through a cultivated country, and upon its banks,
after leaving Sorel, are situate the little towns
of St. Ours, St. Rock, St. Denis, St. Antoine, St.
Marks, Beloeil, Chambly, and St. Johns. Small
steamers, tug-boats, and rafts pass from the St.
Lawrence to Lake Champlain (which lies almost
wholly within the United States), following the
Richelieu to Chambly, where it is necessary, to
avoid rapids and shoals, to take the canal that
follows the river's bank twelve miles to St. Johns,
where the Canadian custom-house is located.
Sorel is called William Henry by the Anglo-Saxon
Canadians. The paper published in this
town of seven thousand inhabitants is La
Gazette de Sorel. The river which flows past the
town is called, without authority, by some
geographers, Sorel River, and by others St. Johns,
because the town nearest its source is St. Johns,
and another town at its mouth is Sorel. There
are about one hundred English-speaking families
in Sorel. The American Waterhouse Machinery
supplies the town with water pumped from the
river at a cost of one ton of coal per day. At
ten o'clock on Monday morning we resumed
our journey up the Richelieu, the current of
which was nothing compared with that of the
great river we had left. The average width of
the stream was about a quarter of a mile, and the
grassy shores were made picturesque by groves
of trees and quaintly constructed farm-houses.