assistance no less than three offers of marriage
were made and accepted among the passengers.
And, did you ever hear of a courtship more
expeditious than that of the mystic William Blake,
pletor ignotus? He had had some great trouble.
"I pity you, William," remarked a young
lady. "Then I am sure I love you with all my
heart," quoth William Blake; and they went off
and got married at once. But if she had not
added the endearing "William " to the expression
of pity, that young lady might never have
become Mrs. Blake.

There was not much to remind one of the
Celestial Empire at the clean little village of La
Chine. It was nearly all French. The hotel,
or tavern, was, as usual, half and half. The
little sanded parlour was decorated with
portraits of Queen Victoria and the late Duke of
Wellington, side by side with a Madonna and
Child, and his Grace the Archbishop of Quebec,
in full canonicals, and the Montreal Herald lay
on the table cheek by jowl with L'Echo du
Canada. A French servant-maid brought us
some English beer, and on our expressing a
desire to hire a canoe, the Scotch landlord hailed
two boatmen, one of whom was an Indian and
the other an Irishman, to pole us across to
Cuagnawagha. It only wanted a raven, and a
cage, and the celebrated professor of Trafalgar-
square, to make the exhibition of the happy
family complete.

We crossed the magnificent river, at this
point far enough from the La Chine Rapids to be
lying calm in the sun, like one sheet of burnished
gold. There was no awning to the canoe, and
a Venetian gondola would perhaps have been
preferable as a conveyance; but there was
something after all in riding lightly on the bosom of
the famous St. Lawrence in a real canoe of
birch bark, with a real Red Indian at the stern.
I will say nothing of the Irishman at the prow,
for he rather detracted from the romance of the
thing. A Canadian vovageur now, softly
murmuring La complainte de Cadieux, or chanting
in lugubrious tones the fearful history of Marie
Joseph Corriveau and the iron cage of Quebec:
such an oarsman would have left nothing to be
desired. You must get on to the Ottawa river
ere you can catch your voyageur. The Irishman
and the Indian did not attempt the "Row,
Brothers, Row," or any other variety of the
Canadian boat-song. It was worth coming a
good many miles, however, to hear the Irishman
endeavour to make himself understood in the
French tongue by the redskin, and that noble
savage, not to be behindhand in courtesy,
endeavouring to talk English to the Irishman. I
must not omit to mention that the noble savage
wore a pea-jacket and a billycock hat, and
informed us that, in addition to the skill and
dexterity with which he feathered his oar, or rather
his pole, he was "one dam good pilot."

As the opposite shore was approached, the
navigation became somewhat difficult, and the
channel rather a matter to be faintly hoped for
than confidently fixed upon. Several times we
were, as I thought, within an inch of being
"snagged"—the "snags," in this case, not
being trunks of trees, as on the Mississippi, but
sharp-pointed fragments of rock. However, the
Indian successfully guided us through the watery
labyrinth, and in some degree justified his claim
to the title of "one dam good pilot." There
were more rocky fragments on the bank;
indeed, the littoral of the St. Lawrence, opposite
La Chine, might remind the Eastern traveller of
the shores of Arabia Petræa; and the quarter of
a mile walk or so, lying between the river and
the village, was, to one of the visitors to
Cuagnawagha, of a gouty constitution, and to
another with tight boots, and to a third with
bunions and an irritable temper, agonising.

We brought up at last in a long straggling
street, or rather lane, of hovels built of loose
stones and planks nailed together in apparently as
loose a fashion. Here and there, perhaps, a little
mud had been used to finish off the corners, or
stick on the chimney-pots; but looseness was
the prevailing characteristic of the street
architecture. When I call these dwellings hovels, I
use the word in no offensive sense. They were
hovels in construction, but exceedingly clean,
and abundantly furnished. The doors and
windows were all wide open, and the domestic
arrangements of the inhabitants of Cuaguawagha
were almost as fully exposed to public gaze as
those of a doll's-house in Mr. Cremer's London
shop-windows. As the majority of the houses
comprised only one room, the publicity given to
the domesticity of the place may be more easily
understood. They were, as I have hinted,
supplied with abundant chattels. I saw more than
one four-post bedstead, several easy-chairs, and
any number of profusely ornamented tea-trays.
Next to these, the most fertile product of
Cuagnawagha appeared to be babies. I could not at
first make out what had become of the children
of medium growth, nor of the seven-year olds up
to the ten-year olds; but I learnt subsequently
that the elder ones were at church, and the
younger at play in the cemetery. In Cuagnawagha
itself the babies ruled the roast. They
were very fat—of a rich oily fatness indeed,
and, in the ridiculous swaddling-bands in which
they were enveloped, looked not unlike very
little sucking-pigs seen through reddish-brown
spectacles. But all the babies I saw were, I am
pleased to say, immaculately clean. Those who
had any hair, had it of a lustrous raven line, such
as Horace Vernet has put on the head of the baby
Napoleon, in that exquisite vignette where the
hero is depicted, naked, and one hour old,
sprawling on a fragment of tapestry. Their
black eyes, too, had a merry twinkle; and
altogether their coppery hue was not unpleasing,
and they were the nicest babies I had seen for
many a long month. In Cuagnawagha a baby is
called a "papoose;" and a solemn rite, the
performance of which is exacted from all strangers,
is that the papooses should be kissed. I had
been warned in Montreal that the maternal
squaws of Cuagnawagha were sometimes
actuated by mercenary motives in offering their
babes to the caresses of tourists; and that the
request, "Anglis, kiss papoose," was not
unfrequently followed by another, "Give little