Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Nearly every watercourse, whether the stream be perennial or not, is a cañon; a narrow valley, with precipitous walls. In many cases, these cañons are so numerous that they cut the plateau into shreds--a mere skeleton of a country. Of such a section Lieutenant Ives, who explored the course of lower Colorado, writes: “The extent and magnitude of the system of cañons in that direction is astounding. The plateau is cut into shreds by these gigantic chasms, and resembles a vast ruin. Belts of country, miles in width, have been swept away, leaving only isolated mountains standing in the gap; fissures so profound that the eye cannot penetrate their depths are separated by walls whose thickness one can almost span; and slender spires, that seem tottering on their base, shoot up a thousand feet from vaults below.”

But few of these cañons contain water throughout the year. Most of them are dry at all times, excepting for a few days in the early spring, or for a few minutes or hours at most after a heavy shower. It is characteristic of Western North America, as of all arid countries, that the streams, away from their sources in the mountains, lose water, rather than gain it, in traversing the lower country. The dry atmosphere and the thirsty soil absorb it, and, in many cases, large streams entirely disappear in this way. This is the case to a great extent in the plateau country, and still more so in the Great Basin, where these are the only outlets to the drainage.

Those who have long and carefully studied the Grand Cañon of the Colorado do not hesitate for a moment to pronounce it by far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles. If its sublimity consisted only in its dimensions, it could be sufficiently set forth in a single sentence. It is more than 200 miles long, from five to twelve miles wide, and from 5,000 to 6,000 feet deep. There are in the world valleys which are longer and a few which are deeper. There are valleys flanked by summits loftier than the palisades of the Kaibab. Still the Grand Cañon is the sublimest thing on earth. It is not alone by virtue of its magnitudes, but by virtue of the whole--its _ensemble_.

The space under immediate view from our stand-point, fifty miles long and ten to twelve wide, is thronged with a great multitude of objects so vast in size, so bold yet majestic in form, so infinite in their details, that as the truth gradually reveals itself to the perceptions it arouses the strongest emotions. Unquestionably the great, the overruling feature is the wall on the opposite side of the gulf. Can mortal fancy create a picture of a mural front a mile in height, seven to ten miles distant, and receding into space in either direction? As the mind strives to realize its proportions its spirit is broken and its imagination completely crushed. If the wall were simple in its character, if it were only blank and sheer, some rest might be found in contemplating it; but it is full of diversity and eloquent with grand suggestions. It is deeply recessed by alcoves and amphitheatres receding far into the plateau beyond, and usually disclosing only the portals by which they open into the main chasm. Between them the promontories jut out ending in magnificent gables with sharp mitred angles. Thus the wall rambles in and out, turning numberless corners. Many of the angles are acute, and descend as sharp spurs like the forward edge of a ploughshare. Only those alcoves which are directly opposite to us can be seen in their full length and depth. Yet so excessive, nay, so prodigious, is the effect of foreshortening, that it is impossible to realize their full extensions.

Numerous detached masses are also seen flanking the ends of the long promontories. These buttes are of gigantic proportions, and yet so overwhelming is the effect of the wall against which they are projected that they seem insignificant in mass, and the observer is often deluded by them, failing to perceive that they are really detached from the wall and perhaps separated from it by an interval of a mile or two.

At the foot of this palisade is a platform through which meanders the inner gorge, in whose dark and sombre depths flows the river. Only in one place can the water surface be seen. In its winding the abyss which holds it extends for a short distance towards us and the line of vision enters the gorge lengthwise. Above and below this short reach the gorge swings its course in other directions and reveals only a dark, narrow opening, while its nearer wall hides its depth. This inner chasm is 1,000 to 2,000 feet deep. Its upper 200 feet is a vertical ledge of sandstone of a dark rich brownish colour. Beneath it lies the granite of a dark iron-grey shade, verging towards black, and lending a gloomy aspect to the lowest deeps. Perhaps half a mile of the river is disclosed. A pale, dirty red, without glimmer or sheen, a motionless surface, a small featureless spot enclosed in the dark shade of the granite, is all of it that is here visible. Yet we know it is a large river, 150 yards wide, with a headlong torrent foaming and plunging over rocky rapids.

The walls of the Grand Cañon and the level of the plateau descend by a succession of great steps, produced by faults, until the level of the river is reached at the mouth of the Grand Wash; and thus ends the Grand Cañon.

Below the Grand Wash, a dry stream bed which enters the Colorado from the north, the river turns south again and enters the Black Cañon of Lieutenant Ives’ report--a cañon which would be a remarkable feature were it not brought into such close juxtaposition with that described above.

Below it the river runs in narrow valleys and low cañons to its mouth.

THE AVON

JOHN WILSON CROKER

There are Avons and Avons. Of course, Shakespeare’s Avon is the famous stream which takes precedence of all others. It rises at Naseby, in the yard of a small inn near the church. So for two things is that village of Naseby renowned. A good many years ago a hospitable agriculturist, resident near Naseby, asked me to come over and see the battle-field and source of the Avon. I came and saw. The battle-field, truth to say, impressed me in no degree more than the river-head; I saw a quantity of ploughed land, undulating in true Northamptonshire fashion. Doubtless grim old Oliver and hot Prince Rupert saw a good deal more; and that heavy land is responsible for many oaths on the part of the prince, and prayers from the ever-prayerful lips of the Roundhead general. But Naseby field is very much like all the rest of Northamptonshire. There is not a hill in the country, or a brook that a boy cannot leap, or a church spire that a boy cannot throw a stone over, or enough level ground for a game of cricket. Yet it is a capital hunting county nevertheless.

Descending the Avon from Naseby, we pass through much dreary Northamptonshire scenery. At a village called Catthorpe, we are reminded of a certain poetaster named Dyer. Poetry was in a poor state when the author of _Grongar Hill_ could be considered a poet. He was an amiable clergyman, who wrote mediocre verse; but Horace’s opinion of such verse is peculiarly popular in the present day. The first town of any consequence which the pedestrian reaches is Lutterworth; and concerning Lutterworth there is little to be said, except that Wicliffe was once its rector; and the ashes of the great reformer were disinterred by certain ecclesiastical vultures, and thrown into the brook which runs into the Avon at Lutterworth. So says Fuller, whom Wordsworth has followed: “This brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wicliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”

The next town is Rugby; an immortal town, forever connected with the greatest of school-masters.

The scenery about Avon begins to improve near Newnham Regis; a small village, remarkable for having nothing of the church left except the tower. The rector of Church Lawford is also vicar of King’s Newnham; and as the two villages cannot count five hundred inhabitants, we perhaps need not regret the destruction of the ancient church.

The city of Coventry lies not very far from the Avon. It is, I think, the dirtiest place in England, Bristol and Birmingham not excepted. In days gone by it had great fame, this _Coventria civitas_; and its earl, Leofric, who used to stride about his hall among his dogs,

“His beard a foot before him, and his hair
A yard behind,”

was a worthy ancestor of Lord Palmerston; and we all remember who wrote,

“I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires.”

What strikes me in this city of Coventry--when I look at those noble spires, which Tennyson has immortalized (St. Michael’s is second to Salisbury only), and at the splendid city-hall--is the wonderful change between the past and the present. It is now one of the most sordid and miserable towns in the empire. What generous and magnificent inhabitants must it have had when the spires of St. Michael’s and Trinity were raised heavenwards! I’ll be hanged if Godiva the beautiful would have

“Unclasped the wedded eagles of her belt”

for the present population of Coventry. I fear that among its makers of watches and ribbons there are goodly number of “low churls, compact of thankless earth.”

The beauty of Avon begins where it enters the park of Stoneleigh Abbey, seat of Lord Leigh. The first baron, when Mr. Chandos Leigh, published some elegant poetry. His title to the estate was at one time questioned; and an inventive attorney produced a most marvellous case against him, accusing him and Lady Leigh of pulling down one side of Stoneleigh Church, to get rid of some genealogical testimony furnished by the Monuments, and of causing a huge stone to be dropped on some men who were engaged in building a bridge across the river Sow, it being important to suppress their evidence; I forget how many murders this lawyer (who very justly suffered imprisonment) charged against one of the gentlest and most amiable of men. Of the old abbey nothing is left but a gateway; and the great mansion of the Leighs, though doubtless magnificent and luxurious within, has no external beauty. But the park is redolent of _As you like it_. All this Warwickshire woodland breathes of Shakespeare. Under these stately oaks, the noblest I have ever seen, beside this sparkling river, how sweet it were to moralize with melancholy Jaques, to while away the golden time with joyous Rosalind! As the traveller lies beneath a patrician tree, amid the magical noontide, well might he fancy the mellow voice of Amiens in the distance, cheering the banished Duke with music. Of Stoneleigh village I have only to say, that when last there I found it impossible to obtain a glass of ale; Lord Leigh having an objection to that wholesome liquid. An English village without ale is awful to think of.

Two miles through field and woodland, and we are at Kenilworth. Wise were the monks when they settled down in that green valley. Very quaint is the village that clusters round the old church; traditions of monastic and baronial times linger there; the exteriors of several of the antique houses made me wish to catch a glimpse of the interiors and their inhabitants, which I was not lucky enough to do. They are just the sort of houses where a good dinner and a bottle of rare port is the order of the day. The end of the village near the church is quite another affair; instead of seeming coeval with the castle and the priory, it appears to have sprung up simultaneously with the railway-station. Extremes meet at Kenilworth: in these modern villas you would expect to find no inhabitant less active than a commercial traveller; in the old houses at the other end you would hardly be startled by an interview with Sir Walter Raleigh or rare Ben Jonson.

Of course I ought to describe Kenilworth Castle; but I cannot do it, that’s a fact; besides which, the thing has been done a hundred times. It is a glorious ruin; and as one lies on the turf on a summer day in the shadow of its grey stonework, watching the flying clouds, and the choughs in the ivy, and the little river shimmering through the meadows, and the immoveable old towers decaying in their stately strength, there descends upon the spirit a mystic and unutterable feeling, worth more than all the poetry ever written, ay, or all the claret ever pressed from Bordeaux grapes.

Avon winds back into Stoneleigh Park after leaving Kenilworth, and passes the little village of Ashow, where I tasted the juiciest mulberries I ever ate,--blood-ripe as those wherewith the laughing Naiad Ægle stained the temples of Silenus. Cool and peaceful is that pleasant village, where Avon murmurs softly amid reedy islets. Passing onward, we see a cross upon a wooded hill: there poor Piers Gaveston was beheaded, some five centuries and a half ago. There is a capitally written inscription on the cross. Somewhat farther is Milverton Church, with a quaint wooden tower: they say it is not worth while to build a stone one, as the lightning strikes it so often. But Guy’s Cliff!

Perhaps I had better let those three words stand as sole suggestion of what that exquisite residence is. The strange legend of Guy of Warwick, vanquisher of Colbrand the Dane, and of the Dun Cow, hovers around this delightful old place. But I don’t know whether Mr. Bertie Percy’s poetic dwelling is not surpassed by the mill close thereto.

Few places I have seen dwell in my memory like this beautiful old mill, surrounded by a wealth of water, a luxury of leafage. If there be mills in fairy-land, they are built on this pattern. If the miller’s daughter, “so dear, so dear” to the Laureate that he plagiarized from Anacreon for her sake, had any actual existence, it must have been at a mill like this of Guy’s Cliff.

I scarce dare approach Warwick after Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reaction from a fast, loud, vulgar, sordid life, makes the most refined and poetic natures of America dreamers of dreams. Such, with especial emphasis, was Hawthorne. To him the ideal was more real than reality. What visions he saw in Warwick, where the great castle “floats double” in the lucid Avon; where a strange old-world tranquillity broods over the famous Earl of Leicester’s antique hospital! After Windsor (and I do not forget Alnwick), I think Warwick the noblest castellated building in England. Built into the solid rock, it overhangs Avon with a wild sublimity. As you look down from the windows of the great hall upon the river far beneath, you think that thus may Guinevere and Lancelot have looked, when the angry Queen cast into the water the nine great diamonds, while the doomed barge bore to her burial the lily maid of Astolat. Why over that old broken bridge, green with the ivy of a thousand years, may not the blameless King have passed, and Merlin the sage, and Tristram of Lyonnesse, leading Iseult of Ireland? Who knows? Are these things fables? Are ye enchanters, Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold?

The Earl of Warwick’s courtesy throws the castle open to the public two or three days a week. Rumour says that the late Earl’s housekeeper, whose monument may be seen in Warwick Church, left her master sixty thousand pounds, accumulated by visitors’ fees! At the very gateway you are met by wonders,--an iron porridge-pot of the great Sir Guy, holding a hogshead or two, I suppose. The old knight must have had a rare appetite for breakfast. There is also his sword, a gigantic weapon, which I defy Jacob Omnium to wield with both hands. As for the contents of the castle, I will not say a word about them; though of historical portraits, Vandykes and Rubenses, there is a fine collection. I commend the traveller upon looking out upon Avon from those wondrous rooms, to call back, if he can, the heroic and poetic times when it was possible to build such a castle; when it seemed fit habitation for those who dwelt in it,--for Neville the Kingmaker, to wit, who fills a marvellous page, brilliant with gold and stained with blood, in England’s history; and who well deserved to be found in Shakespeare’s peerless portrait-gallery.

Warwick town is very quaint, and has two old-fashioned hostelries, the Warwick Arms and the Woolpack, at either of which a hungry and thirsty traveller will find ample refreshment of the right sort. From the top of Warwick Church tower there is a magnificent view over a rich country. The church’s chief glory is the Beauchamp Chapel, just 400 years old, a perfect poem in stone, an absolute triumph of the good old artist-workmen, who find no rivals in the days when artists are never workmen, and workmen never artists. Its dead inhabitant was last of the Beauchamp Earls, and that crowned saint, Henry VI., conferred the earldom upon the Kingmaker; thus commencing the third line of its holders, for the first Earl was a Newburgh, or Neuburg, of the Conqueror’s creation; then, two centuries later, it passed through a female to the Beauchamps; two centuries more, and the last Beauchamp was succeeded by a Nevil; on Nevil’s death, “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence” had the earldom, whose son, last of the Plantagenets, ended the fourth line, when he and Perkin Warbeck died on Tower Hill; next came the Dudleys, creatures of Henry VIII., the elder of whom, Lady Jane Grey’s father-in-law and worst enemy, is better known as Duke of Northumberland; then Lord Rich, whose great grand-son married Cromwell’s daughter, was created Earl of Warwick by James I.; and finally George II. conferred the title on Greville, Earl Brooke, ancestor of the present Earl. Thus six families at least have held this famous earldom.

The traveller will of course turn aside to Leamington, town of fashion and frivolity, about a mile and a half from the poetic stream. Leamington owes its existence, as anything beyond a village, to one Dr. Jephson, who hit on the brilliant notion that the mineral waters of the place would cure all possible diseases. A great hotel sprang up, the Regent, which for years was a kind of hospital for Dr. Jephson’s patients. This medical genius is quite deified in the town. There are pleasant gardens dedicated to him, to which none are admitted save subscribers of a guinea, or something of the sort. It is a downright apotheosis (or apodiabolosis) of physic. But other causes concurred to bring Leamington into the first rank of pleasure towns: there is capital hunting in the neighbourhood, and a first-rate pack of hounds. It is almost the metropolis of archery, a pastime which young ladies wisely patronize, since a pretty girl cannot look prettier than in her toxophilite costume of Lincoln-green. Nothing can be more beautiful than the walk by the margin of Avon through Lord Warwick’s park. After passing through several pleasant villages, full of Warwickshire quaintness, we reach Charlecote House, the seat of the Lucy family. It has always appeared to me that Haydon more admirably than any man expressed the feeling which is produced in poetic minds by the places sacred to Shakespeare. Painting under the stress of a noble ambition, with the sad certainty that the age could not perceive his greatness, had injured his health; instead of joining “the vulgar idlers at a watering-place” he sought change of scene at Stratford. How the man enjoyed it, and how vigorously he depicts his enjoyment! “To Charlecote,” says he, “I walked as fast as my legs could carry me, and crossing the meadow, entered the immortalized park by a back pathway. Trees, gigantic and umbrageous, at once announce the growth of centuries: while I was strolling on, I caught a distant view of the old red-bricked house, in the same style and condition as when Shakespeare lived; and on going close to the river-side, came at once on two enormous old willows, with a large branch across the stream, such as Ophelia hung to. Every blade of grass, every daisy and cowslip, every hedge-flower and tuft of tawny earth, every rustling, ancient and enormous tree which curtains the sunny park with its cool shadows, between which the sheep glitter on the emerald green in long lines of light, every ripple of the river with its placid tinkle,

“Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
It overtaketh in its pilgrimage,”

announced the place where Shakespeare imbibed his early, deep, and native taste for forest scenery. Oh, it was delightful, indeed! Shakespeare seemed to hover and bless all I saw, thought of, or trod on. Those great roots of the lime and the oak, bursting, as it were, above the ground, bent up by the depth they had struck into it, Shakespeare had seen--Shakespeare had sat on.

In the same spirit of delight, and with the same realizing power, did the great painter--one of those

“Mighty poets in their misery dead,”

“of whom the world was not worthy”--enjoy Stratford itself. Thus does he write of what he felt as sunset descended on the church where lies all that was mortal of God’s greatest human creature. “I stood and drank into enthusiasm all a human being could feel; all that the most ardent and devoted lover of a great genius could have a sensation of; all that the most tender scenery of river, trees, and sunset sky together could excite. I was lost, quite lost; and in such a moment should wish my soul to take its flight (if it please God) when my time is finished.” God willed otherwise; that great soul took flight in a moment, not of delight, but of agony.

There seem to be always American visitors at Stratford. The refined and thoughtful Americans, like Washington Irving and Hawthorne, have by the intensity of their reverie, thrown a halo of fresh beauty around many places sacred to genius. But too many of these trans-atlantic travellers merely visit a place like Stratford just to say they have been there; and people of that kind are singularly unpleasant to meet. There is a story that one Yankee offered an enormous sum of money for Shakespeare’s house, to take it to the States for exhibition.

I must hurry on. Village after village, quaint and beautiful, lie along the margin of Avon; the keen eye will notice whence Shakespeare drew his choicest descriptions of nature; the longest summer-day will not be too long to loiter around the vicinity of Stratford. One of the best proofs that Avon River flows through rich and lovely country is the multitude of monastic institutions which have left their names to the villages, with here and there a noble tower or graceful gateway.

Founders of abbeys loved a pleasant river flowing through fertile meadows; salmon and trout and eels for fast-days were as important as beeves and deer for festivals. So there are more conventual remains between Naseby and Tewkesbury than in almost any equal distance of which I have knowledge; and the glory of those old ecclesiastic foundations is peculiarly realized as the noble bell-tower of Evesham Abbey rises above the town. The great monastery had lasted more than a thousand years when the ruthless hand of Henry VIII. fell upon it. The bell-tower and a most delightful old gateway are the only relics of it left.

The pilgrim through the beautiful Vale of Evesham comes upon another battle-field, where, 600 years ago, fell a famous leader of the Commons against the Crown. Simon de Montfort fought for the right, so far as we can judge at this remote period; but his antagonist was the greatest general of the day, and afterwards became England’s greatest king. He was but twenty-six when he won the immortal victory known as the Murder of Evesham. If Montfort gave England its first parliament, Edward gave us Wales and Scotland, and made the priests pay taxes in defiance of the Pope. A poetic prince, as well as a gallant; for did he not, when Eleanora the Castilian died in Lincolnshire, cause Peter l’Imagineur to build a stately cross wherever her corpse rested on its way to Westminster? Thanks to the poetry of a railway company, London sees the last and stateliest of those crosses rebuilt in what was once the quiet village of Charing.

There was another abbey at Pershore, which takes its name from its abundant pear-trees. Bredon Hill, not far from this town, is worth climbing, for its fine view towards the Malverns. At the village of Strensham the author of _Hudibras_ was born. I must not be retarded by reminiscences of that most humorous writer of wonderful doggerel; but pass on to Tewkesbury, last of the towns on the Avon, which here falls into the wide and shining Severn. Tewkesbury had also its abbey and its famous battle; it has, moreover, its legend of that unfortunate gentleman, Brictric of Bristol, who, somewhere about the noon of the Eleventh Century, made love to Matilda, daughter of Count Baldwin of Flanders, and then jilted her. ’Twas the unluckiest action of his life. For Matilda married a certain fierce and resolute Duke of Normandy, who used to thrash her occasionally; and this same duke became King of England by the strong hand; and then Matilda coaxed him (nothing loth, I guess) to seize all Brictric’s wide demesnes, and imprison their owner. So the poor fellow died in Winchester Castle; and his manors in half-a-dozen counties, as may be seen by Domesday book, passed into the hands of the queen. So much for the _spretæ injuria formæ_.

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE

CHARLES DICKENS

Queenston, at which place the steamboats start from Toronto (or I should rather say at which place they call, for their wharf is at Lewiston, on the opposite shore), is situated in a delicious valley, through which the Niagara River, in colour a very deep green, pursues its course. It is approached by a road that takes its winding way among the heights by which the town is sheltered; and seen from this point is extremely beautiful and picturesque.

Our steamboat came up directly this had left the wharf, and soon bore us to the mouth of the Niagara: where the Stars and Stripes of America flutter on one side, and the Union Jack of England on the other: and so narrow is the space between them that the sentinels in either fort can often hear the watchword of the other country given. Thence we emerged on Lake Ontario, an inland sea; and by half-past six o’clock were at Toronto.

The country round this town being very flat, is bare of scenic interest; but the town itself is full of life and motion, bustle, business, and improvement. The streets are well paved, and lighted with gas; the houses are large and good; the shops excellent. Many of them have a display of goods in their windows, such as may be seen in thriving county towns in England; and there are some which would do no discredit to the metropolis itself.

The time of leaving Toronto for Kingston is noon. By eight o’clock next morning, the traveller is at the end of his journey, which is performed by steamboat upon Lake Ontario, calling at Port Hope and Coburg, the latter a cheerful, thriving little town. Vast quantities of flour form the chief item in the freight of these vessels. We had no fewer than one thousand and eighty barrels on board, between Coburg and Kingston.

We left Kingston for Montreal on the tenth of May, at half-past nine in the morning, and proceeded in a steamboat down the St. Lawrence River. The beauty of this noble stream at almost any point, but especially in the commencement of this journey when it winds its way among the Thousand Islands, can hardly be imagined. The number and constant successions of these islands, all green and richly wooded; their fluctuating sizes, some so large that for half an hour together one among them will appear as the opposite bank of the river, and some so small that they are mere dimples on its broad bosom; their infinite variety of shapes; and the numberless combinations of beautiful forms which the trees growing on them present: all form a picture fraught with uncommon interest and pleasure.

In the afternoon we shot down some rapids where the river boiled and bubbled strangely, and where the force and headlong violence of the current were tremendous. At seven o’clock we reached Dickenson’s Landing, whence travellers proceed for two or three hours by stage-coach: the navigation of the river being rendered so dangerous and difficult in the interval, by rapids, that steamboats do not make the passage. The number and length of those _portages_, over which the roads are bad, and the travelling slow, render the way between the towns of Montreal and Kingston somewhat tedious.

Our course lay over a wide, uninclosed tract of country at a little distance from the riverside, whence the bright warning lights on the dangerous parts of the St. Lawrence shone vividly. The night was dark and raw, and the way dreary enough. It was nearly ten o’clock when we reached the wharf where the next steamboat lay; and went on board, and to bed.

She lay there all night, and started as soon as it was day. The morning was ushered in by a violent thunder-storm, and was very wet, but gradually improved and brightened up. Going on deck after breakfast, I was amazed to see floating down with the stream, a most gigantic raft, with some thirty or forty wooden houses upon it, and at least as many flag-masts, so that it looked like a nautical street. I saw many of these rafts afterwards, but never one so large. All the timber, or “lumber,” as it is called in America, which is brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in this manner. When the raft reaches its place of destination, it is broken up; the materials are sold, and the boatmen return for more.

At eight we landed again, and travelled by a stage-coach for four hours through a pleasant and well-cultivated country, perfectly French in every respect: in the appearance of the cottages; the air, language, and dress of the peasantry; the signboards on the shops and taverns; and the Virgin’s shrines, and crosses, by the wayside. Nearly every common labourer and boy, though he had no shoes to his feet, wore round his waist a sash of some bright colour: generally red: and the women, who were working in the fields and gardens, and doing all kinds of husbandry, wore, one and all, great flat straw hats with most capacious brims. There were Catholic Priests and Sisters of Charity in the village streets; and images of the Saviour at the corners of cross-roads, and in other public places.

At noon we went on board another steamboat, and reached the village of Lachine, nine miles from Montreal, by three o’clock. There we left the river, and went on by land.

Montreal is pleasantly situated on the margin of the St. Lawrence, and is backed by some bold heights, about which there are charming rides and drives. The streets are generally narrow and irregular, as in most French towns of any age; but in the more modern parts of the city, they are wide and airy. They display a great variety of very good shops; and both in the town and suburbs there are many excellent private dwellings. The granite quays are remarkable for their beauty, solidity and extent.

There is a very large Catholic cathedral here, recently erected; with two tall spires, of which one is yet unfinished. In the open space in front of this edifice, stands a solitary, grim-looking, square brick tower, which has a quaint and remarkable appearance, and which the wiseacres of the place have consequently determined to pull down immediately. The Government House is very superior to that at Kingston, and the town is full of life and bustle. In one of the suburbs is a plank road--not foot-path--five or six miles long, and a famous road it is, too. All the rides in the vicinity were made doubly interesting by the bursting out of spring, which is here so rapid, that it is but a day’s leap from barren winter, to the blooming youth of summer.

The steamboats to Quebec perform the journey in the night; that is to say, they leave Montreal at six in the evening, and arrive in Quebec at six next morning. We made this excursion during our stay in Montreal (which exceeded a fortnight), and were charmed by its interest and beauty.

The impression made upon the visitor by this Gibraltar of America: its giddy heights; its citadel suspended, as it were, in the air; its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways; and the splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn: is at once unique and lasting. It is a place not to be forgotten or mixed up in the mind with other places, or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a traveller can recall. Apart from the realities of this most picturesque city, there are associations clustering about it which would make a desert rich in interest. The dangerous precipice along whose rocky front Wolfe and his brave companions climbed to glory; the Plains of Abraham, where he received his mortal wound; the fortress, so chivalrously defended by Montcalm; and his soldier’s grave, dug for him while yet alive, by the bursting of a shell; are not the least among them, or among the gallant incidents of history. That is a noble Monument, too, and worthy of two great nations, which perpetuates the memory of both brave generals, and on which their names are jointly written.

The city is rich in public institutions and in Catholic churches and charities, but it is mainly in the prospect from the site of the Old Government House, and from the Citadel, that its surpassing beauty lies. The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and forest, mountain-height and water, which lies stretched out before the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of gables, roofs, and chimney-tops in the old hilly town immediately at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze, whose distant rigging looks like spiders’ webs against the light, while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy mariners become so many puppets: all this, framed by a sunken window in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within, forms one of the brightest and the most enchanting pictures that the eye can rest upon.

In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have newly arrived from England or from Ireland, pass between Quebec and Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements of Canada. If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often found it) to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal, and see them grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about their chests and boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be their fellow-passenger on one of these steamboats, and, mingling with the concourse, see and hear them unobserved.

THE TIGRIS

GEORGE RAWLINSON

The Tigris, like the Euphrates, rises from two principal sources. The most distant, and therefore the true source is the western one, which is in latitude 38° 10′ longitude, 39° 20′, nearly, a little to the south of the high mountain lake called Göljik, in the peninsula formed by the Euphrates where it sweeps round between Palon and Telek. The Tigris’s source is near the south-western angle of the lake, and cannot be more than two or three miles from the channel of the Euphrates. The course of the Tigris is at first somewhat north of east, but after pursuing this direction for about twenty-five miles it makes a sweep round to the south, and descends by Arghani Maden upon Diarbekr. Here is a river of considerable size, and it is crossed by a bridge of ten arches a little below that city. It then turns suddenly to the east, and flows in this direction past Osman Kieui to Til where it once more alters its course and takes that south-easterly direction, which it pursues with certain slight variations, to its final junctions with the Euphrates. At Osman Kieui it receives the second or Eastern Tigris, which descends from Niphates, with a due course south, and, collecting on its way the waters of a large number of streams, unites with the Tigris half-way between Diarbekr and Til, in longitude 41° nearly. Near Til a large stream flows into it from the north-east, bringing almost as much water as the main channel ordinarily holds. The length of the whole stream, exclusive of meanders, is reckoned at 1,146 miles. From Diarbekr to Samara the navigation is much impeded by rapids, rocks and shallows, as well as by artificial bunds or dams, which in ancient times were thrown across the stream, probably for purposes of irrigation. The average width of the Tigris in this part of its course is 200 yards, while its depth is very considerable. From the west the Tigris obtains no tributary of the slightest importance, for the Tharthar, which is said to have once reached it, now ends in a salt lake, a little below Tekrit. Its volume, however, is continually increasing as it descends, in consequence of the great bulk of water brought in from the east, particularly by the Great Zab and the Diyaleh.

The Tigris, like the Euphrates, has a flood season. Early in the month of March, in consequence of the melting of the snow on the southern flank of Niphates, the river rises rapidly. Its breadth gradually increases at Diarbekr from 100 or 120 to 250 yards. The stream is swift and turbid. The rise continues through March and April, reaching its full height generally in the first or second week of May. At this time the country about Baghdad is often extensively flooded, not, however, so much from the Tigris as from the overflow of the Euphrates, which is here poured into the eastern stream through a canal. About the middle of May the Tigris begins to fall, and by midsummer it has reached its normal level.

We find but little mention of the Tigris in Scripture. It appears indeed under the name of Hiddekel, among the rivers of Eden, and is there correctly described as “running eastward to Assyria.” But after this we hear no more of it, if we except one doubtful allusion in Nahum, until the Captivity, when it becomes well known to the prophet Daniel, who had to cross it in his journeys to and from Susa. With Daniel it is “the Great River”--an expression commonly applied to the Euphrates; and by its side he sees some of his most important visions. No other mention seems to occur except in the apocryphal books; and there it is unconnected with any real history. The Tigris, in its upper course, anciently ran through Armenia and Assyria. Lower down, from above the point where it enters on the alluvial plain, it separated Babylonia from Susiana. In the wars between the Romans and the Parthians we find it constituting, for a short time (from A. D. 114 to A. D. 117), the boundary line between these two empires. Otherwise it has scarcely been of any political importance. The great chain of Zagros is the main natural boundary between Western and Central Asia; and beyond this, the next defensible line is the Euphrates. Historically it is found that either the central power pushes itself westward to that river; or the power ruling the west advances eastward to the mountain barrier.

The water of the Tigris, in its lower course, is yellowish, and is regarded as unwholesome. The stream abounds with fish of many kinds, which are often of a large size. Abundant water-fowl float on the waters. The banks are fringed with palm trees and pomegranates, or clothed with jungle and reeds, the haunt of the wild-boar and the lion.

THE OISE

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The river was swollen with the long rains. From Vadencourt all the way to Origny, it ran with ever quickening speed, taking fresh heart at each mile, and racing as though it already smelt the sea. The water was yellow and turbulent, swung with an angry eddy among half-submerged willows, and made an angry clatter along stony shores. The course kept turning and turning in a narrow and well-timbered valley. Now, the river would approach the side, and run grinding along the chalky base of the hill, and show us a few open colza fields among the trees. Now, it would skirt the garden-walls of houses, where we might catch a glimpse through a doorway and see a priest pacing in the chequered sunlight. Again the foliage closed so thickly in front, that there seemed to be no issue; only a thicket of willows, overtopped by elms and poplars, under which the river ran flush and fleet, and where a kingfisher flew past like a piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations, the sun poured its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as solid on the swift surface of the stream as on the stable meadows. The light sparkled golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought the hills into communion with our eyes. And all the while the river never stopped running or took breath; and the reeds along the whole valley stood shivering from top to toe.

There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more striking to man’s eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along the shore, is enough to infect a silly human with alarm. Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the stream. Or perhaps they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury of the river’s flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of the river, he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror of the world.

The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying off a nymph. To keep some command on our direction, required hard and diligent plying of the paddle. The river was in such a hurry for the sea! Every drop of water ran in a panic, like as many people in a frightened crowd.

There was never any mistake about the Oise, as a matter of fact. In these upper reaches, it was still in a prodigious hurry for the sea. It ran so fast and merrily, through all the windings of its channel that I strained my thumb, fighting with the rapids, and had to paddle all the rest of the way with one hand turned up. Sometimes it had to serve mills; and being still a little river, ran very dry and shallow in the meanwhile. We had to put our legs out of the boat, and shove ourselves off the sand of the bottom with our feet. And still it went on its way singing among the poplars and making a green valley in the world. After a good woman and a good book, and tobacco, there is nothing so agreeable on earth as a river. I forgave it its attempt on my life; which was after all one part owing to the unruly winds of heaven that had blown down the tree, one part to my own mismanagement, and only a third part to the river itself, and that not out of malice, but from its great preoccupation over its business of getting to the sea. A difficult business, too; for the _détours_ it had to make are not to be counted. The geographers seem to have given up the attempt; for I found no map representing the infinite contortion of its course. A fact will say more than any of them. After we had been some hours, three if I mistake not, flitting by the trees at this smooth, breakneck gallop, when we came upon a hamlet and asked where we were, we had got no farther than four kilometres (say two miles and a half) from Origny. If it were not for the honour of the thing (in the Scotch saying), we might almost as well have been standing still.

Moy (pronounce Moÿ) was a pleasant little village gathered round a _château_ with a moat. The air was perfumed with hemp from neighbouring fields. At the Golden Sheep we found excellent entertainment. German shells from the siege of La Fère, Nürnberg figures, gold fish in a bowl, and all manner of knick-knacks embellished the public room. The landlady was a stout, plain, short-sighted, motherly body, with something not far short of a genius for cookery.... We made a very short day of it to La Fère; but the dusk was falling and a small rain had begun before we stowed the boats....

Below La Fère the river runs through a piece of open pastoral country; green, opulent, loved by breeders; called the Golden Valley. In wide sweeps, and with a swift and equable gallop, the ceaseless stream of water visits and makes green the fields. Kine and horses, and little humorous donkeys browse together in the meadows, and come down in troops to the riverside to drink. They make a strange feature in the landscape; above all when startled, and you can see them galloping to and fro, with their incongruous forms and faces. It gives a feeling as of great unfenced pampas and the herds of wandering nations. There were hills in the distance upon either hand; and on one side the river sometimes bordered on the wooded spurs of Coucy and St. Gobain....

All the time, the river stole away like a thief in straight places, or swung round corners with an eddy, the willows nodded and were undermined all day long; the clay banks tumbled in; the Oise, which had been so many centuries making the Golden Valley, seemed to have changed its fancy, and be bent upon undoing its performance. What a number of things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its heart!

Noyon stands about a mile from the river, in a little plain surrounded by wooded hills, and entirely covers an eminence with its tile roofs surmounted by a long, straight-backed cathedral with two stiff towers. As we got into the town, the tile roofs seemed to tumble up hill one upon another, in the oddest disorder; but for all their scrambling, they did not attain above the knees of the cathedral, which stood upright and solemn, over all. As the streets drew near to this presiding genius, through the market-place under the Hotel de Ville, they grew emptier and more composed. Blank walls and shuttered windows were turned to the great edifice and grass grew on the white causeway. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” The Hôtel du Nord, nevertheless, lights its secular tapers within a stone cast of the church, and we had the superb east end before our eyes all morning from the window of our bedroom....

The most patient people grow weary at last with being continually wetted with rain; except of course in the Scotch Highlands, where there are not enough fine intervals to point the difference. That was like to be our case the day we left Noyon. I remember nothing of the voyage; it was nothing but clay banks and willows and rain; incessant, pitiless, beating rain; until we stopped to lunch at a little inn in Pimprez, where the canal ran very near the river.... That was our last wetting. The afternoon faired up: grand clouds still voyaged in the sky, but now singly and with a depth of blue around their path; and a sunset, in the daintiest rose and gold, inaugurated a thick night of stars and a month of unbroken weather. At the same time, the river began to give us a better outlook into the country. The banks were not so high, the willows disappeared from along the margin, and pleasant hills stood all along its course and marked their profile on the sky.

In a little while, the canal, coming to its last lock, began to discharge its water-houses on the Oise; so that we had no lack of company to fear. Here were all our old friends; the Deo Gratias of Condé and the Four Sons of Aymon journeyed cheerily down stream along with us; we exchanged waterside pleasantries with the steersman perched among the lumber, or the driver hoarse with bawling to his horses; and the children came and looked over the side as we paddled by. We had never known all this while how much we missed them; but it gave us a fillip to see the smoke from their chimneys.

A little below this junction we made another meeting of yet more account. For there we were joined by the Aisne, already a far travelled river and fresh out of Campagne. Here ended the adolescence of the Oise; this was his marriage day; thenceforward he had a stately, brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams. He became a tranquil feature in the scene. The trees and towns saw themselves in him, as in a mirror. He carried the canoes lightly on his broad breast; there was no need to work hard against an eddy: but idleness became the order of the day, and mere straightforward dipping of the paddle, now on this side, now on that, without intelligence or effort. Truly we were coming into halcyon weather upon all accounts, and were floated towards the sea like gentlemen.

We made Compiègne as the sun was going down: a fine profile of a town above the river. Over the bridge, a regiment was parading to the drum. People loitered on the quay, some fishing, some looking idly at the stream. And as the two boats shot in along the water, we could see them pointing them out and speaking one to another. We landed at a floating lavatory, where the washerwomen were still beating the clothes.

We put up at a big, bustling hotel in Compiègne, where nobody observed our presence.... It is not possible to rise before a village; but Compiègne was so grown a town that it took its ease in the morning; and we were up and away while it was still in dressing-gown and slippers. The streets were left to people washing door-steps; nobody was in full dress but the cavaliers upon the town-hall; they were all washed with dew, spruce in their gilding and full of intelligence and a sense of professional responsibility. Kling, went they on the bells for the half-past six, as we went by. I took it kind of them to make me this parting compliment; they never were in better form, not even at noon upon a Sunday.

There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen--early and late--who were already beating the linen in their floating lavatory on the river. They were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged their arms boldly in and seemed not to feel the shock. It would be dispiriting to me, this early beginning and first cold dabble, of a most dispiriting day’s work. But I believe they would have been as unwilling to change days with us, as we could be to change with them. They crowded to the door to watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon the river; and shouted heartily after us till we were through the bridge.