The brothers were fascinated: their admiration had no words.
'This is as bad as the iceberg for making a fellow's brain feel too big for his head,' said Arthur at last. 'We've seen two sublime things, at all events, Bob.'
Clear frosty weather succeeded—weather without the sharp sting of cold, but elastic and pure as on a mountain peak. Being becalmed for a day or two off a wooded point, the skipper sent a boat ashore for fuel and water. Arthur eagerly volunteered to help; and after half an hour's rowing through the calm blue bay, he had the satisfaction to press his foot on the soil of Lower Canada.
There was a small clearing beside a brook which formed a narrow deep cove, a sort of natural miniature dock where their boat floated. A log hut, mossed with years, was set back some fifty yards towards the forest. What pines were those! what giants of arborescence! Seventy feet of massive shaft without a bough; and then a dense thicket of black inwoven branches, making a dusk beneath the fullest sunshine.
'I tell you we haven't trees in the old country; our oaks and larches are only shrubs,' he said to Robert, when narrating his expedition. 'Wait till you see pines such as I saw to-day. Looking along the forest glades, those great pillars upheld the roof everywhere in endless succession. And the silence! as if a human creature never breathed among them, though the log hut was close by. When I went in, I saw a French habitan, as they call him, who minds the lighthouse on the point, with his Indian wife, and her squaw mother dressed in a blanket, and of course babies—the queerest little brown things you ever saw. One of them was tied into a hollow board, and buried to the chin in "punk," by way of bed-clothes.'
'And what is punk?' asked Robert.
'Rotten wood powdered to dust,' answered Arthur, with an air of superior information. 'It's soft enough; and the poor little animal's head was just visible, so that it looked like a young live mummy. But the grandmother squaw was even uglier than the grandchildren; a thousand and one lines seamed her coppery face, which was the colour of an old penny piece rather burnished from use. And she had eyes, Bob, little and wide apart, and black as sloes, with a snaky look. I don't think she ever took them off me, and 'twas no manner of use to stare at her in return. So, as I could not understand what they were saying,—gabbling a sort of patois of bad French and worse English, with a sprinkling of Indian,—and as the old lady's gaze was getting uncomfortable, I went out again among my friends, the mighty pines. I hope we shall have some about our location, wherever we settle.'
'And I trust more intimate acquaintance won't make us wish them a trifle fewer and slighter,' remarked Robert.
'Well, I am afraid my enthusiasm would fade before an acre of such clearing,' rejoined Arthur. 'But, Bob, the colours of the foliage are lovelier than I can tell. You see a little of the tinting even from this distance. The woods have taken pattern by the aurora: it seems we are now in the Indian summer, and the maple trees are just burning with scarlet and gold leaves.'
'I suppose you did not see many of our old country trees?'