It was one of the few subjects upon which Mr. Holt got excited; but he had seen the evils of feudalism in the strong light of Western progress. Captain Armytage, for peace' sake, qualified his lately expressed admiration, but was met again by a torrent of words—to the unalloyed delight of Andy, who was utterly unable to comprehend the argument, but only hoped 'the schamer was gettin' more than he bargained for.'

'Pauperism will be the result, sir; the race is incorrigible in its stupid determination to do as its forefathers did, and nothing else. Lower Canada wants a clearing out, like what you are getting in Ireland, before a healthy regeneration can set in. The religion is faulty; the habits and traditions of the race are faulty; Jean Baptiste is the drone in our colonial hive. He won't gather honey: he will just live, indolently drawling through an existence diversified by feast and fast days; and all his social vices flourish in shelter of this seignorial system—this—this upas-tree which England is pledged to perpetuate:' and Mr. Holt struck his hand violently on the gunwale of the boat, awakening a responsive grin of triumph from Andy.

The captain was spared a reply by the boat just then touching the wharf; and while they were landing, and lodging the luggage in Pat M'Donagh's house till the starting of the Montreal boat next afternoon, we may say a few words concerning the feudal system extant in Lower Canada at the period when this story begins.

Henri Quatre was the monarch under whose sway the colony was originated. Champlain and De Levi knew no better than to reproduce the landed organization of France, with its most objectionable feature of the forced partition of estates, in the transatlantic province, for defensive purposes, against the numerous and powerful Indian tribes. Military tenure was superadded. Every farmer was perforce also a soldier, liable at any time to be called away from his husbandry to fight against the savage Iroquois or the aggressive British. Long after these combative days had passed away the military tenure remained, with its laws of serfdom, a canker at the roots of property; and thinking men dreaded to touch a matter so inwound with the very foundations of the social fabric in Lower Canada. But in 1854 and 1859 legislative acts were passed which have finally abolished the obnoxious tenure; each landholder, receiving his estate in freehold, has paid a certain sum, and the Province in general contributed L650,000 as indemnity to those whose old-established rights were surrendered for the public weal. Eight millions of inhabited acres were freed from the incubus, and Lower Canada has removed one great obstacle in the way of her prosperity.

At the period when Hiram Holt expressed himself so strongly on the subject, a grinding vassalage repressed the industry of the habitans. Though their annual rent, as censitaires or tenants, was not large, a variety of burdensome obligations was attached. When a man sold his tenure, the seigneur could demand a fine, sometimes one-twelfth of the purchase money; heavy duties were charged on successions. The ties of the Roman Catholic Church were oppressive. Various monopolies were possessed by the seigneurs. The whole system of social government was a reproduction, in the nineteenth century, of the France of the fifteenth.

Mr. Holt was somewhat cooled when his party had reached the citadel, through streets so steep that the drive to their summit seemed a feat of horsemanship. Here was the great rock whence Jacques Cartier, first of European eyes, viewed the mighty river in the time of our Henry VIII., now bristling with fortifications which branch away in angles round the Upper Town, crowned with a battery of thirty-two pounders, whose black muzzles command the peaceful shipping below. Robert Wynn could not help remarking on that peculiarly Canadian charm, the exquisite clearness of the air, which brought distant objects so near in vision that he could hardly believe Point Levi to be a mile across the water, and the woods of the isle of Orleans more than a league to the eastward.

Captain Armytage had many reminiscences of the fortress, but enjoyed little satisfaction in the relating of any; for nothing could get the seignorial tenure out of Mr. Holt's head, and he drove in sentences concerning it continually.

Outside the Castle gates the captain remembered important business, which must preclude him from the pleasure of accompanying his friends to Wolfe's Landing.

'Well, sir, I hope you now acknowledge that the seignorial system is a blot on our civilisation.'

'I wish it had never been invented!' exclaimed the captain, very sincerely. And, with the gracefullest of bows, he got quit of Mr. Holt and his pet aversion together.

Hiram's features relaxed into a smile. 'I knew I could convince him; he appears an agreeable companion,' remarked Mr. Holt, somewhat simply. But the subject had given the keynote to the day; and in driving along the road to Cape Rouge, parallel with the St. Lawrence, he was finding confirmations for his opinion in most things they met and passed. The swarming country, and minute subdivisions of land, vexed Hiram's spirit. Not until they entered the precincts of the battlefield, and he was absorbed in pointing out the spots of peculiar interest, did the feudality of the Province cease to trouble him.

All along the river was bordered by handsome villas and pleasure-grounds of Quebec merchants. Cultivation has gradually crept upon the battlefield, obliterating landmarks of the strife. The rock at the base of which Wolfe expired has been removed, and in its stead rises a pillar crowned with a bronze helmet and sword, and is inscribed:

HERE DIED WOLFE, VICTORIOUS.

Not till seventy-five years after the deed which makes his fame was this memorial erected: a tardy recognition of the service which placed the noblest of our dependencies—a Province large as an old-world empire—in British hands.



CHAPTER VII.

THE RIVER HIGHWAY.

'Well, Misther Robert! if ever I laid my eyes on the likes of such a ship, in all my born days!'

With this impressive ejaculation, Andy Callaghan backed on the wharf to take a completer view of the wondrous whole. His untravelled imagination had hitherto pictured steamers after the one pattern and similitude of those which sailed upon the river Lee and in the Cove of Cork—craft which had the aquatic appendages of masts and decks, and still kept up an exterior relation with the ship tribe. But this a steamboat! this great three-storied wooden edifice, massive-looking as a terrace of houses!

'An' a hole in the side for a hall-door!' soliloquized Andy. 'No, but two holes, one for the quality an' the other for the commonality. An' no deck at all at all for the people to take the air, only all cabins intirely! If it isn't the very dead image of a side of a sthreet swimmin' away!'

Andy's outspoken remarks attracted some notice when he was fairly aboard.

'This is the fore-cabin, and you must try to keep quiet,' said Arthur. 'We'll be off presently; and whatever you do,' he added in a low tone, 'keep clear of that bar'—indicating a counter recess where liquors were sold, and where customers had congregated already.

'Never fear, sir,' was the reply; 'though they've no right to put it there forenent us, an' they knowin' that the bare sight of it is like fire to tow with many a one. But sure they're not thinkin' only how to get money:' and Mr. Callaghan ended his moral reflections by sitting down beside a family of small children, who squalled in different keys, and treating one of them to a ride on his foot, which favour, being distributed impartially, presently restored good humour.

'An' isn't there any peep of the fresh air allowed us at all?' inquired Andy of a man near him, whose peculiar cut of garments had already excited his curiosity. 'It's a quare vessel that hasn't aither a sail or deck: we might all go to the bottom of the say in this big box, 'athout bein' a bit the wiser.'

The emigrant with the six children looked rather anxious, and hugged her baby closer, poor woman; glancing for a minute at the bar, where her husband was sipping gin, and already brawling with an American. But as the apple-complexioned man whom Andy addressed happened to be a French habitan, limited in English at the best of times, the Irish brogue puzzled him so thoroughly, that he could only make a polite bow, and signify his ignorance of Monsieur's meaning.

'Maybe he's an Injin,' thought Andy; 'but sure I thought thim savages wore no clothes, and he has an iligant blue coat an' red tie. I wondher would it be any good to thry the Irish wid him;' and, as an experiment, he said something in the richest Munster dialect. The Canadian's politeness was almost forgotten in his stare of surprise, and he took the earliest opportunity of changing his place, and viewing Andy respectfully from afar.

But if it had a repellent effect on the habitan, it exerted a strong attractive force upon other of the passengers. Mr. Callaghan was never happier than when at the focus of a knot of his countrymen, for his talents were essentially social; and before the evening was over, his musical feats with voice and violin had so charmed the aforesaid Canadian, that he came up and made him another of the polite bows.

'Very much obliged to you, sir, if I only knew what you were sayin',' replied Andy, with equal courtesy.

'He's inviting you to his daughter's wedding,' interpreted one of the sailors who stood by; 'you and the fiddle.'

'With all the pleasure in life, sir,' promptly replied Andy, as he imitated the bow of the worthy habitan to perfection. 'I'm always ready for any fun-goin'. Ask the old gentleman when and where it's to be,' he continued, jogging the interpreter with his elbow.

'The day after to-morrow, at a village near Montreal;' upon learning which, Andy's countenance fell, and the festive vision faded from his ken. 'Maybe it's in China I'd be by that time,' said he, with incorrect notions of geography; 'but I'm obliged to you all the same, sir, an' wherever I am I'll drink her health, if 'twas only in a glass of wather. I'll have a pain in me back if I bow much longer' added Andy sotto voce; 'I don't know how he's able to keep it up at all.'

'Why, where are you going to?' asked the sailor, laughing; 'this ain't the way to China by a long chalk.'

'Going to make me fortune,' replied Andy boldly, as he dropped the violin into its case and latched the cover tightly, as if a secret were locked in. While no more idea had he of his destination, nor plan for future life, poor faithful peasant, than the fine Newfoundland dog which slept not far from him that night in the fore-cabin, a mass of creamy curls.

Meanwhile, all the evening, and all the night through, the noble steamer stemmed the broad brimming flood, steadily onwards, casting behind her on the moonlit air a breath of dark smoke ruddy with sparks, at every palpitation of her mighty engine-heart. Past black pine forests to the edge of the shore; past knots of white cottages centred round the usual gleaming metal spire; past confluence of other rivers, dark paths joining the great continental highway; blowing off steam now and then at young roadside towns, where upon wooden wharves, waited passengers and freight in the moonlight, swallowing into either mouth all presented to her, and on untiringly again. Robert Wynn stayed on the small open poop astern, gazing at the picturesque panorama, half revealed, half shaded by the silvery beams, long after the major part of the passengers were snug in their state rooms or berths below. With the urging of the fire-driven machinery he could hear mingled the vast moan of the river sweeping along eastwards. It saddened him, that never-silent voice of 'the Father of Waters.' Memories of home came thronging round him—a home for him extinct, dead, till in this distant land he should create another. At the threshold of a great undertaking, before hand has been put to work it out, the heart always shrinks and shivers, as did his here. Looking upon the length and breadth of all that had to be done, it seemed too hard for him.

But not so when next morning he arose from a few hours' sleep, and beheld the bright sunshine lighting up the glorious Canadian world. Looming giants by moonlight are reduced to very ordinary obstacles by daylight; and the set of desponding thoughts which had weighed upon the young man as he contemplated the inky river and darkling country, seemed now to belong to another phase of being. Despondent! with the wide free world to work in, and its best prizes lying beside the goal, ready for capture by the steady heart and active hand. Robert felt almost as if that shadowy home in the forest were already built, already peopled with the dear old faces he had left behind. The pure fresh air—clear as is rarely breathed in Europe (for it is as if in our Old World the breath of unnumbered nations has for centuries been soiling the elements)—the richly coloured scene, were a cordial to his young brain. The steamer was fast approaching the isle of St. Helen's; and beyond, against a background of purple mountain, lay 'the Silver Town,' radiant with that surface glitter peculiar to Canadian cities of the Lower Province; as if Montreal had sent her chief edifices to be electro-plated, and they had just come home brightly burnished. In front was the shining blue current of the St. Lawrence, escaped from a bewildering perplexity of islets and rapids, which had apparently ruffled its temper not a little.

'Part of our Ottawa flows here,' said Mr. Holt, glancing at the stream with a sort of home affection—'our clear emerald Ottawa, fresh from the virgin wilderness; and it hasn't quite mingled with its muddy neighbour yet, no more than we Westerns can comfortably mingle with the habitans and their old-world practices down here. You see, Wynn, the St. Lawrence has been running over a bed of marl for miles before it reaches Lake St. Louis; and the Ottawa has been purified by plenty of rocks and rapids; so they don't suit very well—no more than we and the habitans—ha! ha!' Mr. Holt was vastly amused by the similitude. He pointed to a very distinctly marked line of foam wavering on the river surface, and said, 'There's the demarcation.'

'I am glad it is of such an evanescent nature, sir,' replied Robert. He might have said how much grander the river became when all brawling was forgotten, and both currents fused into one glorious stream.

'Now,' said Arthur, with the contrariety of youth (and aside, as is written in stage-plays), 'I'm certain these French Canadians are not so black as they're painted. I like those sociable white villages round the tin spires; and the guide-book says the people are amiable and civil. I'll investigate that subject, Bob.'

'I would advise you to investigate breakfast just now,' was the reply, as the steward's bell swung forth its summons. Then commenced a procession of passengers to the eating-room; through the length of the sumptuously furnished saloon, where the richest Persian carpets, marble tables, brilliant chandeliers, and mirrors, were at the service of the public; by a narrow staircase amidships down to the lowest storey of the vessel, a long apartment lit by candles, and lined at the sides with curtained rows of berths. The usual pause followed for the advent of the ladies: nobody sat down till they had come from their cabin on the middle deck, and established themselves wheresoever they listed.

'That's like Irish politeness' whispered Arthur, whose good spirits were always talkative. 'My father, dear old gentleman, would take off his hat to a petticoat on a bush, I do believe.'

The company was very mixed, and quite as much conversation went on in French as in English. It seemed to the strangers as if the balance of gentlemanly deportment, and yet vivacity of manner, might possibly lie on the side of those who spoke the former tongue. Next to Arthur sat the sallow States'-man, bolting his breakfast with unconscionable speed, and between whiles, in a high treble voice, volunteering his opinion pretty freely on Canadian matters, as if he were endowed with a special commission to set them right. Badly as Hiram Holt thought of the seignorial system, he was perforce driven to defend it in some measure, much to Arthur's delectation; but he soon discovered that to carry war into the enemy's country was his best policy, so he seized the institution of slavery in his canine teeth, and worried it well. The States'-man thought that a gentleman might be permitted to travel without being subject to attacks on his country: Mr. Holt observed that he thought precisely the same, which species of agreement closed the conversation. And the States'-man relieved his feelings subsequently by whittling a stick from the firewood into impalpable chips, with his heels resting on the apex of the saloon stove. Kind-hearted Hiram Holt had meanwhile more than half repented his hostility.

'Tell you what, sir,' said he, going up and extending his hand, 'it wasn't the matter, but the manner of your talk that raised my dander awhile since. I agree in most of what you say about this Province here, and I hope as much as you do that the last badge of feudalism may soon be swept away.'

The American put his bony pale hand almost sullenly into the Canadian's brawny palm, and after suffering the pressure, returned to his interesting pursuit of whittling, which he continued in silence for the rest of the voyage.



CHAPTER VIII.

'JEAN BAPTISTE' AT HOME.

After seeing most of the thoroughfares of Montreal, and receiving the set of sensations experienced by all new-comers and recorded in all books of Canadian travel—principally wondering at the incongruities of French and English nationality grafted together, and coherent as the segments of the fabled centaur—the active commerce of a British port carried on beneath the shadow of walled-in convents suggesting Belgium—friars endued with long black robes, passing soldiers clothed in the immemorial scarlet—a Rue Notre Dame and a St. James's Street in neighbourhood—the brothers witnessed another phase of American life as they dined at a monster table-d'hote in the largest hotel of the city. The imperial system of inn-keeping originated in the United States has been imported across the border, much to the advantage of British subjects; and nothing can be a queerer contrast than the Englishman's solitary dinner in a London coffee-room, and his part in the vast collective meals of a transatlantic hotel.

'New to this sort of thing, I should imagine?' said the gentleman next beside Robert, in a particularly thin, wiry voice.

'Yes, quite a stranger,' answered Robert, looking round, and seeing that the speaker was a person with a sharp nose and small keen black eyes.

'So I thought; your looks betray it. Everything seems queer, I guess. Intending to be a settler, eh?' Then, without waiting for an answer, 'That's right: I always welcome the infusion of young blood into our colony, particularly gentle blood, for we are a rough set, mister, and want polish—and—and—all that.'

These deferential words, uttered in the deferential manner of inferiority to acknowledged excellence, certainly pleased Robert; for what heart is unsusceptible to subtle flattery? And of all modes of influence, men are most easily flattered or disparaged by reference to what is no worthiness or fault of their own—the social station in which it has pleased the Creator that they should enter this world. The keen brain behind the keen eyes knew this well; the fact had oiled a way for his wedge many a time. What was his motive for endeavouring to ingratiate himself with young Wynn for the next twenty minutes?

'Now, mister, if it's a fact that you be settling, I can give you a chance of some of the finest lots of land ever offered for sale in Montcalm township. A friend of mine has a beautiful farm there that would just suit you; best part cleared and under fence—fine water privilege—land in good heart, and going, I may say, dirt cheap.'

Robert felt much obliged for the interest in his welfare which prompted this eligible offer. 'But, unfortunately, I have very little money to invest,' said he carelessly. The swift penetrating glance that followed from his companion was unseen, as he crumbled his biscuit on the table-cloth. 'I am rather disposed to try the backwoods,' he added.

'The bush!' in accents of amazement. 'The bush! it may do very well for labourers, but for a gentleman of your pretensions, it would be misery—wholly unsuitable, sir—wholly unsuitable. No, no, take my advice, and settle where the advantages of civilisation—the comforts of life to which you have been accustomed—are accessible. A few thousand dollars'—

'I regret to say,' Robert interposed, 'that even one thousand is immensely more than I possess,' turning to the Canadian with a frank smile, which was by no means reduplicated in the sharp face. And from the era of that revelation, conversation unaccountably flagged.

'Do you know to whom you talked at table?' asked Hiram Holt afterwards. He had been sitting some way farther up at the other side. 'One of the most noted land-jobbers in the country—a man who buys wild lands at three shillings an acre, to sell them again at ten or fifteen, if he can; and he never loses an opportunity of driving a trade. His bargain of a cleared farm is probably some worn-out dilapidated location not worth half-a-dollar an acre till hundreds have been spent on it.'

'Then I've gained one benefit by being poor,' said Robert; 'nobody can have a motive for over-reaching me'—which was philosophic consolation.

Mr. Holt's business would not permit him to leave till next evening. And so the Wynns, continuing to lionize, looked into the vast but dreary Romish cathedral, which seats ten thousand people in its nine spacious aisles and seven chapels; clambered to the roof, and viewed the city from a promenade at an elevation of 120 feet; and then drove to that special beauty of Montreal—the mountain. This is a hill more than 500 feet in height, and clothed from head to foot with the richest verdure of woods; among which grow the most delicious apples extant since Paris selected one as a prize. From the summit a landscape of level country stretches below westwards; in middle, distant villages; on the horizon, the Ottawa confluence, bounding Montreal Island and forming others. Southwards, across the St. Lawrence, the hills of Vermont far away; nearer, the fertile valley of the Richelieu.

'Let's go off to one of the habitan villages,' said Arthur suddenly. 'Dismiss the caleche, and we will walk back. I'll ask for a drink of water in one of the cottages just to scrape acquaintance.'

'Furbish up your French, too,' said Robert, 'for they do gabble it fast. I heard a fellow chattering in the steerage, coming up the river yesterday morning: by the way, he and Andy had struck up a friendship: and such bowing as they had to each other's incomprehensible lingo!'

'I wonder what he is doing to-day,' said Arthur reflectively; 'he asked me so particularly whether we should want him again till the evening.'

'Found out a nest of Irish somewhere, I suppose.'

'There's a fellow taking off his hat to us,' remarked Arthur, as they passed a carter. 'Everybody seems to bow to everybody in this country. But did you ever see such an old-fashioned vehicle as he drives? And he keeps talking to himself and his horse all the way, apparently.'

Rapidly walking down the fine road to the plain, they were not long in nearing a group of neat white houses round the invariable shining steeple.

'The village looks as sociable as the people,' said Robert. 'How neat everything seems!—Hallo, Arthur, we've come in for some festivity or other, by all the gay ribbons about.'

'Bon jour, Madame,' said Arthur boldly, to a tidy old lady, sitting in her green verandah. 'Nous sommes des etrangers—I'd like to ask her what it's all about,' he whispered confidentially to Robert; 'but I'm out of my depth already.'

The aged Canadienne arose, with the politeness so natural to her Gallic descent, and bade them welcome. But sounds issuing from the opposite house riveted their attention. 'As sure as I'm here, that's Andy's violin,' exclaimed Arthur; 'I'd know his scrape anywhere;' and he crossed the road in a moment.

Without doubt Andy was the player, ay, and the performer too; for he was dancing a species of quickstep solo, surrounded by a circle of grinning and delighted habitans. The most perfect gravity dwelt in his own countenance meanwhile, alloyed by just a spice of lurking fun in his deep-set eyes, which altogether faded, as a candle blown out, when suddenly he perceived the accession to the company. Silence succeeded the dead blank on his features, down hung the violin and its bow on either side, and the corners of his mouth sunk into a dismal curve.

'Go on, old boy—scrape away,' shouted Arthur hilariously. 'So many pretty faces would inspire anybody;' and whether it was that the black-eyed Canadian damsels felt the compliment through the foreign idiom, there was considerable blushing and bridling as the speaker's glance travelled round the group.

They deserved his encomium. The slight sprightly type of dark beauty abounded; and so prettily decked out with bright ribbons and flowers, that it was evident the tastefulness which renders French modistes unrivalled had not died out in these collateral relatives of the nation. Forward stepped Monsieur, the master of the house and father of the bride, begging that Messieurs would be so benevolent as to seat themselves, and would honour him by partaking of refreshment; both which requests Messieurs were nothing loth to fulfil. It was hardly to be realized that these were the besotted habitans, the unimprovable race, the blotch on the fair face of Canadian civilisation; these happy-looking, simple-minded people. Hiram Holt was a slanderer. Full an hour passed before the Wynns could get away from the embarrassing hospitalities and politeness of the good villagers, who shook hands all round at parting in most affectionate style. As for Andy, much to his own discomfort, he was kissed by his host.

'Now I could ondherstand if it was the missus that shaluted me,' said he, rubbing across his cheek with his cuff as soon as he was on the road; 'throth an' they're all very fond of me intirely, considherin' they never laid eyes on me till this mornin', barrin' himself. An' I never see nater houses—they're as clean as a gintleman's; you might ate off the flure. If only the people wud forget that queer talk they have, an' spake like Christians, that a body could know what they're sayin', 'twould be a deal more comfortable.'

'And how could you get on without understanding them?' asked Arthur.

'Oh, 'twas aisy enough sometimes; for whin they wanted me to come to dinner they had only to show me the table; and when they wanted me to play, they only rubbed across their arm this way, and said, "Jawer, jawer" (I brought away that word, anyhow,' added Mr. Callaghan, with great satisfaction). 'All other times they spake to me I bowed plinty, and that did the business. But there was a man alongside me at the dinner that had a few words of English; an' he tould me that this time of the year they all marries to be ready against the winter. I likes that fashion, Misther Robert;' and herewith Andy heaved a little sigh, thinking perhaps of a certain pretty blue-eyed Mary in Ireland.

'Put your best foot foremost, Callaghan,' said Mr. Wynn; 'we shall scarcely reach town in time;' and all three quickened their pace.

'I'll never believe a syllable against the habitans again,' said Arthur. 'Their old-fashioned politeness is a perfect relief from the bluff manners of most other Canadians. They seem to me to have a lot of virtues,—cleanliness, good-humour, good-nature,—and I like their habit of living altogether, children settled round the parent tree like branches of a banyan. We would give a trifle to be able to do it ourselves, Bob;' and the smile with which the brothers met each other's eyes was rather wistful.



CHAPTER IX.

'FROM MUD TO MARBLE.'

Hiram Holt was proud of his ancestry. Not that he had sixteen quarterings whereof to boast, or even six; his pedigree could have blazoned an escutcheon only with spade, and shuttle, and saw, back for generations. But then, society all about him was in like plight; and it is a strong consolation in this, as in matters moral, to be no worse than one's neighbours. Truly, a Herald's College would find Canada a very jungle as to genealogy. The man of marble has had a grandfather of mud, as was the case with the owner of Maple Grove.

And, instead of resenting such origin as an injury received from his progenitors, worthy Hiram looked back from the comfortable eminence of prosperity whereunto he had attained, and loved to retrace the gradual steps of labour which led thither. He could remember most of them; to his memory's eye the virgin forest stretched for unknown and unnumbered miles west and northward of the settler's adventurous clearing, and the rude log shanty was his home beside the sombre pines. Now the pines were dead and gone, except a few isolated giants standing gloomily among the maple plantations; but the backwoodsman's shanty had outlived all subsequent changes.

Here, in the wide courtyard to the rear of Mr. Holt's house, it was preserved, like a curious thing set apart in a museum—an embodiment of the old struggling days embalmed. The walls of great unhewn logs fastened at the corners by notching; the crevices chinked up with chips and clay; the single rude square window shuttered across; the roof of basswood troughs, all blackened with age; the rough door, creaking on clumsy wooden hinges when Mr. Holt unlocked it,—these were not encouraging features, viewed by the light of a future personal experience. Robert stole a glance at Arthur as they stepped inside the low dark shed, and, as Arthur had with similar motives also stolen a glance at Robert, their eyes naturally met, and both laughed.

They had been thinking a twin thought—'How will my brother like such quarters as this in the forest?'

'A queer concern,' remarked Arthur in a low voice, and rubbing his chin.

'Rather!' replied Robert, looking equally dubious.

'I like to show the shanty to youngsters,' said Mr. Holt, as he turned from pushing back the shutter, 'that they may see what they have to expect. From such a start as this we Canadians have all waked up into opulence—that is, the hardworking share of us; and there's room enough for tens of thousands to do the same off in the bush.'

'I hope so, sir,' was the least desponding remark of which Robert could think. For the naked reality of a forest life came before him as never previously. The halo of distance had faded, as he stood beside the rude fireplace, fashioned of four upright limestone slabs in a corner, reaching to a hole in the roof, down which the wind was howling just now. It was rather a bleak look-out, notwithstanding the honeyed promises of the old settler pouring on his ear.

'To be sure there is. Fortune's at your back in the bush; and you haven't, as in the mother country, to rise by pushing others down. There's no impassable gulf separating you from anything you choose to aim at. It strikes me that the motto of our capital is as good as a piece of advice to the settler—"Industry, Intelligence, and Integrity"—with a beaver as pattern of the first two principles, anyhow. So recollect the beaver, my young chaps, and work like it.'

'I don't remember the building of this,' he added; 'but every stick was laid by my father's own hands, and my mother chinked between them till all was tight and right. I tell you I'm prouder of it than of a piece of fancy-work, such as I've seen framed and glazed. I love every log in the old timbers.' And Mr. Holt tapped the wall affectionately with his walking-staff. 'It was the farthest west clearing then, and my father chose the site because of the spring yonder, which is covered with a stone and civilised into a well now-a-days.'

'And is the town so modern as all that comes to?' said Robert.



'Twenty years grows a city in Canada,' replied Mr. Holt, somewhat loftily. 'Twenty years between the swamp and the crowded street: while two inches of ivy would be growing round a European ruin, we turn a wilderness into a cultivated country, dotted with villages. The history of Mapleton is easily told. My father was the first who ever built a sawmill on the river down there, and the frame-houses began to gather about it shortly. Then he ventured into the grist line; and I'm the owner of the biggest mills in the place now, with half-a-dozen of others competing, and all doing a fair business in flour, and lumber for exportation. You see in this land we've room enough for all, and no man need scowl down another of the same trade. 'Taint so in England, where you must knock your bread out of somebody else's mouth.'

'Not always, sir,' said Robert, 'nor commonly, I hope.'

'I forgot you were a fresh importation,' observed Mr. Holt with a satisfied chuckle. 'You ain't colonized yet. Well, let's come and look at something else.'

Meanwhile Arthur had measured the dimensions of the shanty, by pacing along and across: sixteen feet one way, twelve the other. Narrow limits for the in-door life of a family; but the cottage had somewhat grown with their growth, and thrown out a couple of small bed-chambers, like buds of incipient shanties, from the main trunk. A curiosity of wood-craft it looked, so mossy, gnarled, and weather-beaten, that one could easily have believed it had sprung from the ground without the intervention of hands, a specimen of some gigantic forest fungus.

'I'll leave a charge in my will that it's not to be disturbed,' said Hiram. ''Twould be sacrilege to move a log of the whole consarn. D'ye hear, Sam?'

His son had just come up and shaken hands; for this was a matutinal expedition of Mr. Holt and his guests round the farm. Being given to habits of extreme earliness, the former was wont to rouse any one in the house whose company he fancied, to go with him in his morning walks; and the Wynns had been honoured by a knocking-up at five o'clock for that purpose. Mr. Holt had strode into their room, flung open the window shutters and the sash with a resounding hand which completely dissipated sleep, and rendered it hardly matter of choice to follow him, since no repose was to be gained by lying in bed. Sam's clear brown eyes sparkled as he saw the victims promenading after his tall father at the Gothic hour of six, and marked Arthur furtively rubbing his eyes.

'You're tremendously early people here,' remarked Arthur, when young Holt joined them. 'I had a mind to turn round and close the shutters again, but was afraid I might affront your father.'

'Affront him! oh no; but he'd just come again and again to rouse you, till you were compelled to submit in self-defence. He wakes up young people on principle, he says.'

'Well, he practises his precepts,' rejoined Arthur, 'and seems to have trained his children in the same.'

'Yes, he has made us all practical men; seven chips of the old block,' observed Sam.

'Seven brothers!' ejaculated Arthur. 'I saw only three last night. And are they all as tall as you?'

'About forty-four feet of length among us,' said Sam. 'We're a long family in more ways than one;' and he looked down from his altitude of seventy-five inches on the young Irishman.

'It is quite a pleasant surprise to see your sister,' Arthur remarked.

'Bell hasn't kept up the family tradition of height, I must say. She's a degenerate specimen of the Holts;' and the speaker's brown eyes softened with a beam of fondness; 'for which reason, I suppose, she'll not bear the name long.'

'And who's the lucky man?' asked Arthur, feeling an instant's disagreeable surprise, and blushing at the sensation.

'Oh, out of half-a-dozen pretenders, 'twould be hard to say. We all marry early in Canada; most of my contemporaries are Benedicts long ago. Three brothers younger than I have wives and children, and are settled in farms and mills of their own.'

'And might I ask'—began Arthur, hesitating when the very personal nature of the inquiry struck him.

'To be sure you might. Well, in the first place, I took a fancy to go through college, and my father left me in Toronto for four years at the University of Upper Canada. That brought me up to twenty-three years old; and then—for the last two years nobody would have me,' added Sam, elevating his black brows.

'Perhaps you are too fastidious; I remark that about men who have nice sisters,' said Mr. Arthur, with an air of much experience: 'now, Robert and I never see anybody so nice as Linda—at least hardly ever.'

'A saving clause for Bell,' said her brother, laughing, 'which is polite, at all events. I must tell her there's a young lady at home that you prefer immensely.'

Which he accordingly did, at the ensuing breakfast; and pretty Miss Holt pretended to take the matter greatly to heart, and would not permit Arthur to explain; while mischievous Sam scouted the notion of the unknown 'Linda' being his sister, except by the rather distant tie of Adam and Eve.

What a plentiful table was this at Maple Grove! Several sorts of meat and wild fowl, several species of bread and cake, several indigenous preserves; and Robert could not help going back with aching heart to the scant supply of meagre fare at home; he saw again his sweet pale mother trying to look cheerful over the poor meal, and Linda keeping up an artificial gaiety, while her soul was sick of stints and privations. His face grew stern and sad at the memory; enjoyment or amusement was criminal for him while they were suffering. So when, by and by, Mr. Holt invited him and Arthur to remain for the winter months at Maple Grove, with a view of gaining insight of Canadian manners and Canadian farming, he decidedly declined. He wished to push on at once; whatever hardships lay before them, had better be combated as soon as possible. A lengthened stay here would be a bad preparation for the wilderness life; they could scarcely but be enervated by it.

'You're a brave lad,' said Mr. Holt, 'and I admire your pluck, though you are plunging right into a pack of troubles; but the overcoming of each one will be a step in the ladder to fortune. Now I'll go and get out the horses, and ride you over to Mr. Landenstein's office: he'll know all about the wild lands, and perhaps has a cleared farm or two cheap.'

But unfortunately such farms did not suit Robert's pocket. One of two hundred acres, fifty cleared and the rest bush, was offered for L240, with a wooden house thrown into the bargain; but the purchaser's fancy for the forest was unconquerable: it puzzled even Mr. Holt. He returned from Mapleton the proprietor of a hundred acres of bush in a newly settled western township, and felt much the better and cheerier that his excursion had ended so. The future had something tangible for his grasp now; and he only grudged every hour spent away from his sphere of labour as an opportunity of advantage lost.



CHAPTER X.

CORDUROY.

'They wor very kind to us,' observed Andy, from his elevation in the waggon; 'an' this counthry bates all the world at 'ating and dhrinking.'

This to Arthur Wynn, who was seated rather despondingly in front of the collection of boxes, pots, and pails, which formed their stock-in-trade for bush life. Sam Holt and Robert were walking on before the horse, a furlong ahead; but Arthur had dropped behind for meditation's sake, and taken up his residence on the waggon for awhile, with his cap drawn over his eyes. I dare say Miss Bell had something to do with the foolish boy's regret for leaving Maple Grove.

'Every day was like a Christmas or an Aisther,' continued Andy, who had no idea that any one could prefer silence to conversation; 'an' the sarvints had parlour fare in the kitchen always, an' a supper that was like a dinner, just before goin' to bed. Throth, they had fine times of it—puddins an' pies, if you plaze: the bare lavins would feed a family at home. An' it's the same, they tell me, in all the farmers' houses round about. I never thought to see so much vittles.'

No reply could be elicited from Mr. Arthur Wynn but a grunt.

'Didn't you?' put in the driver, with a small sneer. Andy had deemed him too far distant to catch his words, as he walked beside his horse.

'Why, then, you've long ears, my man; but sure it's kind for ye,' retorted Mr. Callaghan, his eye twinkling wickedly. I fear that his subtle irony was lost upon its subject. 'Of coorse I'm not used to ye're foreign food. Our vittles at home are a dale dacenter, though not so common.'

And Arthur, through his half-drowsy ears, was amused by the colloquy that ensued, in the course of which Andy completely floored the Canadian by a glowing description of Dunore, delivered in the present tense, but referring, alas! to a period of sixteen or twenty years previously. But the smart black-eyed backwoodsman wound up with the utterly incredulous speech,—

'They left all them riches to come and settle in our bush! whew!' He jerked his whip resoundingly upon the frying-pan and tin-kettle in the rear, which produced a noise so curiously illustrative of his argument, that Arthur laughed heartily, and shook off his fit of blues.

The aspect of nature would have helped him to do that. The thousand dyes of the woods were brilliant, as if the richest sunset had gushed from the heavens, and painted the earth with a permanent glory of colour. A drapery of crimson and gold endued the maples; the wild bines and briars were covered with orange and scarlet berries; the black-plumed pine trees rose solemnly behind. A flat country, for the most part; and, as the travellers slowly receded westward, settlements became sparse and small; the grand forests closed more densely round them; solitary clearings broke the monotony of trees.

The first of anything that one sees or experiences remains stronger than all after impressions on the memory. With what interest did the embryo settlers regard the first veritable log-hut that presented itself, surrounded by half an acre of stumps, among which struggled potatoes and big yellow squashes. A dozen hens pecked about; a consumptive-looking cow suspended her chewing, as also did her master his hoeing, to gaze after the waggon, till it disappeared beyond the square frame of forest which shut in the little clearing.

Again the long lines of stately oaks and firs, with a straight and apparently endless road between them, like the examples of perspective in beginners' drawing-books, but with the vanishing point always receding.

'I see they've turnpiked this road since I was on it before,' observed the driver.

'Where?' asked Andy, looking about. 'I don't see a turnpike—an' sure I ought to know a tollman's dirty face in any place. Sorra house here at all at all, or a gate; or a ha'porth except trees,' he added in a disgusted manner.

'There,' said the Canadian, pointing to a ploughed line along each side of the road, whence the earth had been thrown up in the centre by a scraper; 'that's turnpiking.'

'Ye might have invented a new name,' rejoined the Irishman, with an offended air, 'an' not be mislading people. I thought it was one of the ould pike-gates where I used to have to pay fourpince for me, ass and car; an' throth, much as I hated it, I'd be a'most glad to see one of the sort here, just for company's sake. A mighty lonesome counthry ye have, to be sure!'

'Well, we can't be far from Greenock now; and I see a bit of a snake fence yonder.'

It was another clearing, on a more enterprising scale than the last described; the forest had been pushed back farther, and a good wooden house erected in the open space; zigzag rail fences enclosed a few fields almost clear of stumps, and an orchard was growing up behind. A man in a red shirt, who was engaged in underbrushing at a little distance, said that 'the town' was only a mile away—Greenock, on the Clyde.

Alas for nomenclature! The waggon scrambled down a rather steep declivity, towards a dozen houses scattered beside a stream: stumps stood erect in the single short street, and a ferry-boat was the only craft enlivening the shore. A Greenock without commerce or warehouses, a Clyde without wharves or ships, or the possibility of either—what mere travestie effected by a name!

'A nest of Scottish emigrants, I suppose,' said Robert Wynn, as he contemplated 'the town.'

'Yes, and they'll push their place up to something,' replied Sam Holt: 'if pluck and perseverance can do it, they will. Only one enemy can ruin a Scotchman here, and that's the "drap drink." Ten to one that in twenty years you find this ground covered with factories and thousands of houses; that solitary store is the germ of streets of shops, and the tavern will expand into half a score hotels. Sandy will do it all.'

'I'm afraid you could not speak so well of Irish progress.'

'Because the canker of their religion continues to produce its legitimate effects in most cases; and the influence of whisky—the great bane of social life in our colony—is even more predominant than over the lower class Scotch settlers. Still, they do infinitely better here than at home; and you'll meet with many a flourishing Hibernian in the backwoods and pioneer cities.'

'I presume this is a pioneer city?' looking round at the handful of wooden shanties.

'Don't despise it; Rome had as small a beginning, and was manned by no more indomitable hands and hearts than our frontier emigrants.'

'We are producing quite a sensation,' said Robert. For the major part of the inhabitants came out of doors to view the strangers, with that curiosity which characterizes a new-born society; many of the men bethought themselves of some business at the wooden tavern by the water-side, where the waggon drew up and the new arrivals entered in.

A store where everything was sold, from a nail or a spool of 'slack' to a keg of spirits or an almanac: sold for money when it could be had, for flour or wool or potash when it couldn't; likewise a post-office, whither a stage came once a week with an odd passenger, or an odd dozen of newspapers and letters; likewise the abode of a magistrate, where justice was occasionally dispensed and marriages performed. The dwelling that united all these offices in its single person, was a long, low, framed house, roofed with shingles, and but one storey in height; proprietor, a certain canny Scot, named Angus Macgregor, who, having landed at Quebec with just forty shillings in the world, was making rapid strides to wealth here, as a landed proprietor and store-keeper without rivalry. Others of the clan Gregor had come out, allured by tidings of his prosperity; and so the broad Doric of lowland Scotch resounded about the tavern table almost as much as the Canadian twang.

All doing well. Labour was the sole commodity they possessed, and it sufficed to purchase the best things of life in Canada, especially that slow upward rising in circumstances and possessions which is one of the sweetest sensations of struggling humanity, and which only a favoured few among the working classes can enjoy at home. Robert Wynn was almost as curious about their affairs as they were about his; for he was energized afresh by every instance of progress, and little inducement was required to draw from the settlers their own histories, which had the single monotony running through each of gradual growth from poverty to prosperity.

'What sort of roads have you across the ferry to the Cedars?' inquired Sam Holt of mine host.

'The first part of the concession line is pretty good, but I canna say as much for the "corduroy" afterwards: the riding's not so easy there, I guess.'

'Corduroy!' ejaculated Arthur.

'Oh, wait till you feel it,' said Sam, with much amusement in his eyes. 'It's indescribable. I hope we won't meet in the dark, that's all.'

'Drivin' across ladders for ever, with the rungs very far apart,' explained a Canadian to Andy, in the background, as the latter rubbed his finger-tips over the ribs in the material of his pantaloons, and looked puzzled.

'An' what description of vahicle stands sich thratement?' asked Mr. Callaghan, 'an' what description of baste?'

'Oxen is the handiest, 'cos they've the strongest legs,' returned his informant, with a fresh puff of his pipe.

'Well, of all the counthries'—began Andy, for the twentieth time that day; and perhaps as many as ten additional utterances of the ejaculation were forced by the discovery that he and the gentlemen were to occupy the same sleeping apartment; but, above all, by the revelation that behind a ragged curtain in the corner reposed two wayfaring women, going to join their husbands in the woods, and having also a baby. The latter creature, not being at all overawed by its company, of course screamed in the night whenever the fancy seized it; and good-natured Andy found himself at one period actually walking up and down with the warm bundle of flannel in his arms, patting it on the back soothingly.

Next morning they left the little settlement, and, crossing the ferry again, plunged into the primeval forest. Robert felt as if that mock Clyde were the Rubicon of their fate.

'I leave the old degenerate life,' he murmured to himself, 'with all its traditions of ease. I go forth to face Fortune in these wilds, and to win her, if ever sturdy toil of limb and brain succeeded.'

This spirit of independence was manly, but Robert did not at the moment join to it the nobler spirit of dependence on the Divine Disposer of events: self-trust filled his heart; and this is the great snare of youth.

'You are looking unusually valorous,' said Sam Holt, who marched alongside. He had volunteered to stay with them for their first fortnight of bush life, like a kind fellow as he was. Something about these young Wynns had attracted his regard, and perhaps a touch of compassion. He would, at least, help them to put up the shanty, he said.

And truly the road grew very bad; at a short bit of swamp they made their first acquaintance with 'corduroy.' Sam explained the structure when the waggon had done bumping over it: trunks of trees had been laid along the road as 'sleepers' in three continuous lines; and across them round logs, close together by theory, but in practice perhaps a foot or two apart, with unknown abysses of mud between.

They wished even for the corduroy expedient a little farther on, when the line became encumbered with stumps left from the underbrushing, and which caught in the axletree every few score yards. Now came the handspikes into action, which provident Sam had cut, and laid into the waggon when the road was fair and smooth; for the wheels had to be lifted high enough to slip over the obstacles. In the pauses of manual labour came the chilling thought, 'All this difficulty between us and home.'

Sunlight faded from the tree-tops; and soon night was descending darkly among the pines.

'We must either camp in the woods, or get shelter at some settler's,' decided Sam. 'We'll try a quarter of a mile farther, and see what it brings.' So away they went again, shouting at the oxen, and endeavouring to steer the equipage free of mud-holes and stumps.

'I am afraid our cups and saucers are all in a smash,' said Arthur. Robert had a secret misgiving to the same effect; but, then, crockeryware is a luxury to which no shanty-man has a right. Andy rescued a washing basin and ewer, by wearing the former on his head and the latter on his left arm—helmet and shield-wise; except at intervals, when he took his turn at handspiking.

A light gleamed through the trees, and a dog barked simultaneously: they were on the verge of a clearing; and, hearing the voices outside, the owner of the house came forth to welcome the travellers, with a heartiness widely different from the commonplace hospitality of more crowded countries.



CHAPTER XI.

THE BATTLE WITH THE WILDERNESS BEGINS.

A roaring fire of logs upon the wide hearth, logs built up into walls and roof, logs wrought into rough furniture of tables and stools—here, within the emigrant's hut, the all-encompassing forest had but changed its shape. Man had but pressed it into his service; from a foe it had become a friend; the wooden realm paid tribute, being subjugated.

The still life of the cabin was rude enough. No appliances for ease, not many for comfort, as we in England understand the words. Yet the settler's wife, sitting by her wheel, and dressed in the home-spun fruits thereof, had a well-to-do blooming aspect, which gaslight and merino could not have improved; and the settler's boy, building a miniature shanty of chips in the corner, his mottled skin testifying to all sorts of weather-beating, looking as happy as if he had a toyshop at his command, instead of the word being utterly unknown in his experience; and the baby, rolled up in the hollowed pine-log, slept as sweetly as if satin curtains enclosed its rest. Back to Sam Holt's mind recurred words which he knew well: 'A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth.'

The woman rose and curtsied. She had not been accustomed to make that respectful gesture for a long time back; but something in the appearance of the strangers half involuntarily constrained it.

'I needn't ask if you're Canadian born,' said Mr. Holt; 'you've the manners of the old country.'

'My father and mother were from Wiltshire, and so be I,' she answered, setting back her wheel, and looking gratified at the implied commendation. 'But that be so long ago as I scarce remember.'

'And she made amends by marrying me,' said the settler, entering from the outer door, and latching it behind him. 'Mary, get the pan and fix some supper quick. Them duck I shot won't be bad. You see, I've been expectin' you along rather;' and he flung down an armful of wood, which he began to arrange with architectural reference to the back-log and fore-stick.

'Expecting us?' exclaimed Robert Wynn.

'You're for lot fifteen in ninth concession, township of Gazelle? Wall, so I guessed; for I heard from Zack Bunting who lives at the "Corner," that it was sold by Landenstein; and I calc'lated you'd be along presently:' and he finished his fire-building by a touch with his foot, which appeared to demolish much of his labour, but in reality conduced to his object of intensifying the heat and blaze.

'Benny,' to the boy, who had sat on the ground staring at the new-comers, 'go tell your mother to be spry.' The little fellow went accordingly, by the side door through which she had disappeared a few minutes previously; and the Irish servant, planting himself on the vacated spot with his toes to the fire comfortably, commenced to erect of the child's chips a two-storied mansion.

'You've got a good slice of bush there, back from the pond; though the cedars will be troublesome, I guess.'

'Oh, we bargained for the cedars,' said Sam Holt. 'There's enough to clear without laying an axe to them for many a day.'

'It's all the doing of that spring creek, running through the middle of the lot, as fine a water-privilege as ever I see; but the cedars are where it gets to the pond. If the bed was deepened down below, it's my opinion the swamp would be drained.'

'You seem to know the ground well,' said Robert, with interest.

'I guess I ought to, that have shot over it before ever a blazed line ran through them woods. We was farthest west once, but that's over by a long spell; the neighbourhood's pretty thick now, and the "Corner" will be a town shortly.'

'Well, if this is a thick neighbourhood, I should like to know his idea of a thin one,' said Arthur, sotto voce, to Sam Holt. 'We have met only this house for miles.'

'Oh, they ain't many miles, only you thought they was, cos' I guess you ain't used to the stumps,' put in the settler. 'The back lot to ours, of the same number, is took by a Scotchman, and last week I run a blazed line across to his clearing through the bush; for you see I'm often away, trapping or still-hunting, and Mary here thought she'd be a trifle less lonesome if she had a way of going over the hill to her friend Mrs. Macpherson. The other way is round by the "Corner," which makes it five miles full; but now Benny can run across of a message, by minding the marks; can't you, my lad?'

'Yes, father,' answered the boy proudly. 'And I can chop a blaze myself, too.' Benny was not much taller than an axe handle.

Arthur looked from the child round at the wife, who was often left alone in this solitude of woods, and longed for the slender chain of a scarred line of trees between her and some other woman. A healthy, firm outline of face, wholly unacquainted with nervousness; quiet, self-reliant, hard-working; perhaps of a Dutch type of character. Her husband was a sturdy broad-set man, with lithe limbs, and quick senses looking out from his clear-featured countenance: he had a roving unsubdued eye, befitting the hunter more than the farmer.

'I wouldn't desire,' said the latter, seating himself on the end of the table, while his wife superintended a pan of frizzling pork on the coals—'I wouldn't desire, for a feller that wanted to settle down for good, a more promising location than yourn at the Cedars. The high ground grows the very best sorts of hard wood—oak, sugar maple, elm, basswood. Not too many beech, or I'd expect sand; with here and there a big pine and a handful of balsams. The underbrushing ain't much, except in the swamp.'

'I'm glad to hear that,' said Mr. Holt, 'for the fall is going fast, and we'll have to work pretty hard before snow comes.'

'So I'm thinkin'. But you ain't going to settle: you haven't the cut of it: you're settled already.'

'How do you know?'

'Oh, you didn't listen as they did,' pointing his thumb towards the Wynns, 'when I fell to talkin' of the ground. I know'd my men at once. Nor you didn't stare about as they did, as if the house and fixins was a show at a copper ahead.'

'You must excuse our curiosity,' said Robert politely.

'Surely; every man that has eyes is welcome to use 'em,' replied the backwoodsman bluntly. 'We ain't got no manners in the bush, nor don't want 'em, as I tell Mary here, when she talks any palaver. Now, wife, them pritters must be done;' and he left his seat on the table to pry over her pan.

'Then take the cakes out of the bake-kettle, will you?' said Mary; 'and if them ducks be raw, 'tain't my fault, remember.' She was evidently a woman of few words, but trenchant.

Thus warned, her husband did not press the point, but took the stewing fowl under his own care, displaying a practical experience of cookery won in many a day of bush life.

'These duck was shot on your pond, stranger; if you be a good hand with the gun, you'll never want for fresh meat while that water holds together. The finest maskelonge and pickerel I ever see was hooked out of it.'

Arthur's face brightened; for the sportsman instinct was strong in him, and he had been disappointed hitherto by finding the woods along their track empty of game.

''Cos the critters have more sense than to wait by the road to be shot,' explained the backwoodsman, as he dished up his stew—a sort of hodgepodge of wild-fowl, the theory of which would have horrified an epicure; but the practical effect was most savoury.

Now the boy Benny had never in his small life seen any edifice nobler than a loghouse on the ground-floor; and the upper storey which Mr. Callaghan had built with his chips seemed to him as queer a phenomenon as a man having two heads.

'Well, only think of that!' exclaimed Andy; 'the boy doesn't know what a stairs is.'

'And how should he?' asked the father, rather sharply. 'He ha'n't seen nothin' but the bush. One time I took him to Greenock, and he couldn't stop wonderin' what med all the houses come together. For all that, he ha'n't a bad notion of chopping, and can drive a span of oxen, and is growin' up as hardy as my rifle—eh, Benny?'

'He cut all the wood I wanted while you were away last time, Peter,' chimed in the mother. So the strangers saw that the principle which leads parents to bore their unoffending visitors with copybooks and the 'Battle of Prague,' is applicable to backwood accomplishments also.

As a general rule, conversation does not flourish in the bush. The settler's isolated life is not favourable to exchange of thought, and events are few. Silence had fallen upon the woman in this house to a remarkable degree, and become incorporated with her. She went about her work quietly and quickly, speaking but five sentences in the course of the evening. The last of these was to notify to her husband that 'the skins was ready.'

'We've no beds,' said he, with equal curtness. 'You must try and be snug in a wrap-up on the floor to-night. More logs, Benny;' and additional wood was heaped down, while he brought forward a bundle of bear and buffalo skins, enough to blanket them all. Mary had already picked up the pine-log containing her baby, and taken it into the other room out of sight, whither her husband followed; and Benny crept into a sort of bed-closet in the far corner.

All night long, through the outer darkness, came a sound as of a limitless sea upon a lonely strand. Robert knew it for the wind wandering in the forest, and even in his home dreams it mingled a diapason, until the early sun gleamed through the chinks of the door, and flung a ray across his face. Simultaneously the poultry outside and the infant within woke up, commencing their several noises; and the farmer, coming out, built up the fire, and hung down the bake-kettle to heat for the breakfast bread. Then he invited his company to 'a wash' at the spring; and, leading them by a wood path beside the house, they came to a pellucid pool fed by a rivulet, which, after flowing over its basin, ran off rapidly to lower ground. Here Benny was flung in by his father, though the water was quite deep enough to drown him; but he dived, and came out buoyant as a coot.

'Now go fetch the cow, my lad, and help your mother to fix breakfast, while we walk round the clearing.' But this morning she had an efficient coadjutor in the person of Andy Callaghan, who dandled the baby while the cakes were being made, his sharp eye learning a lesson meantime; and milked the cow while the child was being dressed; and cut slices of pork, superintending its frizzling while the room was being set to rights. Three or four attempts to draw the silent woman into conversation were utterly abortive.

'Troth, an' you're a jewil of a wife,' remarked the Irishman, when everything seemed done. 'I'll engage I won't have the good luck to get one wid her tongue in such good ordher.'

Mary Logan laughed. 'It be from having no folk to talk with,' she said.

'An' a sin an' a shame it is for himself to lave you alone,' rejoined Andy, looking complimentary. 'Now I want to know one thing that has been botherin' me ever since I came in here. What's them strings of yallow stuff that are hangin' out of the rafthers, an' are like nothin' I see in all my days, 'cept shavin's?'

'Sarce,' answered Mrs. Logan, looking up; 'them's sarce.'

'I'm as wise as ever,' said Andy. Whereupon she went to the compartment which acted as store-closet, and, bringing out a pie which had a wooden spoon erect in it, proffered him a bit.

'Ah,' quoth Mr. Callaghan with satisfaction, 'that's English talk; I know what that manes well. So ye calls apples "sarce!" I've heerd tell that every counthry has a lingo of its own, an' I partly b'lieve it now. But throth, that way of savin' 'em would be great news intirely for the childer at home!'

So thought Robert Wynn afterwards, when he found the practice almost universal among the Canadians, and wondered that a domestic expedient so simple and serviceable should be confined to American housekeepers.

'Peter planted an orchard the first thing when we settled, and maples be plenty in the bush,' said Mrs. Logan, with unusual communicativeness.

'Yes, ma'am,' rejoined Andy suavely, and not in the least seeing the connection between maple trees and apple-pie. 'I wondher might I make bould to ax you for one of them sthrings? they're sich a curiosity to me.' And he had the cord of leathern pieces stowed away in one of the provision hampers before the others came in from the fields.

There they had seen the invariable abundance and wastefulness of bush-farming; no trace of the economy of land, which need perforce be practised in older countries, but an extravagance about the very zigzag fences, which unprofitably occupied, with a succession of triangular borderings, as much space as would make scores of garden beds. 'Nobody cares for the selvedges when there is a whole continent to cut from,' remarked Sam Holt, in a sententious way he had.

A yield of from twenty to five-and-twenty bushels per acre of wheat, and two hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes, were mentioned by the farmer as an average crop. His barns and root-house were full to repletion. Nothing of all this property was locked up: a latch on the door sufficed.

'I suppose, then, you have no rogues in the bush?' said Robert.

'Where everybody's as well off as another, there ain't no thievin',' was the pithy answer. 'A wolf now and then among our sheep, is all the robbers we has.'

After breakfast the bullocks were yoked afresh.

'I guess as how you've stumps before you to-day, a few,' said the farmer, coming out axe on shoulder. ''Tain't only a blaze up beyond your place at the Cedars, and not much better than a track of regulation width from the "Corner" to there. Only for that job of underbrushing I want to get finished, I'd be along with you to-day.'

He and his boy Benny walked with the travellers so far as their way lay together. The wife stood at the door, shading her eyes with her hand, till the lumbering waggon was lost to view round the edge of the woods.

The day's journey was just a repetition of yesterday's, with the stumps and the mud holes rather worse. The 'Corner' with its single sawmill and store, offered no inducement for a halt; and a tedious two miles farther brought them to 'hum.'



CHAPTER XII.

CAMPING IN THE BUSH.

'Well!' exclaimed Robert Wynn, 'here is my estate; and neither pond, nor swamp, nor yet spring creek do I behold.'

He looked again at the landmark—an elm tree at the junction of the lot line and the concession road, which bore the numbers of each, 'Nine, Fifteen,' in very legible figures on opposite sides. A 'blaze' had been made by chopping away a slice of the bark with an axe about three feet from the ground, and on the white space the numbers were marked by the surveyor. All roads through the forest, and all farm allotments, are first outlined in this way, before the chopper sets to work.

The new townships in Upper Canada are laid out in parallel lines, running nearly east and west, sixty-six chains apart, and sixty-six feet in width, which are termed concession lines, being conceded by Government as road allowances. These lands thus enclosed are subdivided into lots of two hundred acres by other lines, which strike the concession roads at right angles every thirty chains; and every fifth of these lot lines is also a cross-road. We have all looked at maps of the country, and wondered at the sort of chess-board counties which prevail in the back settlements: the same system of parallelograms extends to the farms.

Robert's face was a little rueful. Twenty yards in any direction he could not see for the overpowering bush, except along the line of road darkened with endless forest. The waggon was being unpacked, for the driver sturdily declared that his agreement had been only to bring them as far as this post on the concession: he must go back to the 'Corner' that evening, on his way home.

'An' is it on the road ye'll lave the masther's things?' remonstrated Andy.

'I guess we han't no masters here, Pat,' was the reply; 'but if you see anywar else to stow the traps, I ain't partic'ler.' And he stolidly continued unloading.

'Come,' said the cheery voice of Sam Holt, 'we will have daylight enough to explore the lot, and select a site for a camp. I think I can discover the tops of cedars over the hardwood trees here. The boxes will take care of themselves, unless a squirrel takes into his head to inspect them. Let's follow the concession line along westward first.'

Callaghan stayed by the luggage, feeling by no means sure of its safety, and saw the rest of the party gradually receding among the trees, with sensations akin to those of a sailor on a desert island. Sitting upon the tool-chest, like an item of property saved from a wreck, Andy looked from the base to the summit of the huge walls of forest that encompassed him, and along the canal of sky overhead, till his countenance had fallen to zero.

The shipwrecked sensation had gone farther; Mr. Holt saw it lurking in other faces, and forthwith found all advantages possible in the lot. The soil was sure to be the best: he could tell by the timber. Its height proved the depth of earth. When the trees grew shorter, a hidden treasure of limestone flag lay beneath the surface, useful for drains and building. And even the entangled cedar swamp was most desirable, as furnishing the best wood for rail-fences and logs for a house.

But nothing could look more unpromising. Blackish pools of water alternated with a network of massive roots all over the soil, underneath broad evergreen branches; trunks of trees leaned in every direction, as if top-heavy. Wilder confusion of thicket could not be conceived. 'The cedars troublesome! I should think so,' groaned their owner.

'This is the worst bit,' acknowledged Sam. 'Now, if we could see it, the lake is down yonder; perhaps if we strike a diagonal across the lot, we may come to some rising ground.' With the pocket compass for guide they left the blazed line, which they had followed hitherto. After a short distance the bush began to thin, and the forest twilight brightened.

'A beaver meadow!' exclaimed Sam Holt, who was foremost. Green as emerald, the small semicircular patch of grass lay at the foot of gentle slopes, as if it had once been a lakelet itself. 'Two acres ready cleared, with the finest dairy grass only waiting to be eaten,' continued encouraging Sam. 'And the clearing on the hill will command the best view in the township; there's the site for your house, Wynn. Altogether you've had rare luck in this lot.'

'But why is that green flat called a beaver meadow?' asked Robert.

'Do you see the creek running alongside? No, you can't for the underbrush; but it's there all the same. Well, they say that long ago beavers dammed up the current in such places as this with clay and brushwood, so that the water spread over all level spaces near; and when the Indians and French were at war, the red men cut away the dams and killed the beavers wholesale to spite their enemies. You're to take that just as an on dit, recollect.'

'And is all that verdure an appearance or a reality?'

'Something of both. I don't say but you will occasionally find it treacherous footing, needing drainage to be comfortable. See! there's the pond at last.'

They had been climbing out of the denser woods, among a younger growth on the face of the slope; and when they turned, the sheet of water was partially visible over the sunken cedar swamp.

'A pond!' exclaimed Arthur; 'why, it must be three miles across to those limestone cliffs. What pretty islets! Such endless varieties of wood and water!'

'I think we Americans are rather given to the diminutive style of parlance,' quoth Mr. Holt. 'We have some justification in the colossal proportion of all the features of nature around us. What is this pretty lake but a mere pool, compared with our Erie and Superior?'



'It is one of a chain,' remarked Robert, taking from his breast pocket a map of the district, which had his own farm heavily scored in red ink. Often had he contemplated that outline of the terra incognita on which he now trod, and longed for the knowledge he now possessed, which, after its manner, had brought him both good and evil. Like balls threaded on a cord, a succession of lakes, connected by cascades and portages, or by reaches of river, stretched away to the north-west, sorely marring the uniformity of the chess-board townships.

As they picked their way back along the lot line northward, Mr. Holt stopped suddenly. 'I hear a very singular noise,' he said, 'for which I am wholly at a loss to account, unless there be Indians about in the neighbourhood. Even then it is totally unlike their cries. Listen!'

His sharper senses had detected before theirs a distant wail, proceeding from some distance in front, apparently—weird and wild as it could be, dying away or surging upon the ear as the wind swept it hither or thither. Arthur shrugged his shoulders. 'You have no ghosts in these forests, Holt, I suppose?'

'The country's too new for anything of the sort,' replied he gravely.

'Nor any mocking birds that can be playing us a trick? Or dryads warning us off their territory?'

He had recognised the performance of Andy Callaghan, who, when they turned the corner of the allotment, was discovered seated on the boxes as when they saw him last, and crooning the dismalest melody. But he had, in the meantime, recovered himself sufficiently to gather brushwood, and kindle a fire beside the road; likewise to cook a panful of rashers as the shadows grew longer and the day later.

'But sure I thought ye wor lost entirely; sure I thought ye wor never comin' at all, Masther Robert, avourneen. 'Twas that med me rise the keen. A single livin' thing I didn't lay my eyes on since, barrin' a big frog. I'm afeard thim are like sticks, Masther Arthur, they're so long fryin'.'

'No matter, Andy, they'll do first-rate. I'd only advise you to chop up more. I feel like eating all that myself;' and, trencher on knee, they dined with real backwood appetites.

A shelter for the night was the next consideration. Mr. Holt constituted himself architect, and commenced operations by lashing a pole across two trees at about his own height; the others cut sticks and shrubs for roofing. Three young saplings sloped back to the ground as principal rafters, and on these were laid a thatch of brushwood; the open ends of the hut were filled with the same material.

'Now,' said Sam Holt, contemplating the work of his hands with professional pride, 'when we have a big fire built in front, and a lot of hemlock brush to lie on, we shall be pretty comfortable.'

And he instructed his novices further in the art of making their couch luxuriously agreeable, by picking the hemlock fine, and spreading over it a buffalo skin. Sam Holt had evidently become acquainted with 'considerable' bush lore at his University of Toronto.



CHAPTER XIII.

THE YANKEE STOREKEEPER.

Three men stood with their axes amid the primeval forest. Vast trunks rose around them to an altitude of thirty or even fifty feet without a bough; above, 'a boundless contiguity of shade,' and below, a dense undergrowth of shrubs, which seemed in some places impenetrable jungle. Three axes against thirty thousand trees. The odds were immensely in the dryads' favour; the pines and hardwoods might have laughed in every leaf at the puny power threatening their immemorial empire, and settled that vis inertiae alone must overcome.

If, as Tennyson has bestowed upon the larkspur ears, the higher vegetation can listen also, the following conversation would that day have been heard from the triad of axe-men beginning their campaign against the forest, and 'bating no jot of heart or hope' in the contest.

'Here's the site for your shanty,' said Mr. Holt, dealing a blow on a fine maple before him, which left a white scar along the bark. 'It has the double advantage of being close to this fine spring creek, and sufficiently near the concession line.'

'And I'm sanguine enough to believe that there will be a view at some future period,' added Robert, 'when we have hewed through some hundred yards of solid timber in front. By the way, Holt, why are all the settlers' locations I have yet seen in the country so destitute of wood about them? A man seems to think it his duty to extirpate everything that grows higher than a pumpkin; one would imagine it ought to be easy enough to leave clumps of trees in picturesque spots, so as to produce the effect of the ornamental plantations at home. Now I do not mean exclusively the lowest grade of settlers, for of course from them so much taste was not to be expected; but gentlemen farmers and such like.'

'I dare say they contract such an antipathy to wood of every species during their years of clearing, that it is thenceforth regarded as a natural enemy, to be cut down wherever met with. And when you have seen one of our Canadian hurricanes, you will understand why an umbrageous elm or a majestic oak near one's dwellings may not always be a source of pleasurable sensations.'

'Still, I mean to spare that beautiful butternut yonder,' said Robert; 'of all trees in the forest it is prettiest. And I shall try to clear altogether in an artistic manner, with an eye to the principles of landscape gardening. Why, Holt! many an English parvenu planning the grounds of his country seat, and contemplating the dwarf larches and infantine beeches struggling for thirty years to maturity, would give a thousand guineas for some of these lordly oaks and walnuts, just as they stand.'

Sam Holt refrained from expressing his conviction that, after a winter's chopping, Robert would retract his admiration for timber in any shape, and would value more highly a bald-looking stumpy acre prepared for fall wheat, than the most picturesque maple-clump, except so far as the latter boded sugar.

'To leave landscape gardening for after consideration,' said he, with some slight irony, 'let us apply ourselves at present to the shanty. I think, by working hard, we might have walls and roof up before dark. Twenty by twelve will probably be large enough for the present—eh, Robert?'

Oh yes, certainly; for the house was to be commenced so soon, that the shanty could be regarded only as a temporary shelter. Blessed, labour-lightening sanguineness of youth! that can bound over intermediate steps of toil, and accomplish in a few thoughts the work of months or years.

So Mr. Holt measured the above dimensions on the ground, choosing a spot where the trunks appeared something less massive, than elsewhere, and set his auxiliaries to cut down all the trees within the oblong, and for a certain distance round; arranging also that the logs should fall as near as might be to where they were wanted for the walls.

Now, the settler's first-felled tree is to him like a schoolboy's first Latin declension, or a lawyer's first brief—the pledge of ability, the earnest of future performances. Every success braces the nerves of mind, as well as the muscles of body. A victory over the woodland was embodied in that fallen maple. But Andy was so near getting smashed in the coming down of his tree, that Mr. Holt ordered him to lay by the axe, and bring his spade, to dig a hole in a certain spot within the oblong.

'An' its mighty harmless that crathur 'ud be agin the wood,' muttered the Irishman; 'throth, the earth in this counthry is mostly timber. An' in the name of wondher what does he want wid a hole, barrin' we're to burrow like rabbits?'

But the others were too busy felling or chopping trees into lengths of log to heed Andy's wonderment; and the novices were agreeably surprised to find how dexterous they became in the handling of the axe, after even a few hours' practice. Their spirits rose; for 'nothing succeeds like success,' saith the Frenchman.

'Now I'll give you a lesson in basswood troughs,' said Mr. Holt. 'This shanty of yours is to be roofed with a double layer of troughs laid hollow to hollow; and we choose basswood because it is the easiest split and scooped. Shingle is another sort of roofing, and that must be on your house; but troughs are best for the shanty. See here; first split the log fair in the middle; then hollow the flat side with the adze.'

Robert was practising his precepts busily, when he was almost startled by a strange nasal voice beside him.

'Considerable well for a beginner; but I guess you put a powerful deal too much strength in yer strokes yet, stranger.'

The speaker was a tall lank man, with black hair to correspond, and lantern jaws; little cunning eyes, and a few scrubby patches of rusty stubble on chin and cheeks. Robert disliked him at once.

'Why didn't you stop at the "Corner" yesterday? 'Twarn't neighbourly to go on right away like that. But it all come, I reckon, of Britisher pride and impudence.'

Robert looked at him full, and demanded, 'Pray who are you, sir?'

'Zack Bunting as keeps the store,' replied the other. 'I'm not ashamed neither of my name nor country, which is the U—nited States, under the glorious stars and stripes. I come up to help in raising the shanty, as I guessed you'd be at it to-day.'

Young Wynn hardly knew what to reply to such an odd mixture of insolence and apparent kindness. The Yankee took the adze from his hand before he could speak, and set about hollowing troughs very rapidly.

'You chop, and I'll scoop, for a start. Now I guess you hain't been used to this sort of thing, when you was to hum? You needn't hardly tell, for white hands like yourn there ain't o' much use nohow in the bush. You must come down a peg, I reckon, and let 'em blacken like other folks, and grow kinder hard, afore they'll take to the axe properly. How many acres do you intend to clear this winter?'

'As many as I can.'

'Humph! you should blaze 'em off all round, and work 'em reglar. You han't more than a month's "brushing" now. Are you married?'

'No,' replied Robert, waxing fierce internally at this catechism. 'Are you?' by way of retaliation.

'This twenty year. Raised most of our family in the States. The old woman's spry enough yet, as you'll see when you come to the "Corner."'

All this time Mr. Bunting was chewing tobacco, and discharging the fluid about with marvellous copiousness, at intervals. Robert thought his dried-up appearance capable of explanation. 'What made you come to settle in the bush?' was his next question.

'Holt!' called out Robert, quite unable patiently to endure any further cross-examination; and he walked away through the trees to say to his friend,—'There's an intolerable Yankee yonder, splitting troughs as fast as possible, but his tongue is more than I can bear.'

'Leave him to me,' answered Sam; 'his labour is worth a little annoyance, anyhow. I'll fix him.' But he quietly continued at his own work, notwithstanding, and kept Robert beside him.

Mr. Bunting speedily tired of manufacturing the basswood troughs alone, and sloped over to the group who were raising the walls of the shanty.

'Wal, I guess you're gitting along considerable smart,' he observed, after a lengthened stare, which amused Arthur highly for the concentration of inquisitiveness it betrayed. ''Tain't an easy job for greenhorns nohow; but you take to it kinder nateral, like the wood-duck to the pond.' He chewed awhile, watching Sam's proceedings narrowly. 'I guess this ain't your first time of notching logs, by a long chalk, stranger?'

'Perhaps so, perhaps not,' was the reply. 'Here, lend a hand with this stick, Mr. Bunting.'

Zack took his hands from the pockets of his lean rusty trousers, and helped to fit the log to its place on the front wall, which, in a shanty, is always higher than the back, making a fall to the roof. Mr. Holt managed to keep the Yankee so closely employed during the next hour, that he took out of him the work of two, and utterly quenched his loquacity for the time being. 'He shall earn his dinner, at all events,' quoth Sam to himself.

'Wal, stranger, you are a close shave,' said Zack, sitting down to rest, and fanning himself with a dirty brownish rag by way of handkerchief. 'I hain't worked so hard at any "bee" this twelve month. You warn't born last week, I guess.'

'I reckon not,' replied Sam, receiving the compliment as conscious merit should. 'But we're not half done, Mr. Bunting; and I'd like such a knowledgeable head as yours to help fix the troughs.'

'Oil for oil in this world,' thought Robert.

'Throth, they'll build me up entirely,' said Andy to himself; 'an' sorra door to get out or in by, only four walls an' a hole in the middle of the floor. Of all the quare houses that iver I see, this shanty bates them hollow. Masther Robert,' calling aloud, 'I wondher have I dug deep enough?'

'Come out here, and get dinner,' was the response. 'We'll see to-morrow.'

''Tis asier said than done,' remarked Andy, looking for a niche between the logs to put his foot in. 'I hope this isn't the way we'll always have to be clamberin' into our house; but sorra other way do I see, barrin' the hole's to be a passage ondherground.'

'You goose! the hole is to be a cellar, wherein to keep potatoes and pork,' said his master, overhearing the tale of his soliloquy. Andy departed to his cookery enlightened.

Before the pan had done frizzling, whole rows of the ready-made troughs were laid along the roof, sloping from the upper wall plate to the back; and Mr. Bunting had even begun to place the covering troughs with either edge of the hollow curving into the centre of that underneath. Robert and Arthur were chinking the walls by driving pieces of wood into every crevice between the logs: moss and clay for a further stuffing must be afterwards found.

If the Yankee were quick at work, he fulfilled the other sequent of the adage likewise. His dinner was almost a sleight-of-hand performance. Arthur could hardly eat his own for concealed amusement at the gulf-like capacity of his mouth, and the astonishing rapidity with which the eatables vanished.

'While you'd be sayin' "thrapstick," he tucked in a quarter of a stone of praties and a couple of pound of rashers,' said Andy afterwards. 'Before the gintlemen was half done, he was picking his long yellow teeth wid a pin, an' discoorsin' 'em as impident as if he was a gintleman himself, the spalpeen!'

All unwitting of the storm gathering in the person of the cook, Mr. Bunting did indulge in some free and easy reflections upon Britishers in general, and the present company in particular; also of the same cook's attendance during their meal.

'Now I guess we free-born Americans don't be above having our helps to eat with us; we ain't poor and proud, as that comes to. But I'll see ye brought down to it, or my name's not Zack Bunting. It tickles me to see aristocrats like ye at work—rael hard work, to take the consait out of ye; and if I was this feller,' glancing at Andy, 'I'd make tracks if ye didn't give me my rights, smart enough.'

The glow in the Irish servant's eyes was not to be mistaken.

'I guess I've riled you a bit,' added the Yankee wonderingly.

'An' what's my rights, sir, if yer honour would be plasin' to tell me?' asked Andy, with mock obsequiousness; 'for I donno of a single one this minit, barrin' to do what my master bids me.'

'Because I calc'late you've been raised in them mean opinions, an' to think yerself not as good flesh an' blood as the aristocrats that keep you in bondage.'

'Come now,' interrupted Sam Holt, 'you shut up, Mr. Bunting. It's no bondage to eat one's dinner afterwards; and he'll be twice as comfortable.'

'That's thrue,' said Andy; 'I never yet could ate my bit in presence of the quality; so that's one right I'd forgive; and as for me—the likes of me—bein' as good blood as the Masther Wynns of Dunore, I'd as soon think the Yankee was himself.'

With sovereign contempt, Andy turned his back on Mr. Bunting, and proceeded to cook his dinner.

'Wal, it's the first time I see a feller's dander riz for tellin' him he's as good as another,' remarked Zack, sauntering in the wake of the others towards the unfinished shanty. 'I reckon it's almost time for me to make tracks to hum; the ole woman will be lookin' out. But I say, stranger, what are you going to do with that heaver meadow below on the creek? It's a choice slice of pasture that.'

'Cut the grass in summer,' replied Sam Holt, tolerably sure of what was coming.

'I've as fine a red heifer,' said the Yankee confidentially, 'as ever was milked, and I'd let you have it, being a new-comer, and not up to the ways of the country, very cheap.' His little black eyes twinkled. 'I'd like to drive a trade with you, I would; for she's a rael prime article.'

'Thank you,' said Mr. Holt, 'but we don't contemplate dairy farming as yet.' Zack could not be rebuffed under half-a-dozen refusals. 'Wal, if you won't trade, you'll be wantin' fixins from the store, an' I have most everythin' in stock. Some of my lads will be along to see you to-morrow, I reckon, and any whisky or tobacco you wanted they could bring; and if you chose to run a bill'—

Refused also, with thanks, as the magazines say to rejected contributions. This, then, was the purport of Mr. Bunting's visit: to gratify curiosity; to drive a trade; to estimate the new settlers' worldly wealth, in order to trust or not, as seemed prudent. While at dinner he had taken a mental inventory and valuation of the boxes and bales about, submitting them to a closer examination where possible. At the time Robert thought it simply an indulgence of inordinate curiosity, but the deeper motive of self-interest lay behind.

'In their own phrase, that fellow can see daylight,' remarked Mr. Holt, as Zack's lean figure disappeared among the trees. 'I never saw little eyes, set in a parenthesis of yellow crowsfeet at the corners, that did not betoken cunning.'



CHAPTER XIV.

THE 'CORNER.'

Several days were employed in plastering all the crevices of the shanty with clay, cutting out a doorway and a single window in the front wall, and building a hearth and chimney. But when completed, and the goods and chattels moved in, quite a proud sense of proprietorship stole into the owner's heart.

As yet, this arduous bush-life had not ceased to be as it were a play: Sam Holt's cheery companionship took the edge off every hardship; and their youthful health and strength nourished under toil.

'Now, considering we are to be dependent on ourselves for furniture, the best thing I can fashion in the first instance will be a work bench,' said Arthur, whose turn for carpentering was decided. 'Little I ever thought that my childish tool-box was educating me for this.'

'I think a door ought to be your first performance,' suggested Robert. 'Our mansion would be snugger with a door than a screen of hemlock brush.'

'But I must go to the "Corner" for boards, and that will take an entire day, the road is so vile. I can't see why I couldn't hew boards out of a pine myself; eh, Holt?'

'You want to try your hand at "slabbing," do you? I warn you that the labour is no joke, and the planks never look so neat as those from the sawmill.'

'We have flung "looks" overboard long ago,' replied Arthur. 'Come, teach me, like a good fellow.'

'Choose your tree as clean and straight in the grain as possible.'

'And how am I to tell how its grain runs?' asked the pupil.

'Experiment is the only certainty; but if the tree be perfectly clear of knots for thirty or forty feet, and its larger limbs drooping downwards, so as to shelter the trunk in a measure from the influence of the sun, these are presumptions in favour of the grain running straight.'

'What has the sun to do with it?'

'The grain of most trees naturally inclines to follow the annual course of the sun. Hence its windings, in great measure. Having selected and felled your pine, cut it across into logs of the length of plank you want.'

'But you said something of experiment in deciding about the grain of the wood.'

'Oh, by cutting out a piece, and testing it with the axe, to see whether it splits fair. When you have the logs chopped, mark the ends with a bit of charcoal into the width of your planks: then slab them asunder with wedges.'

'Holt, where did you pick up such a variety of knowledge as you have?'

'I picked up this item among the lumber-men. You must know I spent more than one long vacation in exploring the most-out-of-the-way locations I could find. But I'd advise you to go to the sawmill for your planks, though I do understand the theory of slabbing.'

After due consideration—and as glass for the window was a want for which the forest could supply no substitute—it was agreed that all should take a half-holiday next day, and go down to the 'Corner' to Uncle Zack's store.

'Now that is settled,' said Robert, with a little difficulty, 'I wanted to say—that is, I've been thinking—that we are here in the wilderness, far away from all churches and good things of that kind, and we ought to have prayers of our own every evening, as my mother has at home.'

'Certainly,' said both Arthur and Sam Holt.

'I have never so felt the presence of God,' added Robert solemnly, 'as since I've been in these forest solitudes; never so felt my utter dependence upon Him for everything.'

'No,' rejoined Sam. 'He seems to draw very near to the soul in the midst of these His grand works. The very stillness exalts one's heart towards Him.'

And so that good habit of family worship was commenced, inaugurating the shanty that very night. Andy Callaghan sat by and listened.

'Throth, but they're fine words,' said he. 'I wouldn't believe any one now, that that book is bad to listen to.'

'And at home you'd run away from the sight of it. How's that, Andy?' asked Mr. Wynn.

'It's aisy explained, sir,' replied the servant, looking droll. 'Don't you see, I haven't his riverence at me elbow here, to turn me into a goat if I did anything contrary, or to toss me into purgatory the minit the breath is out of my poor body.'

Thousands of Andy's countrymen find the same relief to their consciences as soon as they tread the free soil of Canada West.

Truly a primitive settlement was the 'Corner.' The dusk forest closed about its half dozen huts threateningly, as an army round a handful of invincibles. Stumps were everywhere that trees were not; one log-cabin was erected upon four, as it had been, legs ready to walk away with the edifice. 'Uncle Zack's' little store was the most important building in the place, next to the sawmill on the stream.

'The situation must be unhealthy,' said Robert; 'here's marsh under my very feet. Why, there's a far better site for a town plot on my land, Holt.'

'Ay, and a better water privilege too. Let me see what your energy does towards developing its resources, Robert.'

They discovered one source of the storekeeper's prosperity in the enormous price he exacted for the commonest articles. Necessity alone could have driven Arthur to pay what he did for the wretched little window of four panes to light the shanty. And Uncle Zack had as much to say about the expense and difficulty of getting goods to a locality so remote, and as much sympathizing with his purchaser because of the exorbitant cost, as if he were a philanthropist, seeking solely the convenience of his neighbours by his sales.

'That fellow's a master of soft sawder when he chooses: but did you see how he clutched the hard cash after all? My opinion is, he don't often get paid in the circulating medium,' said Arthur.

'Of that you may be sure,' rejoined Sam Holt; 'currency here lies more in potash or flour, just as they have salt in Abyssinia. Society seems to be rather mixed at the "Corner." Yonder's a French Canadian, and here's an Indian.'

No glorious red man, attired in savage finery of paint and feathers; no sculptor's ideal form, or novelist's heroic countenance; but a mild-looking person, in an old shooting jacket and red flannel shirt, with a straw hat shading his pale coppery complexion. He wield a tomahawk or march on a war trail! Never. And where was the grim taciturnity of his forefathers? He answered when spoken to, not in Mohawk, or Cherokee, or Delaware, but in nasal Yankeefied English; nay, he seemed weakly garrulous.

'There's another preconceived idea knocked on the head,' said Arthur. 'My glorious ideal Indian! you are fallen, never to rise.'



CHAPTER XV.

ANDY TREES A 'BASTE.'

Door and window were fitted into the holes cut in the front wall of the shanty, and no carpenter's 'prentice would have owned to such clumsy joinery; but Arthur was flushed with success, because the door could positively shut and the window could open. He even projected tables and chairs in his ambitious imagination, en suite with the bedstead of ironwood poles and platted bass-work bark, which he had already improvised; and which couch of honour would have been awarded by common consent to Mr. Holt, had he not adhered to the hemlock brush with all the affection of an amateur.

The great matter on the minds of our settlers now, was the underbrushing. They might calculate on the whole month of November for their work—the beautiful dreamy November of Canada, as different from its foggy and muddy namesake in Britain as well may be. Measuring off thirty acres as next summer's fallow, by blazing the trees in a line around, took up the best part of a day; and it necessitated also a more thorough examination of Robert's domains. Such giant trees! One monarch pine must be nigh a hundred feet from root to crest. The great preponderance of maple showed that the national leaf symbol of Canada had been suitably selected.

'And is there no means,' quoth Robert, who had been mentally gauging his small axe with the infinitude of forest—'is there no means of getting rid of wood without chopping it down?'

'Well, yes, some slower means still; the trees may be "girdled;" that is, a ring of bark cut from the trunk near the base, which causes death in so far that no foliage appears next spring: consequently the tall melancholy skeleton will preside over your crops without injury.'

'Can't say I admire that plan.'

'You are fastidious. Perhaps you would like "niggers" better?'

'I thought they were contraband in any but slave states.'

'Oh, these are "niggers" inanimate—pieces of wood laid round the trunk, and set on fire where they touch it; of course the tree is burned through in process of time. These two expedients might be useful in subsidiary aids; but you perceive your grand reliance must be on the axe.'