However, at midnight I took a
palace car, with such conveniences as even Louis the Great did not have at
Versailles, and woke well up the Mississippi. I spent the day at another
great State university and at dusk set off by the actual trails of the
French coureurs de bois (only by wheels instead of on foot), first through
the woods and along rivers, above Green Bay to the "Soo," then above Lake
Huron and the Nipissing and down the Ottawa River, where I saw the second
day break, and then on past La Salle's seigniory of St. Sulpice, around
Carder's mountain into Montreal, and thence to the Rock of Quebec.
It is a common, unimaginative metaphor in the United States to call the
engine which leads the mighty trains across the country the iron horse;
but it is deserving of a nobler figure. It is the iron coureur de bois,
still leading Europe into America, and America into a newer America.
CHAPTER X
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN"
In the lower St. Lawrence Valley, among the French Canadians, where France
is best remembered and where the shut-in life is not disturbed by current
events or changing conventions or evanescent fashions, I am told there are
traces in their language of the sea life of their ancestors on the coasts
of Brittany and Normandy.
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