On the Lower St. Lawrence, where it widens to an estuary, six leagues across, a ship from France, the last of the season, holds her way for Quebec, laden with stores and clothing, household utensils, goods for Indian trade, the newest court fashions, wine, brandy, tobacco, and the king’s orders from Versailles. Swelling her patched and dingy sails, she glides through the wildness and the solitude where there is nothing but her to remind you of the great troubled world behind and the little troubled world before. On the far verge of the ocean-like river, clouds and mountains mingle in dim confusion; fresh gusts from the north dash waves against the ledges, sweep through the quivering spires of stiff and stunted fir-trees, and ruffle the feathers of the crow, perched on the dead bough after his feast of mussels among the seaweed. You are not so solitary as you think. A small birch canoe rounds the point of rocks, and it bears two men; one in an old black cassock, and the other in a buckskin coat; both working hard at the paddle to keep their slender craft off the shingle and the breakers. The man in the cassock is Father Morel, aged forty-eight, the oldest country curé in Canada, most of his brethren being in the vigor of youth as they had need to be. His parochial charge embraces. a string of incipient parishes extending along the south shore from Riviere du Loup to Rivière du Sud, a distance reckoned at twenty-seven leagues, and his parishioners number in all three hundred and twenty-eight souls. He has administered spiritual consolation to the one inhabitant of Kamouraska; visited the eight families of La Bouteillerie and the five families of La Combe; and now he is on his way to the seigniory of St. Denis with its two houses and eleven souls. * The father lands where a shattered eel-pot high and dry on the pebbles betrays the neighborhood of man. His servant shoulders his portable chapel, and follows him through the belt of firs, and the taller woods beyond, till the sunlight of a desolate clearing shines upon them. Charred trunks and limbs encumber the ground; dead trees, branchless, barkless, pierced by the woodpeckers, in part black with fire, in part bleached by sun and frost, tower ghastly and weird above the labyrinth of forest ruins, through which the priest and his * These particulars are from the Plan général de l’estât présent des missions du Canada, fait en l’année, 1683. It is a list and description of the parishes with the names and ages of the cures, and other details. See Abeille, I. This paper was drawn up by order of Laval. follower wind their way, the cat-bird mewing, and the blue-jay screaming as they pass. Now the goldenrod and the aster, harbingers of autumn, fringe with purple and yellow the edge of the older clearing, where wheat and maize, the settler’s meagre harvest, are growing among the stumps.