noisily, for some ten miles, in successive rapids, down this valley,
here at last to mingle its brown waters with the ice-cold, steel-tinted,
St. Lawrence.

When the tide is in, the bay becomes a shallow arm of the great
river,--the sea, we call it. The French are better off than we; they
have the word "_fleuve_" for the St. Lawrence;--other streams are
"_rivières_." Almost daily, at high water, one may watch small schooners
which carry on the St. Lawrence trade head up the bay. They work in
close to shore, drop their anchors and wait for the tide to go out. It
leaves them high and dry, and tilted sometimes at an angle which
suggests that everything within must be topsy-turvy, until the vessel is
afloat again. With a strong wind blowing from the north-east the bay is
likely to be, at high tide, an extremely lively place for the mariner; a
fact which helps perhaps to explain the sinister French name of Malbaie.
The huge waves, coming with a sweep of many miles up the broad St.
Lawrence, hurl themselves on the west shore with surprising vehemence,
and work destruction to anything not well afloat in deep water, or
beyond the highest of high water marks. At such a time how many a
hapless small craft, left incautiously too near the shore, has been
hammered to pieces between waves and rocks!

Tired wayfarers surveying this remote and lovely scene have fancied
themselves pioneers in something like a new world. In reality, here is
the oldest of old worlds, in which pigmy man is not even of yesterday,
but only of to-day. This majestic river, the mountains clothed in
perennial green, the blue and purple tints so delicate and transient as
the light changes, have occupied this scene for thousands of centuries.
No other part of our mother earth is more ancient. The Laurentian
Mountains reared their heads, it may be, long before life appeared