The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 41, March, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 41, March, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Subsequently, I tried many times to trace it, but without success. Many
strangers visit Lorette during the summer season, and it is possible
that some virtuoso, struck by the associative value of the relic, may
have prevailed on its owner to part with it for a consideration. There
are people who would have possessed themselves of it without the
exchange of a consideration. Should this meet the eye of its present
possessor, and if so be that the medal came into his hands on the
consideration principle, so that he need not be ashamed of it, he will
confer a favor by giving the correct reading of the Indian name. For
"Toussahissa," as I have rendered it, is not exact, but only as near
as I can make it out from my pencil-memoranda, which, written in a
note-book that did occasional duty as a fly-book, have been partially
obliterated in that spot by the contact of a large and remarkably gaudy
salmon-fly, whose repose between the leaves is disturbed, perhaps, by
aquatic nightmares of salmon gaping at him from whirling eddies.
Between Lorette and the unexplored wilderness that stretches away to
polar desolation there is but a narrow selvage of civilization. Looking
toward it from my windows at Quebec, I could see the blue, serrated
ridge of highlands beyond which the surveyor has never yet run his
lines,--beyond which the surveyor's lines would be superfluous, indeed,
and futile; for the soil is of the barren, rocky kind, and the timber of
the scrubby. Not quite so savage is this frontier, indeed, as the wild
precincts described by the Nebraska editor, whose meditations for a
leader used to be cut short, occasionally, by the bellowing of the
shaggy bison at his window, or the incursion of the redoubtable
"grizzly" into his wood-shed where the elk-meat hung. But, in the clear,
cold nights that precede the punctual and distinct winter of these
regions, the black bears often come down from their fastnesses amid the
wild ridges, and astonish the drowsy _habitant_ and his household by
their pranks among his pigs and calves: also in the spring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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