Читать книгу Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An Autobiography - Samuel Thompson - Страница 21
Оглавление"A la claire fontaine, M'en allant promener, J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle, Que je m'y suis baigné. Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, Jamais je ne t'oublirai."
From Lachine to the Coteau, thence by canal and along shore successively to Cornwall, Prescott, and Kingston, occupied several days. We were charmed to get on dry land, to follow our batteau along well-beaten paths, gathering nuts, stealing a few apples now and then from some orchard skirting the road; dining at some weather-boarded way-side tavern, with painted floors, and French cuisine, all delightfully strange and comical to us; then on board the batteau again at night. Once, in a cedar swamp, we were enraptured at finding a dazzling specimen of the scarlet lobelia fulgens, the most brilliant of wild flowers, which Indians use for making red ink. At another time, the Long Sault rapids, up which was steaming the double-hulled steamer Iroquois, amazed us by their grandeur and power, and filled our minds with a sense of the vastness of the land we had come to inhabit. And so we wended on our way until put aboard the Lake Ontario steamer United Kingdom for Little York, where we landed about the first week in September, 1833, after a journey of four months. Now-a-days, a trip to England by the Allan Line is thought tedious if it last ten days, and even five days is considered not unattainable. When we left England, a thirty mile railway from Liverpool to Manchester was all that Europe had seen. Dr. Dionysius Lardner pronounced steam voyages across the Atlantic an impossibility, and men believed him. Now, even China and Japan have their railways and steamships; Canada is being spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific by a railroad, destined, I believe, to work still greater changes in the future of our race, and of the world.
