The valley broadened out into an immense flat plain with but few traces of the wilder hills of New Brunswick. About the line is a belt of prosperity forty miles deep, all of it worked by the habitant owners of the narrow farms, all of it so rich that in the whole area from the border to the city of Quebec there is not a poor farmer.
Before reaching Riviere du Loup we saw the high peaks of the Laurentine Mountains on the far side of the St. Lawrence, and on our side of the stream passed a grim little islet called L'Islet au Massacre, where a party of Micmac Indians, fleeing from the Iroquois in the old days, were caught as they hid in a deep cave, and killed by a great fire that their enemies built at the mouth.
We saw a few seals on the rocks of the river, but not a hint of the numbers that gave Riviere du Loup its name. It is a cameo of a town with falls sliding down-hill over a chute of jumbled rocks into a logging pool beneath.
Riviere du Loup is in the last lap of the journey to Quebec. There are a score or so of little hamlets, the names of which—St. Alexandre, St. Andre, St. Pascal, St. Pacome, St. Valier and so on—sound like a reading from the Litany of the Saints. And, passing the last of them, we saw across the narrowed St. Lawrence a trail of lace against the darkness of the Laurentine hills, a mass of filigree that moved and writhed, so that we understood when some one said:
"The Montmorency Falls."
A moment later we saw across the stream the city of Quebec, a hanging town of fairyland, with pinnacle and spire, bastion and citadel delicate against the quick sky. A city of romance and charm, to which we hurried by the very humdrum route of the steam ferry that crosses to it from the Levis side.