ting being seven, for Toronto; the
weather unusually cold.

This fine boat constitutes, with two others, the City of Toronto and the
Sovereign, the royal mail line between Kingston and Toronto. All are
built nearly alike, are first class seaboats, and low pressure; they
combine, with the Highlander, the Canada, and the Gildersleave, also
splendid vessels, to form a mail route to Montreal--the latter boats
taking the mail as far as Coteau du Lac, forty-five miles from Montreal,
on which route a smaller vessel, the Chieftain, plies, wherein you
sleep, at anchor, or rather moored, till daylight, if going down, or
going upwards, on board the mail boat.

Passengers go from Montreal to Kingston by the mail route in twenty-four
hours, a distance of 180 miles; a small portion, between the Cascades
Rapids and the Coteau being traversed in a coach, on a planked road as
smooth as a billiard-table.

From Kingston to Toronto, or nearly the whole length of Lake Ontario,
takes sixteen hours, the boat leaving at seven, and arriving about or
before noon next day; performing the passage at the rate of eleven miles
an hour, exclusively of stoppages.

The transit between Montreal and Kingston is at the rate, including
stoppage for daylight, the river being dangerous, of eight miles an
hour; thus, in forty hours, the passenger passes from the seat of
government to the largest city of Western Canada most comfortably, a
journey which twenty years ago it always took a fortnight, and often a
month, to accomplish, in the most precarious and uncomfortable
manner--on board small, roasting steamers, crowded like a cattle-pen--in
lumbering leathern conveniences, miscalled coaches, over roads which
enter not into the dreams of Britons--by canoes--by bateaux, (a sort of
coal barges,)--by schooners, where the cabin could never permit you to
display either your length, your breadth, or your thickness, and thus
reducing you to a point in creation, according to Euclid and his
commentators.

Your _compagnons de voyage_, on board a bateau or Durham boat, which was
a _monstre_ bateau, were French Canadian voyageurs, always drunk and
always gay, who poled you along up the rapids, or rushed down them with
what will be will be.

These happy people had a knack of examining your goods and chattels,
which they were conveying in the most admirable manner, and with the
utmost _sang-froid_; but still they were above stealing--they only
tapped the rum cask or