hilst barbarous adaptations of Greek and
Latin find favour in the United States. A little learning is a
dangerous thing. Cicero and Pompey never dreamed or desired that a
white and green wooden village in a wilderness, where patent pails and
patent ploughs are the staple, should be dignified thus; but, as the
French say, _chacun a son gout_.

The first good view of the Grand River was attained three miles from
Brantford, and, although the name is rather too sounding, the Grand
River is a very fine stream. It put me singularly in mind, with its
oak-forested banks, its tall poplars, and its meandering clear waters,
of the Thames about Marlow, where I remember, when I was a boy at the
Military College, seeing the fish at the bottom on a fine day, so
plain that I longed to put a little salt on their tails.

You look down near the Union Inn, Carr's, on a most beautiful woodland
view, undulating, rich, and varied. This part of the country is a
sandy soil, and is called the Oak Plains. Here once flourished the
Indian. His wars, his glory, his people--where are they? Gone! The
Saxon and the Celt have swept off the race, and their memory is as a
cloud in a summer's sky, beautiful but dissolving.

Brantford is a very long village, with four churches or chapels, one
of them a handsome building, and with fine prospects of the country,
through which runs the Grand River. The houses are mostly of wood, a
few of brick, with some good shops, or stores, as they are universally
called in America and Canada, where every thing, from a pin to a
six-point blanket, may be obtained for dollars, country produce, or
_approved_ bills of exchange--chiefly however by barter, that true
universal medium in a new country, as may be gleaned from any Canadian
newspaper about Christmas time, when the subscribers are usually
reminded that wood for warming the printer will be very acceptable.

Plank side-walks, a new feature in Canadian towns, are rapidly
extending in Brantford, which is just starting into importance; as the
government, though it is so far inland, intend to make a port of it,
by thoroughly opening the navigation of the Grand River from its mouth
in Lake Erie. The works are near completion, and a steamboat, the
Brantford, plies regularly in summer. Thus an immense country,
probably the finest wheat-land in the world, will be opened to
commerce, and the great plaster of Paris quarries of the river find a
market, for increasing the fertil