So this is how they happened to be sailing past the hemlock-clad hills of Murray Bay, upon that bright, clear morning, and I’ll warrant that, if you ever play golf upon the course far above the town, as many of you doubtless have often done, and you will look out upon the great, turbid and raging river, where perhaps you can see the bobbing back of a white porpoise, you will think different thoughts than those which are connected with a sliced drive or a miserable putt. Like veritable gnats upon the surface of the tide-swept stream, the vessels kept upon their way, passing the trading-post of Tadoussac (once a flourishing settlement, but now abandoned), the channel of Orleans, and the spuming falls of Montmorenci. They drifted by the brown rocks of Quebec, on, on, up the blue and charging river, until they came opposite that rounded mountain which lifts its head high above the present city of Montreal. All was solitude. Sixty-eight years before this Jacques Cartier, the navigator, had found a numerous savage population, but now all had vanished, and only a few wandering Algonquin redskins peered at them from the edge of the forest. Here are the fiercest of rapids, which, if you pass through to-day, you will find to be dangerous and an exciting adventure. The vigorous Champlain endeavored to paddle up them with a few of the childlike Algonquins. His courage was greater than his ability to stem the whirling foam and tempestuous waves. Oars, paddles, poles, and pikes could not force the thin birch-bark canoes up the swift-moving St. Lawrence, and he was forced to return, acknowledging himself beaten. When he mounted the deck of his vessel, the redmen made rude sketches upon the planking of what he would find above, and spoke of a mighty water-fall (Niagara Falls) where the river plunged downward in a mass of tempestuous spray. Champlain listened with pleasure to these stories of what lay beyond, but he had to return, as De Chastes so willed it. After an uneventful voyage the adventurers reached the shores of France. The gray-haired De Chastes, worn out by the rigors of the voyage, now passed to the great beyond, leaving his title to the great land of New France to Sieur de Monts, who immediately petitioned the King to allow him to colonize Acadie, a region defined as extending from Philadelphia to Montreal. Truly these early adventurers had magnificent ideas of distance, quite in keeping with their ambitious designs of conquest! The King readily gave him what he desired, so, with one vessel, he sailed from Havre de Grace upon the seventh day of April, 1604. But how about the adventure-loving Champlain? He remained at home not only for that year, but for five full years, while De Monts and his men were having plenty of hard knocks and experience in the bleak land of New France.