Next they rode along Sherbrooke Street, past a beautiful art gallery and some fine residences to the McGill University grounds, which lie at the foot of the mountain slope. This college was founded in 1821 and named from its founder the Honorable James McGill. Then, just a little further on, is the Royal Victoria college for women, donated by Lord Strathcone, and a beautiful statue of Queen Victoria ornaments the entrance steps—this statue was designed by the Princess Louise, one of Queen Victoria's own children. Miss Anstruther said she hoped some day her little students would become McGill graduates.
As motors are not allowed on Mount Royal, it was decided that they would go out to Lachine by the lower road, in this way they passed very many interesting places. Near the Place d'Armes stood the house of Sieur du Luth, from whom the city of Duluth was named, and west of St. Lambert hill was a tiny house once the home of Cadillac, who left the then little French village to proceed westward and found the now beautiful city of Detroit.
In the years which came after, such men as Washington Irving, General Montgomery, Benjamin Franklin, Benedict Arnold, John Jacob Astor all lived for some time in Montreal, and all had something to do with the making of its history. In many places the Antiquarian Society has marked the various sites where these famous men made their homes.
On this lower road to Lachine, and within hearing of the sound of the rapids, stands a very old windmill, said to have been built in 1666 when La Salle came to Montreal,—there are also crumbling remains of a fortified château nearby and there is a well-founded legend that the old chimney attached thereto was built by Samuel de Champlain himself in his trading post of logs. The snowflakes of three hundred winters have fallen into that great fireplace since those stones and mortar were laid.
The Lachine Rapids were first run by a steamer in the summer of 1840 by the side-wheeler Ontario—afterward this boat's name was changed to The Lord Sydenham—and for very many years an Indian pilot took the wheel and steered the course over treacherous rock and reef. From very early times these rapids had been navigated by Indians in their frail canoes, and they knew where the water was deep enough for a large boat to go.
George Dudley was keen to see the village of Lachine itself and seemed quite worried because everybody was alive and well, as he had but recently read in his history of the Massacre of Lachine, but he had forgotten that it happened in 1689. It was in the summer of that year that the Iroquois descended upon this little hamlet on a very dark night and surrounded every house at midnight, and then with terrible yells and war-whoops destroyed every house and killed every living being.
It was nearly five o'clock when the little party left their borrowed automobile and boarded the steamer to shoot the rapids—they got right in the bow of the boat and Oisette stood on a chair where she could see the flying spray.
Altogether, it had been a wonderful event in her life, for French Canadian children, as a rule, do not have a whole day's outing, and when at last she was home again and tried to tell her mother about it, the good woman crossed herself to think of the dangers her little girl had come through.