g
hill-sides, on which the snowy sheep were browsing, and the cattle
lowing.

A field of Indian corn was rustling its broad and vivid green flaggy
leaves, whilst its fruit, topped by long silky pennons, waving in the
breeze, seemed to say to me, "Good Englishman, why do your countrymen
despise my golden spikes? do they think, as they do of my ugly,
prickly friend the oat, that I am not good enough for man, and fit
only for the horse or the negro? You know better, and you have often
eaten of a pound-cake made of my flour, which you said was sweeter and
better than that of wheat. You have often tasted my puddings; come
now, Mr. John Bull, were they not very good?"

"Certainly they were, Mr. Maize, and hominy and hoe-cake and all that
sort of thing are good too; but pray don't ask me to devour you in the
shape of mush, molasses and butter. Take any shape but that, and my
firm nerves will never tremble."

Jesting apart, the flour of Indian corn, or maize, is as much
superior, as nutritive food, to potatoes, as wheat flour is to Indian
corn. I wish the poor Irish had plenty of it.

The farmers in Upper Canada use it much, but in that wheat country it
cannot of course be expected that it supersedes flour, properly so
called. They also use buckwheat flour largely in the shape of
pancakes, and a most excellent thing it is.

My friend's life was diversified; for, during the season that the
crops are ripening, he had time to spare to go out on fishing and
shooting excursions on the Trent, and occasionally in winter a little
deer-hunting, with, _longo intervallo_, a bear-killing event.

I went to a combined fishing and shooting pic-nickery, and travelled
from Rainey's mills and Falls all along the valley of the Trent to
Healy's Falls.

The Trent is a beautiful and most picturesque river, rushing and
roaring along over a series of falls and rapids for miles together,
and expanding in noble reaches and little lakes.

Rainey's Falls I have faintly sketched, to show the soft beauty of
some parts of this river; at Healy's Falls it is more broken.

We went to Crow Bay, just above which the Crow River, from the iron
mine country of Marmora, runs into the Trent. Here we found two
friends, brothers, settled in great comfort. They had been about ten
years in the "Bush," and had excellent farms and houses equal to any I
have seen so far in the interior, with every comfort around them. In
one of their pleasure-boats, we embarked f