y a year has gone by since I last looked upon this picture, and then it
was a winter scene; for it was near the end of March, which is winter
enough in this region, and the blue water of the bay there was flagged
over with a rough white pavement of crisp snow. I think I see it now,
faintly ruled with two lines of _sapins_, or young fir saplings,--one
marking out the winter road to the Island of Orleans, and the other that
from Quebec to Montmorency; and this memory recalls to me how it fell upon
a certain day, the incidents of which are expanding upon my mind like
those dissolving views that come up out of the dark, I set up a camp-fire
just where that wood-barge nods drowsily at anchor, about a mile this side
of the town. It was a sort of bivouac a man is not likely to forget in a
hurry; not that it makes much of a story, after all,--but a trifling
scratch will sometimes leave its mark on a man for life. I was quartered
in Quebec then; didn't go much into society, though, because I devoted
much of my young energies to shooting and fishing, which were worth any
expenditure of energy in those days. And so I restricted my evening rounds
of duty to one or two houses which were conducted on the always-at-home
principle, walking in and hanging up my wide-awake when it suited me, and
staying away when it didn't,--which was about the oftener.

In the winter of eighteen hundred and no matter what, I got three months'
leave of absence, with the intention of devoting a great portion of it to
a long-planned expedition, an invasion of the wild mountain-region lying
north of Quebec, towards the head-waters of the Saguenay,--a district
seldom disturbed by the presence of civilized man, but abandoned to the
semi-barbarous hunter and trapper, and frequented much by that prince of
roving bucks, the shy but stately caribou. I need not go into the details
of my two-months' hunt. It was like any other expedition of the sort,
about which so much information has already been given to the world in the
pleasant narratives of the wandering family of MacNimrod. I succeeded in
procuring many hairy and horned trophies of trap and rifle, as well as in
converting myself from some semblance of respectability into the veriest
looking cannibal that ever breakfasted on an underdone enemy. The return
from the chase furnished the little adventure I have alluded to,--a very
small adventure, but deeply impressed upon a memory now a good deal cut up
with track