The river Peribonca, into which Lake Tchitagama flows without a break, is the noblest of all the streams that empty into Lake St. John.  It is said to be more than three hundred miles long, and at the mouth of the lake it is perhaps a thousand feet wide, flowing with a deep, still current through the forest.  The dead-water lasted for several miles; then the river sloped into a rapid, spread through a net of islands, and broke over a ledge in a cataract.  Another quiet stretch was followed by another fall, and so on, along the whole course of the river.

We passed three of these falls in the first day’s voyage (by portages so steep and rough that an Adirondack guide would have turned gray at the sight of them), and camped at night just below the Chute du Diable, where we found some ouananiche in the foam.  Our tents were on an islet, and all around we saw the primeval, savage beauty of a world unmarred by man,

The river leaped, shouting, down its double stairway of granite, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race.  The after-glow in the western sky deepened from saffron to violet among the tops of the cedars, and over the cliffs rose the moonlight, paling the heavens but glorifying the earth.  There was something large and generous and untrammelled in the scene, recalling one of Walt Whitman’s rhapsodies:—­

“Earth of departed sunsets!  Earth of the mountains misty-topped!  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!  Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!”

All the next day we went down with the current.  Regiments of black spruce stood in endless files like grenadiers, each tree capped with a thick tuft of matted cones and branches.  Tall white birches leaned out over the stream, Narcissus-like, as if to see their own beauty in the moving mirror.  There were touches of colour on the banks, the ragged pink flowers of the Joe-Pye-weed (which always reminds me of a happy, good-natured tramp), and the yellow ear-drops of the jewel-weed, and the intense blue of the closed gentian, that strange flower which, like a reticent heart, never opens to the light.  Sometimes the river spread out like a lake, between high bluffs of sand fully a mile apart; and again it divided into many channels, winding cunningly down among the islands as if it were resolved to slip around the next barrier of rock without a fall.  There were eight of these huge natural dams in the course of that day’s journey.  Sometimes we followed one of the side canals, and made the portage at a distance from the main cataract; and sometimes we ran with the central current to the very brink of the chute, darting aside just in time to escape going over.  At the foot of the last fall we made our camp on a curving beach of sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon in fishing.