mountains beyond the mouth of the Saguenay, and must have represented
an immense destruction of forest timber.

The steamer is two hours crossing the St. Lawrence from Rivière du Loup
to Tadousac. The Saguenay pushes a broad sweep of dark blue water down
into its mightier brother that is sharply defined from the deck of the
steamer. The two rivers seem to touch, but not to blend, so proud and
haughty is this chieftain from the north. On the mountains above
Tadousac one could see banks of sand left by the ancient seas. Naked
rock and sterile sand are all the Tadousacker has to make his garden
of, so far as I observed. Indeed, there is no soil along the Saguenay
until you get to Ha-ha Bay, and then there is not much, and poor
quality at that.

What the ancient fires did not burn the ancient seas have washed away.
I overheard an English resident say to a Yankee tourist, "You will
think you are approaching the end of the world up here." It certainly
did suggest something apocryphal or antemundane,--a segment of the moon
or of a cleft asteroid, matter dead or wrecked. The world-builders must
have had their foundry up in this neighborhood, and the bed of this
river was doubtless the channel through which the molten granite
flowed. Some mischief-loving god has let in the sea while things were
yet red-hot, and there has been a time here. But the channel still
seems filled with water from the mid-Atlantic, cold and blue-black, and
in places between seven and eight thousand feet deep (one and a half
miles). In fact, the enormous depth of the Saguenay is one of the
wonders of physical geography. It is as great a marvel in its way as
Niagara.

The ascent of the river is made by night, and the traveler finds