The city is built on very irregular ground, and some of the streets are so steep that it is desirable for new comers to have steel spikes screwed into the foot-gear to combat the inclination to proneness on the part of the wearers. Emerging through a postern in the ancient battlemented wall we came out in an uninteresting suburb of small houses, from which a descent led to the margin of the water. Far as the eye could reach a vast snow plain extended, with surface broken into ridges, mounds, and long dark lines, and dotted with opaque blocks from which the church steeples sprung aloft, indicating the sites of villages. The ridges were the hills over the St. Lawrence, the mounds its islands, and the lines its banks, which expand widely on the left to embrace the sweep of the St. Charles Lake, on which stands the projecting ledge of the eastern part of the city. As we approached the Lake, over which our route lay, black specks, which were resolved into sleighs, or men and women on foot, were visible making their way over the ice, which was marked by lines of bushes and branches of trees dressed up in the snow so as to indicate the route, and far away similar black specks could be made out crossing the St. Lawrence below, which has now become the great highway. But not a very smooth road. The surface is far from being level, and consists indeed of a succession of undulations in which the profound cavities sometimes give one a sense of insecure travelling. On the whole, however, the expedition was much to be enjoyed, the air was bracing, and the cold not intense, and the scene “slid into the soul” with all its deep tranquillity. Doubtless it produced a very different effect on the red-nosed Britons who were keeping watch and ward on the ramparts of the citadel, or on the poor “habitant” trudging patiently beside his sleigh-load of wood, and knowing that snow is his portion for the next five months. On our right a continuous movement of white rugged masses, to all appearance like a stream of polar bears, betokened the course of the unfrozen St. Lawrence; on our left rose the high bank of the lake over which we were travelling, and cottages of the villagers; before us the sleighs were streaming towards a point which ran out into the river and beyond which there seemed to be a shallow bay. This was the point at which the Montmorenci river, recovering from its fall, expanded into a broad sheet at its junction with the greater river. Here we arrived in about an hour.