In the eighteenth century, Kalm, a Swedish tourist in America, said it could be really called a village, beginning at Montreal and ending at Quebec, "for the farmhouses are never more than five arpents apart, and sometimes but three asunder, a few places excepted;" and two centuries ago a traveller on the river wrote that the houses "were never more than a gunshot apart." All the people are French, retaining the language and old customs, simple-minded and primitive, the same as under the ancient French régime, and excepting that one village, Varennes, has put two towers upon its stately church, all of them are exactly alike. It is recorded that in Champlain's time some Huguenot sailors came up the river piously singing psalm tunes. This did not please the officials, and soon a boat with soldiers put off from one of these villages, and the officer in charge told them that "Monseigneur, the Viceroy, did not wish that they should sing psalms on the great river." The first steamer that came along the St. Lawrence created unlimited dread, horrifying the villagers. Solemnly crossing himself, an old voyageur, who probably thought his trade on the waters endangered, exclaimed, in his astonishment, "But can you believe that the good God will permit all that?" The Richelieu River, the outlet of Lake Champlain, comes in at Sorel, the chief affluent on the southern bank, its canal system making a navigable connection with the Hudson River. Cardinal Richelieu took great interest in early Canadian colonization, and Fort Richelieu was built at the mouth of this river, being afterwards enlarged to prevent Iroquois forays, by Captain Sorel, whose name is preserved in the town. Below, there is an archipelago of low alluvial islands, and the St. Lawrence broadens out into Lake St. Peter, nine or ten miles wide, and generally shallow, this being the head of the tidal influence. On its southern side flows in the St. Francis River, the outlet of Lake Memphremagog and of many streams and lakes in the vast wilderness along the boundary north of Vermont and east of Lake Champlain. At its mouth is the little village of St. François du Lac. As the shores contract below Lake St. Peter, the town of Three Rivers is passed midway between Montreal and Quebec. Here the fine river St. Maurice, another great lumber-producing stream, flows in upon the northern bank, two little islands dividing its mouth into a delta of three channels, thus naming the town. The St. Maurice is full of rapids and cataracts, the chief being Shawanagan Fall, about twenty miles inland, noted for its grandeur and remarkable character. The river, suddenly bending and divided into two streams by a pile of rocks, falls nearly one hundred and fifty feet and dashes against an opposing wall, where the reunited stream forces its way through a narrow passage scarcely a hundred feet wide. The two lofty rocks bounding this abyss are called La Grande Mere and Le Bon Homme. The headwaters of St. Maurice