gs bore so strong a flavor of the backwoods that it was hard
mentally to locate them within college walls.

We were roused from dinner by the announcement that the Long Sault Rapid
was at hand, and gladly deserted one of the meanest tables we had ever
encountered to partake of one of nature's rarest banquets.

The boat was entering what seemed a heaving sea, the waters lifting into
dangerous billows, and tossing our craft with unmitigated rudeness,
until it became almost impossible to retain a level footing. But the
appearance of these rapids was different from what we had been led to
expect. The frightful aspect of danger, the rapid down-hill plunge of
the boat, and all the fear-inspiring adornments of the guide-books,
while they might be visible from the shore, did not appear to those on
the deck. Apparently the boat was fixed in the heart of a watery
turmoil, her onward motion lost in her various upward and sidelong
movements, while as for fear, its only evidence lay in little shrieks
full of laughter, as the equilibrium of the craft was suddenly
destroyed.

Five minutes or so of this experience carried us through the perilous
portion of the great rapid, and brought us into safe waters again. The
St. Lawrence has various other rapids between the Long Sault and
Montreal, differing in appearance, some of them being, as far as the eye
can reach, a succession of crossing and tumbling waves, which give the
boat unexpected little heaves, and appear like the waves of a tossing
sea. Here the water plunges rapidly down a narrow throat between two
islands, there it curves round a rocky shore, on which it breaks in
ocean-like billows. But the only point where danger becomes apparent to
untrained eyes is at the La Chine Rapids, near Montreal, where the river
runs through a narrow foaming channel between two long ridges of rock,
over which the water tumbles with a terrible suggestion of peril.

The peak of Montreal mountain has been long visible, and now we rapidly
approach the long line of Victoria bridge, the great pride of Canadian
engineering. Under this we glide with a gymnast at the mast-head, whose
erected feet seem nearly to touch the bridge; and in a short time we
round in to the wharf and are ashore in the largest city of Canada.

FROM NEW YORK TO WASHINGTON IN 1866.

HENRY LATHAM.

[It is not our purpose to enter into descriptions of the cities
of the United States. They are sufficiently familiar