er into the rising waters and begin their long
adventurous journey through the rapids. At every abrupt turn, at
every fall, where logs jam and pile, must be found the strong and
nimble river-drivers, practised at the dangerous work, at making
their way across the floating timber, breaking the jams, aiding with
ax and pike-pole the free descent of this moving forest.

"A hard time!" exclaimed Legare with scorn. "The young fellows of
to-day don't know the meaning of the words. After three months in
the woods they are in a hurry to get home and buy yellow boots,
stiff hats and cigarettes, and to go and see their girls. Even in
the shanties, as things are now, they are as well fed as in a hotel,
with meat and potatoes all winter long. Now, thirty years ago ..."

He broke off for a moment, expressing with a shake of his head those
prodigious changes that the years had wrought.

"Thirty years ago, when the railway from Quebec was built, I was
there; that was something like hardship, I can tell you! I was only
sixteen years of age but I chopped with the rest of them to clear
the right of way, always twenty-five miles ahead of the steel, and
for fourteen months I never clapped eye on a house. We had no tents,
summer or winter, only shelters of boughs that we made for ourselves.
And from morning till night it was chop, chop, chop,--eaten by the
flies, and in the course of the same day soaked with rain and
roasted by the sun."

"Every Monday morning they opened a sack of flour and we made
ourselves a bucketful of pancakes, and all the rest of the week,
three times a day, one dug into that pail for something to eat. By
Wednesday, no longer any pancakes, because they were all stuck
together; nothing there but a mass of dough. One cut off a big chunk
of dough with one's knife, put that in his belly, and then chopped
and chopped again!"

"When we got to Chicoutimi where provisions could reach us by water
we were worse off than Indians, pretty nearly naked, all scratched
and torn, and I well remember some who began to cry when told they
could go home, because they thought they would find all their people
dead, so long bad the time seemed to them. Hardship! That was
hardship if you like."

"That is so," said Chapdelaine, "I can recall those days. Not a
single house on the north side of the lake: no one but Indians and a
few trappers who made their way up here in summer by canoe and in
winter with dog-sleds, much as it is now in