I ought to say that these Quebec steamers are, as regards saloon accommodation, and the class of people you meet with on board, not quite on a par with those which ply between Liverpool and New York. Perhaps the latter are fitted up almost too splendidly. ‘When the stormy winds do blow’—when everyone is ill—when you are in that happy state of mind when man delights you not, or woman either—the gilded saloons, the velvet cushions, the plate glass and ornamented panels, seem quite out of place; to say nothing of the luxurious dinners, which not everyone is able to enjoy. Such things are better fitted for summer seas and summer skies. CHAPTER III. ARRIVAL AT QUEBEC. Once more I am on _terra firma_, and on Canadian soil, where I breathe a balmier air and rejoice in a clearer atmosphere than you in England can have any idea of. After all, we were in twenty-four hours before the mail steamer, the _Sarmatian_, which you must own is a feather in the cap of the _Sarnia_. One hears much of the St. Lawrence, but it is hard to exaggerate its beauties. When you are fairly in it, after having escaped the fog of the Newfoundland Banks and the icebergs of the Gulf, on you sail all day and night amidst islands, and past mountains, their tops covered with snow, stretching far away into the interior, guarding lands yet waiting to be tilled, and primeval forests yet ignorant of the woodcutter’s axe. A hardy people, mostly of French extraction, inhabit that part of the province of Quebec; but as you reach nearer to the capital, the land becomes flatter, and the signs of human settlement more frequent in the shape of wooden houses, each with its plot of ground, where the rustics carry on the daily work of the farm, or in the shape of villages, inhabited by ship-wrecked fishermen, who have intermarried with the French, and whose children, if they bear the commonest of English names, are at the same time utterly ignorant, not only of the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but of the faith and morals Milton held. They are a lazy people, living chiefly on the harvest of the sea, and doing little when that harvest is over. Men are wanted to cut down timber, and they come in gangs of two or three hundred, and spend a week in riotous debauchery before they can be got to work. Few English settlers go into that region, yet they can easily make a living there if they are inclined to rough it in the bush, and are not afraid of coarse living and hard work. Villages, churches, hotels, are all built of wood on a stone foundation, and, painted as the houses are, they remind one not a little of Zaandam, and the little wooden cottages you may see in that old quarter of the world. But the original colonists are a poor people, living frugally and with little desire for the comforts and luxuries of life. It is the same in Quebec, where the poor all talk French, and where the Protestants are in a very small minority. In Quebec there is little to attract the stranger.