On the stations we talked with men in British khaki trousers who told us in a language in which Canadian French and camp English was strangely mingled of the service they had seen on the British front.
It is the district where the clever and painstaking French agriculturist gets every grain out of the soil, a district where we could see the spire of a parish church every six miles, the land of a people, sturdy, devout, tenacious and law-abiding, the "true 'Canayen' themselves,"
"And in their veins the same red stream;
The conquering blood of Normandie
Flowed strong, and gave America
Coureurs de bois and voyageurs
Whose trail extends from sea to sea!"
as William Henry Drummond, a true poet who drew from them inspiration for his delightful dialect verse, describes them.
The railway passes for hundreds of miles between habitant farms. The land is beautifully cared for, every fragment of rock, from a boulder to a pebble, having been collected from the soil through generations, and piled in long, thin caches in the centres of the fields. The effect of passing for hundreds of miles between these precisely aligned cairns is strange; one cannot get away from the feeling that the rocky mounds are there for some barbaric tribal reason, and that presently one will see a war dance or a sacrifice taking place about one of them.
The farms themselves have a strange appearance. They have an abnormally narrow frontage. They are railed in strips of not much greater breadth than a London back garden, though they extend away from the railway to a depth of a mile and more. At first this grouping of the land appears accidental, but the endlessness of the strange design soon convinces that there is a purpose underlying it.
Two explanations are offered. One is that the land has been parcelled out in this way, and not on a broad square acreage, because in the old pioneer days it afforded the best means of grouping the homesteads together for defence against the Red Man. The other is that it is the result of the French-Canadian law which enforces the division of an estate among children in exact proportion, and thus the original big farms have been split up into equal strips among the descendants of the original owner. Either of these explanations, or the combination of them, can be accepted.
At Campbellton, a pretty, toy-like town, close up to La Baie de Chaleur, there is gathered a remnant of the Micmac Indians, whom the first settlers feared. They have a settlement of their own on a peak of the Baie, and one of their chiefs had travelled to Halifax to be among those who welcomed the son of the Great White Chief.
Campbellton let us into the lovely valley of the Matapedia, an enchanted spot where the river lolls on a broad bed through a grand country of grim hills and forests. Now and then, indeed, its channel is pinched into gorges where its water shines pallidly and angrily amid the crowded shadows of rock and tree; usually it is the nursemaid of rich, flat valleys and the friend of the little frame-house hamlets that are linked across its waters by a spidery bridge of wooden trestles. At times beneath the hills it is swift and combed by a thousand stony fingers, and at other times it is an idler in Arcadie, a dilettante stream that wanders in half a dozen feckless channels over a desert of white stones, with here and there the green humpback of an island inviting the camper.
Beyond Matapedia we got the thrill of the run, an abrupt glimpse of the St. Lawrence, steel-blue and apparently infinite, its thirty miles of breadth yielding not a glimpse of the farther side. A short distance on, beyond Mont Joli, a place that might have come out of a sample box of French villages, the railway keeps the immense river company for the rest of the journey.