ick, and be the one influence which
restrained that little household in the woods from lapsing into the
happy-go-lucky sort of savagery to which even the most cultivated are
liable in a new land.

I do not think that we of this generation can quite realise the life
which was led in Upper Canada eighty years ago, when forest and swamp
and bush foretold nothing of the great farms and cities and thriving
towns which now replace them to such a great extent. Those first
settlers did not foresee the heights of prosperity and hope to which
the land would rise in the time of their children. They looked upon it
rather as some unfriendly place from which they might wrest a living,
than as a goodly country given them that they and their children and
their children's children might labour in it and love it and enjoy
it--and fight and die for it if need were. All their love and
remembrance they gave to those little Isles across the sea; but,
willy-nilly, they were obliged to give their wit and muscle to Canada.
They fought against hardships and privations that were almost
incredible, chiefly in the hope that they might win enough from the New
World to take them back in comfort to the Old. They thought chiefly of
making provision for present needs, not foreseeing that their toil went
to the making of a nation, the building of an Empire. They wrought
indeed better than they knew.

No prophetic vision of the mighty future came to Dick Underwood as he
lay beneath the sumachs that golden October day, nearly ninety years
ago. He gave all the sentiment of which his boyish heart was capable
to his fading memories of his English home, even as his father
did--laying these recollections aside, as it were, in a sacred place.
But here the likeness to his father ceased; for he looked forward in
vast, ignorant, splendid dreams to the possibilities of the land of his
adoption--not the possibilities of trade and agriculture, which seldom
attract youth--but to the more alluring chances of those great Unknown
Lands, to the wonder and mystery of the Indian-haunted North.

He did not put this feeling into words. Indeed, he did not know how to
describe it, or what it was. But it is written in the history books
that in Talon's time the welfare of the French colony was endangered by
the number of young men who took to the woods, obeying the "call of the
wild." It was this that moved Dick Underwood. It moved him then as he
lay lazily in the swe