I do not know that I am particularly happy at describing a waterfall, and what little capacity I may have in this way I would wish to keep for Niagara. One thing I can say very positively about Montmorency, and one piece of advice I can give to those who visit the falls. The place from which to see them is not the horrible little wooden temple which has been built immediately over them on that side which lies nearest to Quebec. The stranger is put down at a gate through which a path leads to this temple, and at which a woman demands from him twenty-five cents for the privilege of entrance. Let him by all means pay the twenty-five cents. Why should he attempt to see the falls for nothing, seeing that this woman has a vested interest in the showing of them? Ideclare that if I thought that I should hinder this woman from her perquisites by what I write, I would leave it unwritten, and let my readers pursue their course to the temple--to their manifest injury. But they will pay the twenty-five cents. Then let them cross over the bridge, eschewing the temple, and wander round on the open field till they get the view of the falls, and the view of Quebec also, from the other side. It is worth the twenty-five cents and the hire of the carriage also. Immediately over the falls there was a suspension bridge, of which the supporting, or rather non-supporting, pillars are still to be seen. But the bridge fell down, one day, into the river; and--alas! alas!--with the bridge fell down an old woman, and a boy, and a cart--a cart and horse--and all found a watery grave together in the spray. No attempt has been made since that to renew the suspension bridge;but the present wooden bridge has been built higher up in lieu of it.
Strangers naturally visit Quebec in summer or autumn, seeing that a Canada winter is a season with which a man cannot trifle; but Iimagine that the mid-winter is the best time for seeing the Falls of Montmorency. The water in its fall is dashed into spray, and that spray becomes frozen, till a cone of ice is formed immediately under the cataract, which gradually rises till the temporary glacier reaches nearly half way to the level of the higher river.
Up this men climb--and ladies also, I am told--and then descend, with pleasant rapidity, on sledges of wood, sometimes not without an innocent tumble in the descent. As we were at Quebec in September, we did not experience the delights of this pastime.
As I was too early for the ice cone under the Montmorency Falls, so also was I too late to visit the Saguenay River, which runs into the St. Lawrence some hundred miles below Quebec. I presume that the scenery of the Saguenay is the finest in Canada. During the summer steamers run down the St. Lawrence and up the Saguenay, but I was too late for them. An offer was made to us through the kindness of Sir Edmund Head, who was then the Governor-General, of the use of a steam-tug belonging to a gentleman who carries on a large commercial enterprise at Chicoutimi, far up the Saguenay; but an acceptance of this offer would have entailed some delay at Quebec, and, as we were anxious to get into the Northwestern States before the winter commenced, we were obliged with great regret to decline the journey.
I feel bound to say that a stranger, regarding Quebec merely as a town, finds very much of which he cannot but complain. The footpaths through the streets are almost entirely of wood, as indeed seems to be general throughout Canada. Wood is, of course, the cheapest material; and, though it may not be altogether good for such a purpose, it would not create animadversion if it were kept in tolerable order. But in Quebec the paths are intolerably bad. They are full of holes. The boards are rotten, and worn in some places to dirt. The nails have gone, and the broken planks go up and down under the feet, and in the dark they are absolutely dangerous. But if the paths are bad, the road-ways are worse. The street through the lower town along the quays is, I think, the most disgraceful thoroughfare I ever saw in any town. I believe the whole of it, or at any rate a great portion, has been paved with wood; but the boards have been worked into mud, and the ground under the boards has been worked into holes, till the street is more like the bottom of a filthy ditch than a road-way through one of the most thickly populated parts of a city. Had Quebec in Wolfe's time been as it is now, Wolfe would have stuck in the mud between the river and the rock before he reached the point which he desired to climb. In the upper town the roads are not as bad as they are below, but still they are very bad. I was told that this arose from disputes among the municipal corporations. Everything in Canada relating to roads, and a very great deal affecting the internal government of the people, is done by these municipalities.
It is made a subject of great boast in Canada that the communal authorities do carry on so large a part of the public business, and that they do it generally so well and at so cheap a rate. I have nothing to say against this, and, as a whole, believe that the boast is true. I must protest, however, that the streets of the greater cities--for Montreal is nearly as bad as Quebec--prove the rule by a very sad exception. The municipalities of which I speak extend, I believe, to all Canada--the two provinces being divided into counties, and the counties subdivided into townships, to which, as a matter of course, the municipalities are attached.
