"How know I this? Because--the records are scanty, and pity it is that they are not fuller--Cartier himself, and other of the old navigators to these waters, found not only the Basque whaling ships before them, but the nomenclature of all the shores and of the fish in the waters purely Basque. Bucalaos is the Basque name for codfish, and the Basques called the whole coast Bucalaos land, or codfish land, because of the multitudes of codfish along the coast. And up to this day, underlying the thin veneer of saint this and saint that, which superstitious piety has given to every bay and cape and natural object in gulf and on river, you find the old Basque names of places and things--the solid oak beneath the tawdry coating applied by priestly brush for churchly purposes. There is Basque harbor, Basque island, and old Basque fort, and a place known as the spot where these old-time whalers boiled their blubber and cured their catch of fish. It was from these old Basque whalers, whose fathers and forefathers for a thousand or thousands of years had visited this coast in commerce, and who knew every cape, bay, island, shoal, and harbor from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Tourmente, as well as from the old Icelandic pilots, that Columbus learned of the existence of this Western Continent; and when he sailed from Lisbon on his 'world-seeking voyage,' I make no doubt that he as surely knew, by actual information, of America, as I know that the island of Anticosti is but 200 miles below me. And yet I read in a paper somewhere lately that some wise dunce had proposed to 'celebrate the fourth centennial of the discovery of America by Columbus'! That's rich! "To-night the yacht Champlain is swinging at anchor in the harbor of Tadousac, and I am writing in her little cabin with a profound conviction that, a thousand years BEFORE COLUMBUS WAS BORN, a little group of men, Basques by name, then living in southern Europe, a remnant of the old Iberian race, anchored their ships in the same harbor in the month of August annually. Only half a mile to the west of me, the Saguenay, whose bottom is one hundred fathoms deeper down than the bed of the St. Lawrence, pours its gloomy current between the stupendous cliffs of rock which make for its resistless passage an awful portal. These monstrous cliffs of bare, gray rock have not changed in form or color or appearance since some force, next to that of the Almighty, lifted them from the under world and placed them to stand eternal sentinels at the entrance to this strange, impressive, awe-inspiring river--for the wind and wear of unnumbered centuries have left them cold and bare, soilless and treeless, save where some stunted shrub, with a single root, has spiked itself into a crevice, and there stands starved and dying, as it lives its withered life.