users and straw hats. Residents did not
appear to see anything eccentric in this; but in the mind of a stranger
a sense of the ludicrous was naturally excited by it.

Contrasts were ever to be observed among the striking features of these
queer settlements. In one very remote township of which I have memories,
there dwelt a family whose eccentricities of costume and manner of life
entitle them to some brief record here. A retired officer of the army,
with a large troop of well-grown sons and daughters, had built himself a
log-house in this dreary wilderness, the roads leading to which were
impassable for four months in the year. The girls of this family were of
a beauty that may truthfully be described as magnificent. No painter
that I know of ever gave to the world a Diana on canvas at all
comparable in beauty of face and form to the eldest of these. The
family, although English, had been brought up, I think, in the Greek
Archipelago, with the language and dialects of which they were
familiar. At home these young wood-nymphs always went barefooted in
summer. Their costume, whether in the woods or when they visited the
more advanced settlements, was of the Oriental style. Ahead of Mrs.
Bloomer, whose note of reform had not yet ruffled the sweeping skirts of
the period, they walked fearlessly abroad in loose trousers, fastened at
the ankle. Close-fitting bodices, with narrow skirts falling a little
below the knee, completed their costume, and the luxuriant masses of
their golden-brown hair fell in natural curls to their shoulders from
beneath their wide-brimmed straw hats. It was strange thus to find a
leaf from "Eothen" amid the black-ash swamps and rickety "corduroy"
causeways of one of the dreariest districts of Canada.

In the social life of these places, where rough hospitality is often
curiously mingled with a strain of former luxury, incidents of a
humorous character will sometimes attract the notice of the visitor. I
remember being told by an acquaintance about a visit once made by him to
the family of an English gentleman, who had settled upon a small
clearing in the depth of the forest. The young men of the family were
engaged in burning brushwood when my informant arrived, and he, anxious
to win their approbation, set to work with a will, and toiled with them
until the distant horn announced that dinner-time had arrived. Ablution
became necessary before the visitor, who by this time was as black as a
charcoal