[Footnote 1:  This name is given by the French Canadians to the bobolink or rice bunting.  It is an old, I believe an obsolete, French word, and means “braggart.”]

Many a year has gone by since I last looked upon this picture, and then it was a winter scene; for it was near the end of March, which is winter enough in this region, and the blue water of the bay there was flagged over with a rough white pavement of crisp snow.  I think I see it now, faintly ruled with two lines of sapins, or young fir saplings,—­one marking out the winter road to the Island of Orleans, and the other that from Quebec to Montmorency; and this memory recalls to me how it fell upon a certain day, the incidents of which are expanding upon my mind like those dissolving views that come up out of the dark, I set up a camp-fire just where that wood-barge nods drowsily at anchor, about a mile this side of the town.  It was a sort of bivouac a man is not likely to forget in a hurry; not that it makes much of a story, after all,—­but a trifling scratch will sometimes leave its mark on a man for life.  I was quartered in Quebec then; didn’t go much into society, though, because I devoted much of my young energies to shooting and fishing, which were worth any expenditure of energy in those days.  And so I restricted my evening rounds of duty to one or two houses which were conducted on the always-at-home principle, walking in and hanging up my wide-awake when it suited me, and staying away when it didn’t,—­which was about the oftener.

In the winter of eighteen hundred and no matter what, I got three months’ leave of absence, with the intention of devoting a great portion of it to a long-planned expedition, an invasion of the wild mountain-region lying north of Quebec, towards the head-waters of the Saguenay,—­a district seldom disturbed by the presence of civilized man, but abandoned to the semi-barbarous hunter and trapper, and frequented much by that prince of roving bucks, the shy but stately caribou.  I need not go into the details of my two-months’ hunt.  It was like any other expedition of the sort, about which so much information has already been given to the world in the pleasant narratives of the wandering family of MacNimrod.  I succeeded in procuring many hairy and horned trophies of trap and rifle, as well as in converting myself from some semblance of respectability into the veriest looking cannibal that ever breakfasted on an underdone enemy.  The return from the chase furnished the little adventure I have alluded to,—­a very small adventure, but deeply impressed upon a memory now a good deal cut up with tracks and traces of strange beasts of accidents, quaint “vestiges of creation,” ineffaceably stamped upon what poor Andrew Romer used to call the “old red sandstone,” in playful allusion to what his friends well knew was a heart of hearts.