bird-shot. We knows the perry-ferry of the circumference of a round
shot. Did you ever see a mortar? Did you ever see a shell? I will answer
for it you never did, except the poticary's mortar, and the shell that
mortar so often renders necessary.

"'Now, gentlemen, at the imperial city of Woolwich, in the Royal
Arsenal, you may, if you join the Royal Artillery, you may see shells in
earnest. Did you ever see a balloon? Yes! Then the shells there are
bigger than balloons, and are the largest hollow shot ever made--the
French has nothing like them.

"'And the way we uses them! We fires them out of the mortars into the
enemy's towns, and stuffs them full of red sogers. Well, they bursts,
and out comes the flatfoots, opens the gates, and lets the Royal
Artillery in; and then every man fills his sack with silver, and gold,
and precious stones, after a leetle scrimmaging.

"'Come along with me, my boys, and every one of you shall have a coat
like mine, which was made out of the plunder; and you shall have a horse
to ride, and a carriage behind it; and you shall see the glorious city
of Woolwich, where the streets are paved with penny loaves, and drink is
to be had for asking.'"

So it is with nine-tenths of the emigrants to Canada in these
enlightened days; so it is with the emigrants from old England, and from
troubled Ireland, to the free and astonishing Union of the States of
America and Texas, that conjoint luminary of the new go-ahead world of
the West.

Dissatisfied with home, with visionary ideas of El Dorados, or starving
amidst plenty, the poorer classes obtain no correct information. Beset
generally with agents of companies, with agents of private enterprise,
with reckless adventurers, with ignorant priests, or missionaries of the
lowest stamp, with political agitators, and with miserable traitors to
the land of their birth and breeding, the poor emigrant starts from the
interior, where his ideas have never expanded beyond the weaver's loom
or factory labour, the plough or the spade, the hod, the plane, or the
trowel, and hastens with his wife and children to the nearest sea-port.

There he finds no friend to receive and guide him, but rapacious agents
ready to take every advantage of his ignorance, with an eye to his
scanty purse. A host of captains, mates, and sailors, eager to make up
so many heads for the voyage, pack them aboard like sheep, and cross the
Atlantic, either to New York or to Quebec, just as