparts a
spasmodic quality to the motion, like Carlyle's style.

The native houses are strung along the road. The modern pattern has a
convex angle in the roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic adaptation
of the Mansard. The antique pattern, which is far more picturesque,
has a concave curve in the roof, and the eaves project like eyebrows,
shading the flatness of the face. Paint is a rarity. The prevailing
colour is the soft