but a sudden angle in this gorge prevented my seeing through to the bottom of the fall. Returning to the shore, I made my way down stream through the forest to see how far the fall extended, and how the river came out of that adventure. It was to clamber along the side of a precipitous mountain of loose mossy rocks, covered with a damp primitive forest, and terminating at the bottom in an abrupt precipice over the stream. This was the east side of the fall. At length, after a quarter of a mile, I got down to still water, and on looking up through the winding gorge, I could just see to the foot of the fall which I had before examined; while from the opposite side of the stream, here much contracted, rose a perpendicular wall, I will not venture to say how many hundred feet, but only that it was the highest perpendicular wall of bare rock that I ever saw. In front of me tumbles in from the summit of the cliff a tributary stream, making a beautiful cascade, which was a remarkable fall in itself, and there was a cleft in this precipice, apparently four or five feet wide, perfectly straight up and down from top to bottom, which from its cavernous depth and darkness, appeared merely as a black streak. This precipice is not sloped, nor is the material soft and crumbling slate as at Montmorenci, but it rises perfectly perpendicular, like the side of a mountain fortress, and is cracked into vast cubical masses of gray and black rock shining with moisture, as if it were the ruin of an ancient wall built by Titans. Birches, spruces, mountain-ashes with their bright red berries, arbor-vitæs, white pines, alders, &c., overhung this chasm on the very verge of the cliff and in the crevices, and here and there were buttresses of rock supporting trees part way down, yet so as to enhance, not injure, the effect of the bare rock. Take it altogether, it was a most wild and rugged and stupendous chasm, so deep and narrow where a river had worn itself a passage through a mountain of rock, and all around was the comparatively untrodden wilderness.

This was the limit of our walk down the St. Lawrence. Early in the afternoon we began to retrace our steps, not being able to cross the north channel and return by the Isle of Orleans, on account of the trop grand vent, or too great wind. Though the waves did run pretty high, it was evident that the inhabitants of Montmorenci County were no sailors, and made but little use of the river. When we reached the bridge, between St. Anne and Chateau Richer, I ran back a little way to ask a man in the field the name

of the river which we were crossing, but for a long time I could not make out what he said, for he was one of the more unintelligible Jacques Cartier men. At last it flashed upon me that it was La Rivière au Chien, or the Dog River, which my eyes beheld, which brought to my mind the life of the Canadian voyageur and coureur de bois, a more western and wilder Arcadia, methinks, than the world has ever seen; for the Greeks, with all their wood and river gods, were not so qualified to name the natural features of a country, as the ancestors of these French Canadians; and if any people had a right to substitute their own for the Indian names, it was they. They have preceded the pioneer on our own frontiers, and named the prairie for us. La Rivière au Chien cannot, by any license of language, be translated into Dog River, for that is not such a giving it to the dogs, and recognizing their place in creation as the French implies. One of the tributaries of the St. Anne is named, La Rivière de la Rose; and further east are, La Rivière de la Blondelle, and La Rivière de la Friponne. Their very rivière meanders more than our river.

Yet the impression which this country made on me, was commonly different from this. To a traveller from the Old World, Canada East may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me, coming from New England, and being a very green traveller withal-notwithstanding what I have said about Hudson's Bay,-it appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian villages, affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that it is St. Fercole or St. Anne, the Guardian Angel or the Holy Joseph's, or of a mountain, that it was Bélangé, or St. Hyacinthe! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly names begin. St. John is the first town you stop at (fortunately we did not see it), and thenceforward, the names of the mountains and streams, and villages, reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication of poetry;Chambly, Longueil, Pointe aux Trembles, Bartholomy, &c., &c.; as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the woods toward Hudson's

Bay, were only as the forests of France and Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful, and to me, significant names, lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In short, the Canada which I saw, was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in, and for criminals to run to.

When I asked the man to whom I have referred, if there were any falls on the Rivière au Chien, for I saw that it came over the same high bank with the Montmorenci and St. Anne; he answered that there were. How far? I inquired; Trois quatres lieue. How high? Je pense, quatrevingt-dix pieds; that is, ninety feet. We turned aside to look at the falls of the Rivière du Sault à la Puce, half a mile from the road, which before we had passed in our haste and ignorance, and we pronounced them as beautiful as any that we saw; yet they seemed to make no account of them there, and when first we inquired the way to the Falls, directed us to Montmorenci, seven miles distant. It was evident that this was the country for waterfalls; that every stream that empties into the St. Lawrence, for some hundreds of miles, must have a great fall or cascade on it, and in its passage through the mountains, was, for a short distance, a small Saguenay, with its upright walls. This fall of La Puce, the least remarkable of the four which we visited in this vicinity, we had never heard of till we came to Canada, and yet, so far as I know, there is nothing of the kind in New England to be compared with it.

At a house near the western boundary of Chateau Richer, whose master was said to speak a very little English, having recently lived at Quebec, we got lodging for the night. As usual, we had to go down a lane to get round to the south side of the house where the door was, away from the road. For these Canadian houses have no front door, properly speaking. Every part is for the use of the occupant exclusively, and no part has reference to the traveller or to travel. Every New England house, on the contrary, has a front and principal door opening to the great world, though it may be on the cold side, for it stands on the highway of nations, and the road which runs by it, comes from the Old World and goes to the Far West; but the Canadian's door opens into his back yard and farm alone, and the road which runs behind his house leads only from the church of one saint to that of another. We found a large family, hired men, wife, and children, just eating their supper. They prepared some for us afterwards. The hired men were

a merry crew of short black-eyed fellows, and the wife a thin-faced, sharp-featured French Canadian woman. Our host's English staggered us rather more than any French we had heard yet; indeed, we found that even we spoke better French than he did English, and we concluded that a less crime would be committed on the whole, if we spoke French with him, and in no respect aided or abetted his attempts to speak English. We had a long and merry chat with the family this Sunday evening in their spacious kitchen. While my companion smoked a pipe and parlez-vous'd with one party, I parleyed and gesticulated to another. The whole family was enlisted, and I kept a little girl writing what was otherwise unintelligible. The geography getting obscure, we called for chalk, and the greasy oiled table-cloth having been wiped,-for it needed no French, but only a sentence from the universal language of looks on my part, to indicate that it needed it,— we drew the St. Lawrence with its parishes thereon, and thenceforward went on swimmingly, by turns handling the chalk and committing to the table-cloth what would otherwise have been left in a limbo of unintelligibility. This was greatly to the entertainment of all parties. I was amused to hear how much use they made of the word oui in conversation with one another. After repeated single insertions of it one would suddenly throw back his head at the same time with his chair, and exclaim rapidly, oui oui oui! oui! like a Yankee driving pigs. Our host told us that the farms thereabouts were generally two acres, or three hundred and sixty French feet wide, by one and a half leagues (?) or a little more than four and a half of our miles deep. This use of the word acre as long measure, arises from the fact that the French acre or arpent, the arpent of Paris, makes a square of ten perches of eighteen feet each on a side, a Paris foot being equal to 1.06575 English feet. He said that the wood was cut off about one mile from the river. The rest was "bush," and beyond that the "Queen's bush." Old as the country is, each landholder bounds on the primitive forest, and fuel bears no price. As I had forgotten the French for sickle, they went out in the evening to the barn and got one, and so clenched the certainty of our understanding one another. Then, wishing to learn if they used the cradle, and not knowing any French word for this instrument, I set up the knives and forks on the blade of the sickle to represent one; at which they all exclaimed that they knew and had used it. When snells were mentioned they went out in the dark and

plucked some. They were pretty good. They said that they had three kinds of plums growing wild, blue, white, and red, the two former much alike, and the best. Also they asked me if I would have des pommes, some apples, and got me some. They were exceedingly fair and glossy, and it was evident that there was no worm in them, but they were as hard almost as a stone, as if the season was too short to mellow them. We had seen no soft and yellow apples by the road-side. I declined eating one, much as I admired it, observing that it would be good dans le printemps, in the spring. In the morn

ing when the mistress had set the eggs a frying, she nodded to a thick-set jollylooking fellow, who rolled up his sleeves, seized the long-handled griddle, and commenced a series of revolutions and evolutions with it, ever and anon tossing its contents into the air, where they turned completely topsy-turvey and came down t'other side up; and this he repeated till they were done. That appeared to be his duty when eggs were concerned. I did not chance to witness this performance, but my companion did, and he pronounced it a master-piece in its way.

WHOEVER has been in Genoa will remember the Strada nuova, the street of palaces. It is one of the narrow, high Italian streets in which the sunshine seems to lie more softly, as if grateful for the picturesque and imposing buildings that men have reared for it to adorn. And perhaps in no street of any city in the world are the buildings more beautiful and striking. They are all palaces. Each of a different character of massiveness from the others, they yet, together, line the way with so regal a grandeur, that the eye of the stranger, when first it penetrates the vista, looks to see nothing less than a crowned emperor advancing. He believes it to be a city of kings. He expects to see queens standing stately between the huge, yellow urns overflowing with aloes that adorn the balconies, and some "long-haired page in crimson clad" leaning from the lofty windows. The impression of this street is among the marked memories of travel. If one comes to it, fresh from the sea, as I did, with nothing but a brief glimpse of Marseilles between that range of palaces and Broadway, it is like the sudden rising of the curtain upon the great spectacle of Europe, of which at home he has so long and longingly dreamed. And if, pausing and entering at one of the magnificent portals he ascends the spacious staircase, circling a court paved with marble, and passes on through an endless suite of apartments named from the seasons and the virtues, and tapestried with the fluted silk of Genoa, he comes at length to a corner room, upon whose walls hang two masterpieces of Vandyck, full-length portraits of the Marquis and Marchioness Brignole; then he blends with the memories

of that marvellous day, his first sight of really fine and famous pictures.

If he were himself a son of the house, and in that Marquis proudly sitting upon his horse recognized an ancestor, how would his emotion differ from that of the admiring stranger? Would he feel only a vague pride, and resolve never to bestride a less aristocratic horse? Would he regard the nobility of mien represented as an incentive to nobility of action peculiarly incumbent upon himself? Would he own a secret spring and start in his blood as it sprang to his cheek in filial recognition? Or would he only stare and wonder, and, in the degree of his perception and sensibility, enjoy the great work of the master?

If a man says in any society, "my ancestor fell at Cressy," he is instantly invested with a certain consideration. Yet he may be, individually, a very worthless fellow; and, undeniably, if Eden was the beginning of sublunary things, Adam, the arch-grandfather of the race, takes ancestral precedence of all medieval warriors; in which case Jones, the cobbler at the corner, has as proud a pedigree as all the Howards. That is, after all, the reductio ad absurdum. It is legitimate and fair. When our friend Jehosaphat asks us to step round and see the family portraits, we always fortify ourselves before going, with a glance at the Family Bible, in which Adam, Eve, and the patriarchs, are-indifferently well-represented.

"This," he says with unction, "is Sir Solomon Sculpin, the founder of the family."

"Famous for what?" we ask respectfully.

"For founding the family."

"This," he says, pointing to a dame in hoops and diamond stomacher, "this is Lady Sheba Sculpin." "Ah! yes. inquire.

Famous for what?" we

"For being the wife of Sir Solomon." Then, in order, comes a gentleman in a huge, curling wig, looking indifferently like James the Second or Louis the Fourteenth, and holding a scroll in his hand. "The Right Honorable Haddock Sculpin, Lord Privy Seal, &c., &c."

Á delicate beauty hangs between, a face fair, and loved, and lost, centuries ago a song to the eye-a poem to the heart, as youth and innocence and beauty always

are.

"Lady Dorothea Sculpin, who married young Lord Pop and Cock, and died prematurely in Italy."

Poor Lady Dorothea! whose great grandchild in the tenth remove died last week, an old man of eighty!

Next the gentle lady hangs a fierce figure flourishing a sword, with an anchor embroidered on his coat-collar, and thunder and lightning, sinking ships, flames and tornadoes, in the background.

"Rear Admiral Sir Shark Sculpin, who fell in the great action off Madagascar."

So Jehosaphat goes on through the series, brandishing his ancestors about your head and incontinently knocking you into admiration. And when we reach the last portrait and our own times, what is the natural emotion? Is it not to put Jehosaphat against the wall, draw off at him with your eyes and mind, scan him and consider his life; and determine how much of the Right Honorable Haddock's integrity, and the Lady Dorothy's loveliness, and the Admiral Shark's valor, reappears in the modern man? After all this proving and refining, ought not the last child of a famous race to be its flower and epitome? Or, in the case that he does not chance to be so, is silence discreet, or is it not?

The question of the claims of ancestry is interesting to us Americans only as a speculation. In a society which recognizes family rank, and assigns to certain of its members legislative and diplomatic functions because they are born Smith and not Jones, it is the natural desire of every man enlightened as to the easy advancement of his interest, to proceed from the Smith and not from the Jones stock. But in societies where a man's position is not hereditary, but self-derived, and who is honored because he fights his own and his country's battles at home, in the Senate, at the bar, in the ware-room, in the shop, or in any other place to which men are called to work, and not because his

ancestor Sir Shark fell in the great action off Madagascar,-in those societies it matters little whether he is born Smith or Jones-provided he be born white. He makes his own mark. He wears his own crown. If his hands are not handsome, they are strong. If his house is gaudy and his manner coarse, it is because in curing the meat he has had no time to look after the spices; and the curious eye discovers that it was always the meatcuring genius that founded the family, while the family itself, taking the meat for granted, has quite uniformly devoted itself to the elaboration of sauce.

The last century has shown us upon a colossal scale, this spectacle of family—its foundation and fortunes-in the career of the Bonapartes. Napoleon was a man of consummate genius and decidedly no saint, who rose to the highest social position, crowned himself upon one of the oldest and most aristocratic thrones of Europe; married a daughter of one of the famous families of the earth-which was founded by a rough medieval Baronreigned the only genuine king of modern history, and died dethroned and exiled. He was no gentleman, say the philosophers and critics, he listened at key-holes -he treacherously murdered the Duc d'Enghien-the old nobles scorned him, and when he wanted to learn the secrets of foreign courts, he was compelled to send a scion of the old régime to do the business. But the family whose secrets he wished to learn, and to learn which he was obliged to have recourse to a man of pedigree, who was a free-mason of nobility in full standing, was descended from precisely the same kind of man as Napoleon himself-a man of stern, uncompromising will, who was of the wild-boar class of gentlemen, and would have listened under the bed, as well as at the key-hole, to advance his ambitious aims. People wax romantic over William the Conqueror -who was a Norman robber-and think the curfew very poetic, which was a supreme act of tyranny-and loudly condemn Napoleon as an upstart and a traitor, and revile him for the murder of the young Duke, which we certainly do not defend, but which belonged to a class of actions to which every despot has more or less resorted. Most great men are upstarts; and Washington was a traitor. Whenever a government becomes imbecile, it is then most foolishly tenacious, and whoever steps forward, in the interests of society and the race, to overthrow it, is, by virtue of his rebellion against the established powers, a criminal and traitor. History shows that genius, in every department, proceeds more from the poor

man's house than the noble's palace. If genius were hereditary, the divine right would be no fiction. In the present arrangement of society, and according to human nature, the divine right is merely a police regulation to secure order, it being held in other countries than America, that the welfare of the state is better secured by lodging the executive power in a single person, and holding it hereditary in his family. "Your Majesty is but a ceremony."

The slightest departure from this fiction is fatal. Therefore, the common sense of England retains the appearance, although it annihilates the fact. Victoria is Queen, wears a crown, and holds a sceptre; appoints and dismisses, is lodged in a palace and sumptuously supported,-as was Elizabeth. But the fact of actual power in the two Queens, while the appearance is the same, is as different as their genius. The popular feeling governs England, but the Prince of Wales will be king, though he were twenty times a Nero. The popular feeling has taken care to draw his teeth, before he is permitted to open his mouth. It is from his sharp perception of this fact of the necessity of the fiction of divine right in a Monarch, that Nicholas declines to call Louis Napoleon, mon frère. How can he do it? A citizenking, as Louis Philippe was called, is an absurdity. What the citizens make by their votes, their votes can unmake. Royalty rests upon loyalty, and loyalty is given to nothing but original power, or to the hereditary and absolute-not conditional-descent of original power. A nation loves a son for his father's sake; his son, in turn, from the same gracious and tender consideration, until the individual is lost, and the sense of immediate independence upon the great man is refined into the sentiment of loyalty for his family. In that loyalty, which, like all love, is unreasoning, lies the strength of royalty. And it endures until it is outraged beyond hope, and the state falls into a ruin whence a new man, and a fresh power, rescues it. The true loyalty of France, since the commencement of the century, has been, and is at this moment, for Napoleon. No man who has known Paris for the last six years, but understands Louis Bonaparte's success. The old régime is a theory in France, not a fact. The one thought that strikes the universal French heart into enthusiasm, is the glory of Napoleon and his empire.

Here we have touched the mystery of the charm that consecrates the family portraits. Sir Solomon was a respectable man, and Sir Shark a brave one, and the Right Honorable Haddock, a learned one; the Lady Sheba was grave and gracious

in her day, and the fair Dorothea lights for us, with pensive sunlight, those longvanished summers. The filial blood gushes more gladly from our hearts as we gaze, and admiration for the virtues of our kindred sweetly mingles with resolutions of our own. Time has its share, too, in the ministry and the influence. The hills beyond the river, lay yesterday, at sunset, lost in purple gloom; they receded into airy distances of dreams and faëry; they sank softly into night, the peaks of the delectable mountains. But I knew, as I gazed enchanted, that the hills so purplesoft of seeming, were hard, and gray, and barren in the wintry twilight, and that in the distance was the magic that made them fair. So, beyond the river of time, that flows between, walk the brave men and the beautiful women of our ancestry, grouped in twilight upon the shore. Distance smooths defects, and, in gentle darkness, rounds every form into grace. It steals the harshness from their speech, and every word becomes a song. across the gulf that ever widens, they look upon us with eyes whose glance is tender, and which light us to success. We acknowledge our inheritance; we accept our birthright: we own that their careers have pledged us to action. Every old Knight, before receiving his sword, passed a night of vigil, in a chapel. There he renounced and resolved; there he dethroned pleasure and crowned duty, and came out with the morning to receive the weapon and the symbol of his endless struggle. So paces the heir of old renowns, the child of famous ancestors, along the gallery of portraits. They have an intimate and peculiar interest for him. Every great life is an incentive to all other lives, but when the brave heart that beats for the world, overflows in private tenderness for us, the example of heroism is more commanding because more personal.

Far

This is the true pride of ancestry. It is sometimes crushing; it is often abused -yet, by a singular providence, few very great men have left direct heirs. The recent death of Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, called forth a catalogue of eminent names, now, in the direct branch, extinct. It is a sort of rough tenderness of Nature that has thwarted Sir Walter Scott's darling dream, that has, even now, ended his family, and leaves him the sole fame of his house. It was sweeter to him to think that, centuries hence, some Lord of Abbotsford would gaze wistfully upon his portrait, as the founder of the house, than that the world would cherish his name as a general benefactor. It is in the tenderness with which the child regards the father, and in the romance that Time