xpanded into towns of considerable size and
local importance.

Strangely grotesque, with their half-civilization, were these places in
their earlier days. Characters which would not have been out of place at
a _bal masque_ were frequently to be met with in all of them. Blanket
coats in winter, adorned with beaded epaulets, scarlet woollen stockings
pulled up over the legs to fend off the snow, and Indian moccasons, were
considered quite the proper thing. Once, as I was travelling by sleigh
in a comparatively settled part of the country, a young man, who was
driving rapidly in the opposite direction, pulled up to greet my
companion, with whom he was acquainted. He was coming to the town, from
his residence in the heart of the woods, thirty or forty miles from
where we met him, and certainly I was astonished--being then newly
arrived in the country--at the extreme slenderness of the outfit of one
who was bound to do the "man about town" for a few days, and that in
midwinter too. He was in his shirt-sleeves, having no coat with him
whatever. His black velvet waistcoat, now foxy and threadbare with much
use, might once have been a _chef-d'oevre_ from the hand of some
London tailor whose gossip was of Guardsmen and their measurement. The
rest of his costume consisted of a pair of buckskin breeches fastened at
the knee with pearl buttons, heavy woollen stockings, and pegged
boots,--the latter indebted for their lustre more to the rind of pork
than to the blacking-brush. Singularly incongruous with this get-up was
the kid-gloved hand with which he removed the black pipe from his mouth;
nor was his straw hat exactly the sort of head-dress that one might have
expected to meet with during a Canadian sleigh-ride. But it was only
when he rose to his feet on the little rough sleigh, three feet by two,
on which he had been sitting, that the full splendor of his wardrobe
became revealed to us; for then he threw around his shoulders a
magnificent cloak, made, I think, of some kind of Siberian fur, and
which, folded up, had served him for a cushion on his journey. I
frequently afterwards met this exquisite of the backwoods, wrapped in
that showy mantle, walking in the streets of the little wooden town,
where his appearance, so strange to me, did not seem to excite any
particular comment. In those parts, men would often come into the towns,
in winter, dressed in blanket coats, with the rather inappropriate
accompaniment of white duck tro