When the tide is in, the bay becomes a shallow arm of the great river,—­the sea, we call it.  The French are better off than we; they have the word “fleuve” for the St. Lawrence;—­other streams are “rivieres.”  Almost daily, at high water, one may watch small schooners which carry on the St. Lawrence trade head up the bay.  They work in close to shore, drop their anchors and wait for the tide to go out.  It leaves them high and dry, and tilted sometimes at an angle which suggests that everything within must be topsy-turvy, until the vessel is afloat again.  With a strong wind blowing from the north-east the bay is likely to be, at high tide, an extremely lively place for the mariner; a fact which helps perhaps to explain the sinister French name of Malbaie.  The huge waves, coming with a sweep of many miles up the broad St. Lawrence, hurl themselves on the west shore with surprising vehemence, and work destruction to anything not well afloat in deep water, or beyond the highest of high water marks.  At such a time how many a hapless small craft, left incautiously too near the shore, has been hammered to pieces between waves and rocks!

Tired wayfarers surveying this remote and lovely scene have fancied themselves pioneers in something like a new world.  In reality, here is the oldest of old worlds, in which pigmy man is not even of yesterday, but only of to-day.  This majestic river, the mountains clothed in perennial green, the blue and purple tints so delicate and transient as the light changes, have occupied this scene for thousands of centuries.  No other part of our mother earth is more ancient.  The Laurentian Mountains reared their heads, it may be, long before life appeared anywhere on this peopled earth; no fossil is found in all their huge mass.  In some mighty eruption of fire their strata have been strangely twisted.  Since then sea and river, frost and ice, have held high carnival.  Huge boulders, alien in formation to the rocks about them, have been dropped high up on the mountain sides by mighty glaciers, and lie to-day, a source of unfailing wonder to the unlearned as to how they came to be there.

Man appeared at last upon the scene; the Indian, and then, long after, the European.  In 1535, Jacques Cartier, the first European, as far as we know, to ascend the St. Lawrence, creeping slowly from the Saguenay up towards the Indian village of Stadacona, on the spot where now is Quebec, must have noted the wide gap in the mountains which makes the Malbaie valley.  Not far from Malbaie, he saw the so-called “porpoises,” or white whales, (beluga, French, marsouin) that still disport themselves in great numbers in these waters, come puffing to the surface and writhe their whole length into view like miniature sea-serpents.  They have heads, Cartier says, with no very great accuracy, “of the style of a greyhound,” they are of spotless white and are found, he was told (incorrectly) only here in all the world.  He anchored at Isle