them in affectionate reference to the labours of
which the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses are a
record). It is some six mile drive from the
thriving and populous city of Montreal.

This is not, perhaps, the first time you have
been told that there are no more genial and
hospitable folks in British North America,
where capital punishment will never be abolished,
so far as killing with kindness is concerned,
than the inhabitants of Montreal. The Canadians
generally labour under a notion—not an
entirely mistaken one, perhaps—that their
brethren of the old country do not hold them
in sufficient estimation; that the glare and
bustle and sensational whirligig life of the
United States offer greater attractions to
English tourists who cross the Atlantic than the
solid, steady, sober-sided existence of the British
Provinces. They have an idea that an Englishman
travelling in the States gets rid of Canada
at an early stage in his journey, or just looks in
upon it at the fag end thereof, and that the real
centres of his curiosity are in the cities of the
Atlantic seaboard. The "Kenucks," and the
"Blue noses," and the other provincials, murmur
at this, but always in a placable and good-
humoured manner. "At least," says Canada,
"the better half of Niagara belongs to us.
At least, the Falls of Montmorency are
equal to those of Gennessee; at least, the
St. Lawrence is not inferior to the Ohio,
and the Thousand Islands beat Boston
Harbour. There is not on the whole North
American continent a city so picturesque as
Quebec; and if you are curious about redskins,
we can show you plenty of Indians—fat, copper-
coloured, prosperous, and happy, instead of the
gaunt, dwarfed, half-starved wretches who are
being 'improved' off the face of the earth by
the restless Yankees." These grievances,
however, do not prevent the Montrealese from
pressing the heartiest of welcomes on every
stranger who comes within their gates. It is
enough for them that he is a stranger, and they
immediately take him in. He is asked out,
systematically and stubbornly, to dinner. If he
pleads previous engagements, he is asked whether
Monday week or Tuesday fortnight will suit
him; and the dinner comes due, and must be
met, like a bill. The Amphitryons who cannot
bag him for a dinner are fain to secure him for
breakfasts or suppers or lunches. Then they
drive him out in trotting-waggons in summer,
and in sleighs in winter; they take him to the
club and to the "kink;" they wrap him up, as
in buffalo-robes, with kind offices and generous
deeds. When I say that my experiences of
Montreal hospitality on the last occasion of my visit
to the royal town included the gift of a roll of
Canada homespun sufficient to make a couple of
travelling suits, and the loan of a railway car,
combining sitting-room, bedrooms, smoking-
rooms, and kitchen, in which I travelled at my
ease many hundreds of miles, you will be enabled
to infer that the people of Montreal are not in the
habit of doing things by halves, and that when
they say they are glad to see you, they mean it.

Hospitality has generally its price; and I have
known more than one country where the price
exacted was slightly beyond the value of the
article itself; but the terms on which kindness
is obtainable in Montreal are not very onerous.
You are not expected to praise everything you
see, to make flowing speeches, or to write a
book, declaring Lower Canada in general, and
Montreal in particular, to be the grandest and
most glorious country and city in the universe.
Nor are you absolutely required to furnish the
album of every young lady fresh from boarding-
school, or at boarding-school, with autographs
and cartes de visite, or to write scraps of poetry
of your own composition (not to exceed thirty
lines) on little bits of parti-coloured silk, to be
returned, post paid, to localities a thousand miles
away, there to be sewn into patchwork counter-
panes. Nor are you asked for opinions on the
abstract questions of Woman's Rights, Moral
Suasion, or International Law. You are only
expected to eat a great deal, to pass the bottle,
to go round the Mountain, to go through the
Tube, and to visit Cuagnawagha. There are
always plenty of kind friends, with knives, forks,
bottles, carriages, and horses, to enable you to
accomplish the first two feats. For the performance
of the third, every assistance will be
rendered you by the courteous officials of the
Grand Trunk Railway of Canada; and the
Victoria-bridge at Montreal is, in its way, quite as
great a wonder of the world as the Falls of
Niagara. When you have despatched that
tremendous piece of engineering—when you
have not only ridden through the tube on a
locomotive, but walked through it, and inspected
the identical rivet driven into the iron by the
Prince of Wales, the last of I know not how
many millions—you have done all that is required
of you in Montreal, with the exception of visiting
Cuagnawagha. The name strikes you at
once. What is it? where is it? you eagerly
inquire. It is an Indian village, you are told,
easily accessible. The best way is by road to
La Chine, where you can obtain a canoe and be
ferried across to the village itself. The very
word "canoe" sets you all agog to go. Sunday,
your counsellors continue, is the best day for a
visit to Cuaguawagha. The squaws are then in
their best dresses, and the papooses or children
are neat and clean, for the inspection of visitors.
It was on a Saturday afternoon that I made an
appointment with a hospitable friend to start
for Cuagnawagha at noon on the morrow. All
night I dreamt about it. A radiant chaos filled
my sleep of moccasins and wampum-belts, of
wigwams and medicine-men, of war-paint and
calumets, of tomahawks and scalps, of fire-water
and unburied hatchets, of gallant, braves and
beauteous squaws, of the Council Fire and the
Happy Hunting-Grounds.

Sunday morning dawned. It was a Canadian
summer Sunday, which is perhaps saying enough;
but our open carriage had a hood, and the day,
though warm, was so beautiful that we felt it
would have been a sin to remain at home.
Perforce, however, so fierce was the glare of the