In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world against the inroads of the English race. “Nos institutions, notre langue, nos lois,” is the motto of the _habitants_. Their newspapers are filled with church celebrations, village fêtes, speeches of “M. le Curé” at the harvest-home, announcements by the “scherif,” speech of M. Cartier at the consecration of Monseigneur Laroque, blessings of bells, of ships; but of life, nothing--of mention of what is passing in America, not a word. One corner is given to the world outside America: “Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Américaine, quatre millions de piastres,” heads a solid column of holy finance. The pulse-beat of the continent finds no echo here. It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of energy in French or Lower Canada; in journeying from Portland to Quebec, the moment the frontier was passed, we seemed to have come from a land of life to one of death. No more bustling villages, no more keen-eyed farmers: a fog of unenterprise hung over the land; roads were wanting, houses rude, swamps undrained, fields unweeded, plains untilled. If the Eastern Townships and country round Quebec are a wilderness, they are not a desert. The country on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in summer it is hot--mosquitoes are not unknown: even at Tadousac, where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there is sunlight as strong as that of Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic--no house, no boat, no sign of man‘s existence, no beasts, no birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord, walled in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is as nothing; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon--that is all. The “whales and porpoises,” which are advertised by the Tadousac folks as certain to “disport themselves daily in front of the hotel,” are never to be seen in this earth-crack of the Saguenay. The cold, for summer, was intense; nowhere in the world does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so far south as in the longitude of the Saguenay. At night we had a wonderful display of northern lights. A white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died away, and was succeeded by broad white clouds, stretching from east to west, and sending streamers northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery columns in the north, northwest, and northeast, on which all the colors of the rainbow danced and played. After moonrise, the whole seemed gradually to fade away.