With Mr. Ferrier, Jr's., taste and knowledge of horticulture, and a liberal expenditure, we wish to see nothing more attractive.

The difficulties which are surrounding us in the States, and the coldness of many portions of the northern continent, would seem to indicate the necessity of employing Orchard houses by those who would have fruit with certainty. Next month we shall publish a description of such structures, now so general in England, and beginning to be common here, and give their results.

In review of our too hurried visit, our impressions are that in the residences more regard is paid to comfort and substantiability than to ornament. The houses are built with thick walls of gray limestone, with double winter windows, rendering them comfortable in the coldest seasons, and delightfully cool in summer. Landscape gardening resembles much that of England. The green-houses and vineries will challenge comparison with any city in the Union. The fruits most successfully cultivated are the Apple, the Plum, Gooseberry, Raspberry, etc, and a few varieties of Pears, including Grapes grown under glass, as well as Melons. The market furnishes the finest Cauliflower, Cabbages, Onions, etc, on the continent. The Horticultural Society, now in its teens, has done good service in promoting a taste for horticultural pursuits. It receives aid from Government, and has its annual exhibitions, at which three hundred dollars are distributed in prizes. Mr. Ferrier's and Mr. Lyman's enthusiasm, aided by a most intelligent set of excellent and well-educated gardeners, as well as a liberal outlay among employers, gives to this society a gratifying eminence.

Horticulture is indeed making rapid strides in Montreal and in Canada generally. What we might consider the difficulties of the climate, they seem to conquer by the wand of industry, and really their achievements in any climate would be highly creditable and satisfactory. Summer here is a delicious season - equal to any in the world - and much resembling that of England, with the addition of some few warmer days to ripen their fruits.

The Cote des Nieges Nurseries of Mr. William Brown are a triumph of skill. The site was taken up when overgrown with bushes, and reclaimed at great expense of money, time, and labor; where the wild fern and the moss received the trickling rill from the mountain, now blooms the rose and all the varieties of ornamental objects which the climate will allow, in addition to large quantities of fruit trees and bedding out plants. Mr. Brown is a highly intelligent and useful citizen, and by his pen is qualified to enlighten, *as he has already done in these pages, his fellow-laborers in the good cause.

But we are anxious to confine ourselves to facts, and must reluctantly leave Montreal till another season can make us more fully acquainted with its inhabitants and its lovely gardens, which we are afraid most visitors from the Union have rarely seen. The highest civilization is always accompanied by a garden; we are almost prepared to say that a neighborhood where the garden is utterly neglected, approaches a state of society which in other respects does not mark progress. We might even go further, and declare that a knowledge of gardening is an essential to the full cultivation of the mind; we see it always where education has made the truest progress.

It is within the scope of this article only to mention here the Great Victoria Tubular Bridge, at Montreal, connecting with the Portland road. The piers are all built, one section of the tube is finished, and another is in progress; it is to cost $1,750,000; is two miles in length, and calculated for a single track only; at its airy height, it looks, as you pass under it, as if it would admit only a small wagon.

In our next we must go back to carry the reader through the Rapids of the St. Lawrence, and then try to picture Quebec horticulturally.

Trip To Canada #1

WE return on our route to pay a passing tribute to the Descent of the St. Lawrence. - The landscape gardener may take lessons from nature in its grandest array as he passes the rapids of this mighty river, now more than usually brimming full, spreading across a space sometimes seven miles in extent, and studded by its "thousand isles." The poet might sing of its beauties in as many strains as Tennyson has done in his "In Memoriam," and yet fail to convey to the mind the impressions which a glance of the eye imparts. The islands are not, as description might lead one to expect, so near the channel that the limbs of the trees brush the deck of the boat; everything is on so grand a scale that there is room and verge enough for the steamers to ply their trade without contact. Some large and some with less than a rod of land, these islands are beautifully wooded; rarely inhabited, there they stand in their individuality, nature asserting her supremacy, trees growing and decaying, and the wild flower and the wilder bird in perpetual possession of one of the most charming and enchanting pictures which man can ever hope to look upon; pictures which put to shame his own efforts, and make, in comparison, his attempts at the sublime quite inconspicuous.

What is "Virginia Water," and what the commonplace efforts at making small lakes, when compared with this gigantic stream? Beauty on such a scale requires one to alter all their measurements, and finally to fall back in despair at imitations. We could describe it only as they do the Bay of Naples - See the St. Lawrence and die!

The water, as before remarked, of the lakes above and of this whole water-way, is higher than usual, and has been so for many months. Where a fall or a "rapid" occurs, the appearance of danger, as well as of beauty, is greater than at some periods. As your boat shoots through the worn channels, surrounded by the agitated waters, an unaccustomed visitor almost holds his breath with fear, admiration, and the delight of a new sensation; but the experienced captain and the accustomed hands pursue their usual avocations with no apparent disturbance. Gradually one feels the confidence you acquire in that more dangerous machine, the railroad car. At last the Lachine Rapids are reached, the turmoil around you approaches; even to the eye acquainted with the sight, there is more than usual danger; the perils past are forgotten, and all assemble in breathless attention. Ah! look up at the English captain ; he is in front of the two pilots at the wheel. His countenance, though calm, bespeaks an anxious thinking. "Gentlemen must not stand there, they interrupt our view." Then there is cause for care at least, and all silently obey.

One passenger, used to the voyage, assures the ladies, wrapped in profound silence, that it would be impossible, even with steam on (and the paddles are still busily pushing us forward), to get the boat out of the well-known channel. One more lurch, and we are safely launched out of the Lake St. Peter, and hurrying our way past the residence of Sir George Simpson, late Governor-General of the Hudson's Bay Company, and who visited their vast possessions once every year. What a lovely site; what a world of moving, fresh, brimming water to gaze on by sunlight and by moonlight, in storm, in ice, in snow. Ah! young Englishman, scion of some old house at home, airing your Greek and Latin in the New World, what think you of this? "Think," is the reply, "why I have had the most glorious sport, in the world, I have shot the rapids /" That could not have been all he felt, but that was all we cared to hear. Would you worship at nature's own most attractive shrines, visit Niagara leisurely, and descend the St. Lawrence. Would you study nature, buy an island in it, and there feel your own insignificance; your stay would be lonesome mayhap, but you might feel what Chateaubriand describes as the most agreeable sensation of his hero's life; when, among these scenes, he simply exclaims, "and I enjoyed a night amid the magnificence of the New World!" One would enjoy to the full that life's capacities will admit, a night here, with the moon in half shadow, .the mind one long poem, and the heart's thoughts in heaven.

How one would like, too, to have the Lachine Rapids at the foot of one's garden, and the ocean on its front. The gardens we love so much would yield in interest to the ever active, varying and beautiful scene; but we might discover that happiness after all, if it be to be found, is in that to be-cherished spot, the mind, alone. These scenes, these fairy spots, are, however, so beautiful, so entirely those of enchantment, that ever afterwards.

In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon the inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with not Words worth's "daffodils," but with the rapids of the St. Lawrence. All who have seen them may well exclaim, " And we too have been in Arcadia!"

Having passed Montreal (described in our last), the voyage to Quebec, being of less interest, is performed partly in the night The majesty of the river, before and and after it passes out of Lake St. Peter, is less striking, and the imagination is so full of the beauties of the rapids, that we may be excused for coming at once upon.