potent, and for Laura the chariot
stayed.

CANADIAN WOODS AND WATERS.

The monotony so characteristic generally of the woodlands of Upper
Canada is mitigated, to a great extent, by the pleasant waters with
which many of the tracts of that country are intersected. Away back from
the great lakes, chains of smaller lakes glisten in the bosom of the
immense forest. Rivers take their course from these, narrow at first,
but noisy, rushing along by sparse settlements and lonely Indian camps
to their junction with the big lakes, where mills, and factories, and
ships, and human dross in general, soon pollute with unclean contact
their fair waters. Many of the early settlers of these regions were of a
stamp far different from that of the rough pioneers by whom new
settlements have generally been opened in the United States and their
territories. Here and there throughout Upper Canada there are
communities--some of them progressive, if not actually flourishing,
others yet in a backward state--which were founded by men whose early
lives had been passed amid the highest refinements of Old World
civilization. Among these, retired officers of the army and navy were
very frequently to be met with. They were generally married men, with
incomes wretchedly inadequate to the support of themselves and their
families on the "European plan." Land in Canada was to be acquired in
fee for a mere song, and it was something for the cadet of a landed
family to become the squire of a thousand acres upon some remote
Canadian lake or river, even although six hundred of his acres might be
nothing but cedar swamp. The native British keenness for the pursuit of
wild creatures had much to do with the choice of locality by the
adventurers, who generally set up their log-houses in districts where
game and fish were to be had in abundance. Communication by road, until
within the last twenty years or so, was so imperfect in many of these
tracts, that but little intercourse existed between one settlement and
another. On this account agricultural operations were very limited,
being confined, generally, to the raising of sufficient grain for family
use. In these communities somebody was always found to build a mill; and
as the gentleman settlers themselves were not above doing carpenter and
blacksmith work, no matter how bunglingly, things were made to look
shapely enough in the course of time, and thus were founded villages,
some of which have since e