om Canada.]_ who with the courage and perseverance that mark
brave men of his class, first ventured to break the bush and locate
himself and his infant family in the lonely wilderness, then far from
any beaten road or the haunts of his fellow-men.

But at the period of which I write, the axe of the adventurous settler
had not levelled one trunk of that vast forest, neither had the fire
scathed it; no voices of happy joyous children had rung through those
shades, nor sound of rural labour nor bleating flock awakened its
echoes.

All the remainder of that sad day, Catharine sat on the grass under a
shady tree, her eyes mournfully fixed on the slow flowing waters, and
wondering at her own hard fate in being thus torn from her home and its
dear inmates. Bad as she had thought her separation from her father
and mother and her brothers, when she first left her home to become
a wanderer on the Rice Lake Plains, how much more dismal now was her
situation, snatched from the dear companions who had upheld and cheered
her on in all her sorrows! But now she was alone with none to love or
cherish or console her, she felt a desolation of spirit that almost made
her forgetful of that trust that had hitherto always sustained her in
time of trouble or sickness. She looked round, and her eye fell on the
strange unseemly forms of men and women, who cared not for her, and to
whom she was an object of indifference or aversion: she wept when she
thought of the grief that her absence would occasion to Hector and
Louis; the thought of their distress increased her own.

The soothing quiet of the scene, with the low lulling sound of the
little brook as its tiny wavelets fell tinkling over the massy roots
and stones that impeded its course to the river, joined with fatigue and
long exposure to the sun and air, caused her at length to fall asleep.
The last rosy light of the setting sun was dyeing the waters with a
glowing tint when she awoke; a soft blue haze hung upon the trees;
the kingfisher and dragon-fly, and a solitary loon, were the only
busy things abroad on the river; the first darting up and down from
an upturned root near the water's edge, feeding its youngings; the
dragon-fly hawking with rapid whirring sound for insects, and the loon,
just visible from above the surface of the still stream, sailed quietly
on companionless, like her who watched its movements.

The bustle of the hunters returning with game and fish to the encampment