“I began this letter at Montreal, on board the Swiftsure steam-boat. This is probably the finest steam-boat which has been built, and I was proud to see her under the British flag; the Americans readily conceded her superior claims. The style of living and attendance is more like that of a good hotel, at the west end of London, than any thing I have seen on this side of the Atlantic, notwithstanding the handsome style of some of the American hotels, and the comfort of some of the boarding-houses. There is an ice-house on board, and the owner supplies her table with grapes and peaches from his own garden. “I often feel a strange sensation, when gliding down the American rivers, in these floating palaces; and have sometimes turned away almost ashamed, when bearing down in all this ostentatious luxury on the poor half-naked Indians, in their birch canoes, struggling to reach the shores on which their fathers roamed fearless and independent. “We left Montreal about noon on the 22d, and for sixty miles averaged thirteen miles an hour. The banks of the river, which is from one and a half to three miles broad, though too flat to be romantic, till you approach within thirty miles of Quebec, are interesting, from the white cottages, which seem to form one continued village, and the neat churches, of which two or three are often in sight at once; the spires are usually covered with tin, and have a very dazzling appearance. “The cottages have originally been placed at equal distances from each other, the farms having been laid off, with a front of a given length to the river; but the Canadian custom of dividing the farm between the children of the deceased (more congenial with their indolence than striking deeper into the woods) has broken uniformity by repeated and often inconvenient subdivisions. A mass of deep woods usually bounds the farms, at the distance of a few acres from the river.