bade farewell to a place in which our hours of anxiety had been many,
and those of pleasure few. We had, however, experienced a great deal of
kindness from those around us, and, though perfect strangers, had tasted
some of the hospitality for which this city has often been celebrated. I
omitted, in my former letter, telling you how we formed an acquaintance
with a highly respectable merchant in this place, who afforded us a
great deal of useful information, and introduced us to his wife, a very
elegant and accomplished young woman. During our short acquaintance, we
passed some pleasant hours at their house, much to our satisfaction.

I enjoyed the fresh breeze from the river along the banks of which our
road lay. It was a fine sight to see the unclouded sun rising from
behind the distant chain of mountains. Below us lay the rapids in their
perturbed state, and there was the island of St. Anne's, bringing to our
minds Moore's Canadian boat song: "We'll sing at Saint Anne's our
parting hymn."

The bank of the St. Laurence, along which our road lay, is higher here
than at Montreal, and clothed with brushwood on the summit, occasionally
broken with narrow gulleys. The soil, as near as I could see, was sandy
or light loam. I noticed the wild vine for the first time twining among
the saplings. There were raspberry bushes, too, and a profusion of that
tall yellow flower we call Aaron's golden rod, a _solidago_, and the
white love-everlasting, the same that the chaplets are made of by the
French and Swiss girls to adorn the tombs of their friends, and which
they call _immortelle_; the Americans call it life-everlasting; also a
tall purple-spiked valerian, that I observed growing in the fields among
the corn, as plentiful as the bugloss is in our light sandy fields in
England.