ater underneath. They called me suddenly to
look at the rapid. I jumped, as I thought, over the space between us;
but my jump was into the shadow. One of the naval officers, a powerful
man, six feet and more in height, saw me jump; and, just as I was
disappearing between the timbers, caught me by the arm, and, by sheer
muscle and strength, held me in mid-air. The other immediately
assisted him, but my young friend became deadly pale and sick. I did
not visit either the slide or the cauldron; in either, instantaneous
and suffocating death was inevitable. Reader, never leap in dark
places, and look before you leap. My young friend looked before he
leaped over the bridge with his span of horses, and, like a gallant
_auriga_, guided his van without fear; but he told me afterwards that
the cold sweat sat on his brow, when the chasm was cleared, as much on
the bridge as it did at my Quintus Curtius venture. By the by, did
Quinte Curce, as the French so adroitly call him, ever leap--I doubt
the fact--into the chasm which closed over him?

After passing this bridge, and a slough of despond beyond it, we again
plunged into the woods, and, mounting over boulders, sinking into
bog-holes, and fairly jolted to jelly, on a sudden turned into an open
space of near a hundred acres, round which the solemn and stately
forest kept eternal guard. Here, in the space of ten or twelve years,
our pioneer friends had laboured through weal and through woe, through
Siberian winters and West Indian summers, through ague and fever, to
create a little modern paradise.

My young friend commenced in this secluded region, where the outer
barbarian was never seen and seldom heard of, where even the troubles
of 1837-8 never showed themselves, his location upon one hundred
acres. He had received the very best education which a public
institution in England could afford; but circumstances obliged him, at
the early age of twenty-five, to turn his thoughts, with a young wife,
to "life in the Bush," as a sole provision. The partner of his cares,
equally well educated, and of an ancient family, by the death of her
father, who was high in office in his country's service, was left
equally unprovided for.

With youth and good constitutions, a determination to make their own
way in life spurred them on to the most disheartening task, a task
which thousands of young people from Britain have, however, daily to
encounter in Canada, and the progress of which I rela