"We dare not tell you to yield to fear, but be prudent. Though prudence may be akin to fear, you never more required all your wits about you. It is very unlikely you will ever select this road again, though it should be a short cut. Such are some of the dangerous streets in their main features. There are thoroughfares, on the other hand, to which fancy lends imaginary charms; the street in which you live, for instance. You think it better, more agreeable. Each object it contains becomes familiar, nay cherished by you--the houses, their doors, their gables. The very air seems more genial. A fellowship springs up between you and your threshold--your land. You get to believe they know you as you know them--softening influences--sweet emanations of 'Home.'"--_Translation._ _THE UPPER TOWN._ The Upper Town in 1608, with its grand oaks, its walnut trees, its majestic elms, when it formed part of the primeval forest, must have been a locality abounding in game. If Champlain, his brother-in-law, Boullé, as well as his other friends of the Lower Town, [9] had been less eager in hunting other inhabitants of the forest infinitely more dreaded (the Iroquois), instead of simply making mention of the foxes which prowled about the residency (_l'abitation_), they would have noted down some of the hunting raids which were probably made on the wooded declivities of Cape Diamond and in the thickets of the Coteau Sainte Geneviève, more especially when scurvy or the dearth of provisions rendered indispensable the use of fresh meats. We should have heard of grouse, woodcock, hares, beavers, foxes, caribou, bears, &c., at that period, as the probable denizens of the mounts and valleys of ancient Stadacona. In 1617 the chase had doubtless to give way to tillage of the soil, when the first resident of the Upper Town, the apothecary Louis Hébert, established his hearth and home there. "He presently," (1617) says Abbé Ferland, "commenced to grub up and clear the ground on the site on which the Roman Catholic cathedral and the Seminary adjoining now stand, and that portion of the upper town which extends from St. Famille Street up to the Hôtel-Dieu. He constructed a house and a mill near that part of St. Joseph Street where it received St. François and St. Xavier Streets. These edifices appear to have been the first which were erected in the locality now occupied by the upper town." At that period there could have existed none other than narrow paths, irregular avenues following the sinuosities of the forest. In the course of time these narrow paths were levelled and widened. Champlain and Sir David Kirtk bothered themselves very little with improving highways. Overseers of roads and _Grand-Voyers_ were not then dreamed of in _La Nouvelle France_: those blessed institutions, macadamized [10] roads, date for us from 1841.