Little Rivers; a book of essays in profitable idleness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 209 pages of information about Little Rivers; a book of essays in profitable idleness.

Little Rivers; a book of essays in profitable idleness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 209 pages of information about Little Rivers; a book of essays in profitable idleness.
smell the delicate vanishing perfume of forest flowers; and the incense of rolls of birch-bark, crinkling and flaring in the camp-fire; and the soothing odour of balsam-boughs piled deep for woodland beds—­the veritable and only genuine perfume of the land of Nod.  The thin shining veil of the Northern lights waves and fades and brightens over the night sky; at the sound of the word, as at the ringing of a bell, the curtain rises.  Scene, the Forest of Arden; enter a party of hunters.

It was in the Lake St. John country, two hundred miles north of Quebec, that I first heard my rustic incantation; and it seemed to fit the region as if it had been made for it.  This is not a little pocket wilderness like the Adirondacks, but something vast and primitive.  You do not cross it, from one railroad to another, by a line of hotels.  You go into it by one river as far as you like, or dare; and then you turn and come back again by another river, making haste to get out before your provisions are exhausted.  The lake itself is the cradle of the mighty Saguenay:  an inland sea, thirty miles across and nearly round, lying in the broad limestone basin north of the Laurentian Mountains.  The southern and eastern shores have been settled for twenty or thirty years; and the rich farm-land yields abundant crops of wheat and oats and potatoes to a community of industrious habitants, who live in little modern villages, named after the saints and gathered as closely as possible around big gray stone churches, and thank the good Lord that he has given them a climate at least four or five degrees milder than Quebec.  A railroad, built through a region of granite hills, which will never be tamed to the plough, links this outlying settlement to the civilised world; and at the end of the railroad the Hotel Roberval, standing on a hill above the lake, offers to the pampered tourist electric lights, and spring-beds, and a wide veranda from which he can look out across the water into the face of the wilderness.

Northward and westward the interminable forest rolls away to the shores of Hudson’s Bay and the frozen wastes of Labrador.  It is an immense solitude.  A score of rivers empty into the lake; little ones like the Pikouabi and La Pipe, and middle-sized ones like the Ouiatehouan and La Belle Riviere, and big ones like the Mistassini and the Peribonca; and each of these streams is the clue to a labyrinth of woods and waters.  The canoe-man who follows it far enough will find himself among lakes that are not named on any map; he will camp on virgin ground, and make the acquaintance of unsophisticated fish; perhaps even, like the maiden in the fairy-tale, he will meet with the little bear, and the middle-sized bear, and the great big bear.

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Little Rivers; a book of essays in profitable idleness from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.