Off the track some ten or twenty miles, though, almost anywhere, some of the materials, at least, for good, regular poetry of the old-fashioned kind are to be found.  A mill, for instance, with a wooden wheel,—­no demoralizing iron about it, in fact, except what cannot well be dispensed with, in view of wear and tear.  A white cottage, where the miller dwells serene; mossy roof, red brick chimney, and no lightning-rod or any other iron, being the principal features of the serene miller’s abode.  Cherries, in that tranquil person’s garden, that are nearly ripe, and roses of a delicate red,—­but none so ripe or so red as the lips and cheeks of the serene miller’s daughter, who trips across the little wooden foot-bridge over the mill-stream, singing a birdy kind of song as she goes.  She is clad in a black velvet bodice and russet skirt, and has no iron about her of any description, unless, indeed, it is in her blood,—­where it ought to be.  The breath of kine waiting to be relieved of their honest milk, which is a good, solid kind of fluid in such places, and meanders about the land with great freedom in company with honey.  All these things will be very scarce in the world by-and-by, on which account it seems to be a judicious thing to go off the track a little, now and then, if only to “say that we have seen them.”

In following the graphic narratives of the Prince of Wales’s tour, the mind naturally wandered away to places not visited by him, although within easy distance of his fore-ordered course.  It is well that there are places left to talk about!  Let us conjure up a few old reminiscences of one,—­a silent, primitive little nook of the North, within an hour’s ride of Quebec, but too insignificant a spot for the coveted distinction of a royal visit.  Crowned heads, then, will have the goodness to transfer their attention, and skip to the next article.

The nook to which I refer is Lorette, in Lower or French Canada, where it is commonly called Jeune Lorette, to distinguish it from Ancienne Lorette,—­a less interesting place, distant from it about four miles.

Jeune Lorette is situated about eight miles north-west of Quebec, upon the beautiful, romantic stream called the St. Charles, which rushes down many a picturesque gorge, and winds through many pleasant meadows, in its course of some twenty miles from Lake St. Charles away up in the hills to the St. Roch suburb of Quebec.  Here it assumes the character of a deep, tortuous dock, incumbered with the debris of many ship-yards, and reflecting the skeleton shapes of big-ribbed merchantmen on the stocks.  Here, too, it is generally called the Little River; probably to distinguish it from the great River St. Lawrence, into which it oozes at this point.

But higher up, as I have said, the St. Charles is romantic and rushes on its fate.  At Lorette, it divides the village in twain:  a western section, for the most part peopled by French-Canadian habitans; an eastern one, inhabited by half-breed Indians, a remnant of the once powerful Hurons of old.