all
the lakes have a fall, no weed gathers, except in the stagnant bays.

The bottom of Ontario is unquestionably salt, and no wonder that it
should be so, for all the Canadian lakes were once a sea, and the
geological formation of the bed of Ontario is the saliferous rock.

I have often enjoyed on Ontario's shores, where I have usually resided,
the grand spectacle which takes place after intense frost. The early
morning then exhibits columns of white vapour, like millions of Geysers
spouting up to the sky, curling, twisting, shooting upwards, gracefully
forming spirals and pyramids, amid the dark ground of the sombre
heavens, and occasionally giving a peep of little lanes of the dark
waters, all else being shrouded in dense mist.

People at home are very apt to despise lakes, perhaps from the usual
insipidity of lake poetry, and to imagine that they can exhibit nothing
but very placid and tranquil scenery. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the
great Canadian fresh-water seas, very soon convinces a traveller to the
contrary; for it is the most turbulent and the most troublesome sea I
ever embarked upon--a region of vexed waters, to which the Bermoothes of
Shakespeare is a trifle; for that is bad enough, but not half so
treacherous and so thunder-stormy as Erie.

Huron is an ocean, when in its might; its waves and swells rival those
of the Atlantic; and the beautiful Ontario, like many a lovely dame, is
not always in a good temper. I once crossed this lake from Niagara to
Toronto late in November, in the Great Britain, a steamer capable of
holding a thousand men with ease, and during this voyage of thirty-six
miles we often wished ourselves anywhere else: the engine, at least one
of them, got deranged; the sea was running mountains high; the cargo on
deck was washed overboard; gingerbread-work, as the sailors call the
ornamental parts of a vessel, went to smash; and, if the remaining
engine had failed in getting us under the shelter of the windward shore,
it would have been pretty much with us as it was with the poor fellow
who went down into one of the deepest shafts of a Swedish mine.

A curious traveller, one of "the inquisitive class," must needs see how
the miners descended into these awful depths. He was put into a large
bucket, attached to the huge rope, with a guide, and gradually lowered
down. When he had got some hundred fathoms or so, he began to feel
queer, and look down, down, down. Nothing could he see but