miles up the Ottawa,
what is called lumbering. The winter work is cutting down the trees and
getting them to the riverbank ready for the spring thaw, when they are
gathered in rafts and floated down to a seaport. We went provided for
six months' severe life in the snowbound forests. Almost every man,
too, took his gun or rifle. The journey to the site of our winter's
encampment was made on foot; our clothes, provision, stoves, and cooking
utensils being loaded on an ox-cart that accompanied us, the oxen being
necessary to haul the timber to the river, as our work extended back.

After a week's journey, we came to the spot selected for our winter's
work, on a bend of the river, ten miles above where the M--- joins the
Ottawa. Of course it is an utterly wild region there, never trodden
except by hunters, and away beyond the usual search of lumbermen. I do
not know why my uncle, the lumber-boss of our expedition, went sixty
miles beyond ordinary timber-cuttings. Perhaps it was to procure, on a
special order, a remarkably fine choice of oak and pine, and that that
spot had been marked by him in some hunting trip or Indian survey as
producing the finest timber in the colony. It was grandly beautiful
there, where a valley, running at a right angle to the river's course,
spread out at the bank to a semicircle, containing a hundred acres and
more of most magnificent trees--a vast forest city, inhabited by immense
patriarchs, grey-bearded with moss. Their dignity and stateliness and
venerable air were most impressive; and when they sang to the strong
wind, chanting like the Druids of old, even I, who had so long lived in
a country of forests, was filled with awe. And we, pigmies of twenty
and thirty years, had invaded this sanctuary to slay its lords, who
counted age by centuries, and had lived and reigned here before our
forefathers first trode the continent. The quietude and hazy light of
Indian summer floated through the aisles and arches of the solemn forest
city as we first saw it--a leaf falling lazily now and then across the
slanting beams of the setting sun--a startled caribou, on the discovery
of our approach, hurrying from his favourite haunt with lofty strides.
All else in the picture before us was silent and motionless. Our
winter's home! Those lofty coverts to be levelled to a bare,
stump-marked plane! The old vikings of the primeval forests, to be
fashioned by the axe, to battle with the fury of the oc