The last Sunday afternoon I smelled the clear pork frying for a farmer’s supper thirty rods off (what a Sunday supper!), the windows being open, and could imagine the _clear_ tea without milk which usually accompanies it. Now the cat-o’-nine-tails are seen in the impenetrable meadows, and the tall green rush is perfecting its tufts. The spotted polygonum (_P. Persicaria_) by the roadside. I scare up a woodcock from some moist place at midday. The pewee and kingbird are killing bees, perched on a post or a dead twig. I bathe me in the river. I lie down where it is shallow, amid the weeds over its sandy bottom; but it seems shrunken and parched; I find it difficult to get _wet_ through. I would fain be the channel of a mountain brook. I bathe, and in a few hours I bathe again, not remembering that I was wetted before. When I come to the river, I take off my clothes and carry them over, then bathe and wash off the mud and continue my walk. I would fain take rivers in my walks endwise. There was a singular charm for me in those French names,—more than in the things themselves. The names of Italian and Grecian cities, villages, and natural features are not more poetic to me than the names of those humble Canadian villages. To be told by a habitant, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that is St. Féréol or St. Anne’s! But I was quite taken off my feet when, running back to inquire what river we were crossing, and thinking for a long time he said _la rivière d’océan_, it flashed upon me at last that it was _La Rivière du Chien_.[249] * * * * * There was so much grace and sentiment and refinement in the names, how could they be coarse who took them so often on their lips,—St. Anne’s, St. Joseph’s; the holy Anne’s, the holy Joseph’s! Next to the Indian, the French missionary and voyageur and Catholic habitant have named the natural features of the land. The _prairie_, the _voyageur_! Or does every man think his neighbor is the richer and more fortunate man, his neighbor’s fields the richest? It needed only a little outlandishness in the names, a little foreign accent, a few more vowels in the words, to make me locate all my ideals at once. How prepared we are for another world than this! We are no sooner over the line of the States than we expect to see men leading poetic lives,—nothing so natural, that is the presumption. The names of the mountains, and the streams, and the villages reel with the intoxication of poetry—Longueuil, Chambly, Barthillon (?), Montilly (?).[250]