“As we approached Quebec, snow lay to the depth of six feet; from the heights of Abraham, the eye rested upon what seemed an immense lake of milk; all smaller irregularities of ground, fences, boundaries, and copse woods, had disappeared; the tops of villages, and scattered farm-houses, with here and there dark lines of pine-wood, and occasionally the mast of some ice-locked schooner, marking the bed of the Charles river, were the only objects peering about it. A range of mountains, sweeping round from west to north, until it meets the St. Lawrence, bounds the horizon; no herald of spring had yet approached this dreary outpost of civilization; we had observed a few blue thrushes in the neighbourhood of Albany, but none had yet reached Canada; two only of the feathered tribe brave the winter of this inclement region—the cosmopolite crow, and the snow-bird, a small white bird, reported to feed upon snow, because it is not very clear what else it can find.
“It would be acting unfairly to Quebec, to describe it as I found it on my arrival, choked with ice and snow, which one day flooded the streets with a profusion of dirty kennels, and the next cased them with a sheet of glass. Cloth or carpet boots, galoshes, with spikes to their heels, iron pointed walking sticks, are the defensive weapons perpetually in employ on these occasions. The direction of the streets too, which are most of them built up a precipice, greatly facilitates any inclination one may entertain for tumbling or neck-breaking.
“The Falls of Montmorency are formed by a little river of that name, near its junction with the St. Lawrence, about five miles north of Quebec. They have a peculiar interest in winter, from the immense cone of ice formed at their foot, which was unimpaired when I visited them, in the second week of April. After winding up a short but steep ascent, the road crosses a wooden bridge, beneath which the Montmorency rushes betwixt its dark grey rocks, and precipitates itself in a broken torrent down a wooded glen on the right. It is not until you have wound round the edge of this glen, which is done by quitting the road at the bridge-foot, that you obtain a view of the Falls; nor was their effect lessened by this approach. A partial thaw, succeeded by a frost, had spread a silvery brightness over the waste of snow. Every twig and branch of the surrounding pine-trees, every waving shrub and briar, was encased in crystal, and glittering to the sun-beams like the diamond forest of some northern elf-land. You are now on the edge of a precipice, to which the Fall itself, a perpendicular of 220 feet, seems diminutive; it is not until you descend, and approach its foot, that the whole majesty of the scene becomes apparent. The breadth of the torrent is about fifty feet; the waters, from their prodigious descent, seem snowy-white with foam, and enveloped in a light drapery of gauzy mist. The cone appears about a hundred feet in height, mathematically regular in shape, with its base extending nearly all across the stream; its sides are not so steep, but that ladies have ascended to the top of it; the interior is hollow. I regret to add that a mill is constructing on this river, which will, by diverting the stream, destroy this imperial sport of nature; or, at least, reduce it to the degradation of submitting to be played off at the miller’s discretion, like a Versailles fountain.
Scene from the Summit of the Fall of Montmorency.
Montmorency Bridge.
“Towards the end of April, the townspeople begin, according to a law of the province, to break up the ice and snow from before their doors; and by the first week in May the streets are tolerably clear. The intermediate state, as may be supposed, is a perfect chaos, through which the stumbling pedestrian, like the arch-fiend of old—
‘Pursues his way,