There are few finer views in the world than that from the terrace of the Citadel of Quebec over the mighty expanse of the St. Lawrence, with ocean-going steamers lying so close below that it would be possible to drop a stone from the Citadel on to their decks; and the view from the Dufferin Terrace, two hundred feet lower down, is just as fine.  My brother-in-law, Lord Lansdowne, had been appointed Governor-General in 1883, and I well remember my first arrival in Quebec.  We had been living for five weeks in the backwoods of the Cascapedia, the famous salmon-river, under the most primitive conditions imaginable.  I had come there straight from the Argentine Republic on a tramp steamer, and we lived on the Cascapedia coatless and flannel-shirted, with our legs encased in “beef moccasins” as a protection against the hordes of voracious flies that battened ravenously on us from morning to night.  It was a considerable change from a tent on the banks of the rushing, foaming Cascapedia to the Citadel of Quebec, which was then appointed like a comfortable English country house, and gave one a thoroughly home-like feeling at once.  After my prolonged stay in South America I was pleased, too, to recognise familiar pictures, furniture and china which I had last met in their English Wiltshire home, all of them with the stolid impassiveness of inanimate objects unaware that they had been spirited across the Atlantic, three thousand miles from their accustomed abiding-place.

In September 1884, at a point immediately below the Falls, I swam Niagara with Mr. Cecil Baring, now a partner in Baring Brothers, then an Oxford undergraduate.  We were standing at the foot of the American Falls, when we noticed a little board inscribed, “William Grenfell of Taplow Court, England” (the present Lord Desborough), “swam Niagara at this spot.”  I looked at Baring, Baring looked at me.  “I don’t see why we shouldn’t do it too,” he observed, to which I replied, “We might have a try,” so we stripped, sent our clothes over to the Canadian side, and entered the water.  It was a far longer swim than either of us had anticipated, the current was very strong, and the eddies bothered us.  When we landed on the Canadian shore, I was utterly exhausted, though Baring, being eight years younger than me, did not feel the effects of the exertion so much.  I remember that the Falls, seen from only six inches above the surface of the water, looked like a splendid range of snow-clad hills tumbling about in mad confusion, and that the roar of waters was deafening.  As we both lay panting and gasping, puris naturalibus, on the Canadian bank, I need hardly say, as we were on the American continent, that a reporter made his appearance from nowhere, armed with notebook and pencil.  This young newspaper-man was not troubled with false delicacy.  He asked us point-blank what we had made out of our swim.  On learning that we had had no money on it, but had merely done it for the fun of the thing, he mentioned the name