The spirit of the Canadian is excited by vanity; he delights in talking to his friends and relatives of the excursions he has made to those distant regions; and he glories in the perils which he has encountered: his vanity would not be gratified by chopping down trees and tilling the earth; he deems this therefore merely a secondary pursuit, and he sets about it with reluctance: self interest, on the contrary, it is that rouses the citizen of the states into action, and accordingly he hastily emigrates to a distant part of the country, where he thinks land is in the most rising state, and where he hopes to be able the soonest to gratify a passion to which he would readily make a sacrifice of every social tie, and of all that another man would hold dear. On the second day of our journey from Quebec to Montreal we reached Trois Rivieres, lying nearly midway between the two places. This town is situated on the banks of the St. Lawrence, close to the mouth of the River St. Maurice, the largest of upwards of thirty that fall into the St. Lawrence, on the north-west side alone, between Quebec and Montreal. This river, before it unites with the St. Lawrence, is divided into three streams by two large islands, so that to a person sailing past its mouth it appears as if three distinct rivers disembogued at the one spot; from hence it is that the town of Trois Rivieres receives its name. The St. Maurice is not navigable for large vessels, neither is it for sloops more than a few miles above its mouth. In bateaus and canoes, however, it may be ascended nearly to its source; from whence, if credit is to be given to the accounts of the Indians, the distance is not very great to the head of navigable rivers that fall into Hudson’s Bay; at a future day, therefore, if ever the dreary and inhospitable waste through which it passes shall put on a different aspect from what it now wears, and become the abode of human beings instead of wild beasts, the St. Maurice may be esteemed a river of the first importance in a commercial point of view; at present there are a few scattered settlements on each side of it, from its mouth as far as the iron works, which are about nine miles distant from Trois Rivieres; beyond that the country is but little known except to Indians. [Sidenote: TROIS RIVIERES.]