The stern and gloomy Saguenay, the largest tributary of the Lower St. Lawrence, is one of the most remarkable rivers in the world. Its main portion is a tremendous chasm cleft in a nearly straight line for sixty miles in the Laurentian Mountains, through an almost unsettled wilderness. These Laurentides make the northern shore of the St. Lawrence for hundreds of miles below Quebec, rising into higher peaks and ridges in the interior, and being the most ancient part of America, the geologists telling us the waves of the Silurian Sea washed against this range when only two small islands represented the rest of the continent. Through this vast chasm the Saguenay brings down the waters of Lake St. John and its many tributaries, some of them rising in the remote north, almost up to Hudson Bay. This lower portion of the river goes through an almost uninhabitable desert of gloomy mountains, the tillable land being in the basin of the Upper Saguenay and Lake St. John, the people of that valley living there in almost complete isolation. Logs and huckleberries are the crops produced on this savage river, the only things the sparse population can depend upon for a living, and the fine blueberries bring them the scant doles of ready money they ever see. The Saguenay's inky waters have the smell of brine as they break in froth upon the shore, and then the air-bubbles show the real color to be that of brandy. The upper tributaries give this color as they flow out of forests of spruce and hemlock and swamps filled with mosses and highly colored roots and vegetable matter. Almost all the lakes and rivers of the vast wilderness north of the St. Lawrence present a similar appearance, their rapids and waterfalls, seen under the sunshine, seeming like sheets of liquid amber.