It is indeed a foreign air that breathes around us as we make the harmless, friendly voyage from Point Levis to Quebec.  The boy on the ferry-boat, who cajoles us into buying a copy of Le Moniteur containing last month’s news, has the address of a true though diminutive Frenchman.  The landlord of the quiet little inn on the outskirts of the town welcomes us with Gallic effusion as well-known guests, and rubs his hands genially before us, while he escorts us to our apartments, groping secretly in his memory to recall our names.  When we walk down the steep, quaint streets to revel in the purchase of moccasins and water-proof coats and camping supplies, we read on a wall the familiar but transformed legend, L’enfant pleurs, il veut son Camphoria, and remember with joy that no infant who weeps in French can impose any responsibility upon us in these days of our renewed honeymoon.

But the true delight of the expedition begins when the tents have been set up, in the forest back of Lake St. John, and the green branches have been broken for the woodland bed, and the fire has been lit under the open sky, and, the livery of fashion being all discarded, I sit down at a log table to eat supper with my lady Greygown.  Then life seems simple and amiable and well worth living.  Then the uproar and confusion of the world die away from us, and we hear only the steady murmur of the river and the low voice of the wind in the tree-tops.  Then time is long, and the only art that is needful for its enjoyment is short and easy.  Then we taste true comfort, while we lodge with Mother Green at the Sign of the Balsam Bough.

I.

Under the white birches.

Men may say what they will in praise of their houses, and grow eloquent upon the merits of various styles of architecture, but, for our part, we are agreed that there is nothing to be compared with a tent.  It is the most venerable and aristocratic form of human habitation.  Abraham and Sarah lived in it, and shared its hospitality with angels.  It is exempt from the base tyranny of the plumber, the paper-hanger, and the gas-man.  It is not immovably bound to one dull spot of earth by the chains of a cellar and a system of water-pipes.  It has a noble freedom of locomotion.  It follows the wishes of its inhabitants, and goes with them, a travelling home, as the spirit moves them to explore the wilderness.  At their pleasure, new beds of wild flowers surround it, new plantations of trees overshadow it, and new avenues of shining water lead to its ever-open door.  What the tent lacks in luxury it makes up in liberty:  or rather let us say that liberty itself is the greatest luxury.

Another thing is worth remembering—­a family which lives in a tent never can have a skeleton in the closet.