In the year 1534, the Breton mariner, Jacques Cartier, sailed up the St. Lawrence till he could see land on both sides. Next year he came again with three well-appointed vessels (none over one hundred and twenty tons burden) to colonize and to trade. It was he who called a small bay, in which his vessels lay upon the Saint’s day, St. Lawrence, a name afterwards extended to the “Great River of Canada,” and to the gulf into which it flows. It was he, too, who, penetrating later in the year far up the river, bestowed the title of “Mont Royale”—now anglicized to Montreal—upon the “Mountain” beneath which, over a century later, the devout and gallant Maisonneuve began the settlement destined to grow into Canada’s greatest city. Cartier himself spent one winter at the point where the St. Charles enters the St. Lawrence, near the Indian village of Stadacona. But a greater man than he was to have the honour of founding Quebec. Cartier’s men suffered horribly from the cold and from scurvy, against which ills they did not know how properly to protect themselves, and in the spring the remnant of the company sailed for home, carrying off with them the chief, Donnacona, and nine other Indians. Two or three other attempts to establish French settlements on the St. Lawrence were made by Cartier, Roberval and La Roche, but it was not till 1608 that Champlain at last “well and truly laid” the foundations of Quebec. Of his company also two-thirds died, during the first winter, of scurvy, but this time the French were there to stay, and for a century and a-half Quebec was both the head and heart of Canada. The proud little city, clinging to and climbing upon the rock, was the seat of the French rulers, the centre of the colony which—despite government restrictions, despite its own early limitations as a mere trading post and mission station, despite the terrible hostility of the Iroquois and the frequent attacks of the English, despite the “wanderlust” of its own more energetic sons, which led to a dissipation of the strength of New France as a whole—struck its roots so deep into the soil, that through all vicissitudes it has preserved to this day its own peculiar type of civilization. To old Quebec, Canadians, whether of French or British descent, turn with much the same feeling that thrills an English heart at the thought of Westminster Abbey. There is something strangely satisfying in the beauty of rock and river, of distant blue hills and shining water, of ancient gabled roofs, grey walls, and antique, harmless-looking cannon; something stirring in memories of the heroes of two races, which mingle at Quebec; and inspiring for the future in the peaceful outcome of the grim struggles of the past.