The St. Lawrence

READERS and rememberers of The Outermost House will feel at home with Mr. Beston in this elemental and beautiful book on the great St. Lawrence. “There is nothing like following a river to put one into the traveler’s frame of mind,” he says, speaking of the little Chaudière; and that philosophy holds for his descent of the noblest river of Northeastern America.

Mr. Stephen Leacock, who has recently written exceedingly well about the city of Montreal, looks at the St. Lawrence through the eyes of man’s littoral industries and habitations. Mr. Beston swings the other way and looks at man and his works almost entirely as the voyageur saw and sees them. Readers new to Mr. Beston’s prose style and historical approach may find his history of conquest lacking in directness; but those who know and love the river itself will discover through Mr. Beston’s sensitive pen that they have missed a thousand expressions of its compelling character.

The chapters on birds, on the wild life of the stream, on St. Lawrence sky, on the waters in motion and lonely near the Gulf, are the most satisfying half of the book. The simplicity of primitive civilization has long held Mr. Beston in thrall, and he was never better in explaining why than in these pages. Yet modern civilization has already claimed great areas touching the subject of this volume, and the reader will wish at times that the author were willing to grant the inevitable encroachment. For alas, not many of us possess an outermost house of the mind, let alone of the teeming earth.

D. McC.

T. B. THOMAS BARBOUR

W. H. C. WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

R. M. G. ROBERT M. GAY

D. McC. DAVID MCCORD

J. C. S. JOHN C. SLATER