In point of numbers, picturesque old Quebec comes a long way behind its slightly younger sister, Montreal, but the former also has a fine port. In the summer it is the point where immigrants, travelling third-class by the St. Lawrence route, disembark to go to their various destinations by rail. Its chief industries are connected with leather and wood. It has also several cotton factories. Other industrial centres are Hull, with wood-working establishments, ranging from saw mills to match factories; Sherbrooke, where the first cotton factory in Canada was opened in 1844; St. Hyacinthe, Three Rivers, Sorel and Valleyfield. The forests are one of the chief assets of Quebec. Leaving out of account the recently-annexed northern regions, eighty million acres, estimated to be worth $450,000,000, are still the absolute property of the province; but forty-five million acres have been leased to lumbermen and six million acres are in private hands. Not very long ago a government “forestry service” was established for the protection of the existing forests and the replanting of “wild and denuded lands.” In 1905 the Laurentides National Park, designed especially for the preservation of fish and game, was Quebec’s only forest reserve. Now ten reserves, comprising 165,000 square miles, have been set apart to be held for the benefit of the whole population and of posterity. The immense value of such reserves may be guessed at from the fact that even under the old haphazard system, the timber limits brought into the provincial coffers during a period of about forty-five years a sum of nearly $29,000,000 (£5,800,000). The lumber industry gives employment, during the winter months, when most other work is slack, to over twenty thousand men, in addition to the thousands of log-drivers required every spring to take the season’s cut down the rivers to market. Much of the government forests (chiefly of pulpwood) have been inaccessible, but the construction of the Transcontinental Railway, which passes through these forests, is adding immensely to their value, and, whenever they are opened to lumbering operations, numerous pulp and paper mills are likely to be erected. In 1912 the province already had twenty-eight of these mills.