My brother-in-law, Lord Lansdowne,
had been appointed Governor-General in 1883, and I well remember
my first arrival in Quebec. We had been living for five weeks in
the backwoods of the Cascapedia, the famous salmon-river, under
the most primitive conditions imaginable. I had come there
straight from the Argentine Republic on a tramp steamer, and we
lived on the Cascapedia coatless and flannel-shirted, with our
legs encased in "beef moccasins" as a protection against the
hordes of voracious flies that battened ravenously on us from
morning to night. It was a considerable change from a tent on the
banks of the rushing, foaming Cascapedia to the Citadel of Quebec,
which was then appointed like a comfortable English country house,
and gave one a thoroughly home-like feeling at once. After my
prolonged stay in South America I was pleased, too, to recognise
familiar pictures, furniture and china which I had last met in
their English Wiltshire home, all of them with the stolid
impassiveness of inanimate objects unaware that they had been
spirited across the Atlantic, three thousand miles from their
accustomed abiding-place.
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