t for potatoes and Indian corn.

When you have cut down the giant trees, then comes the logging.
Reader, did you ever log? It is precious work! Fancy yourself in a
smock-frock, the best of all working dresses, having cut the huge
trees into lengths of a few feet, rolling these lengths up into a
pile, and ranging the branches and brush-wood for convenient
combustion; then waiting for a favourable wind, setting fire to all
your heaps, and burying yourself in grime and smoke; then rolling up
these half-consumed enormous logs, till, after painful toil, you get
them to burn to potash.

Wearied and exhausted with labour and heat, you return to your cabin
at night, and take a peep in your shaving-glass. You start back, for,
instead of the countenance you were charmed to meet at the weekly
beard reckoning, you see a collier's face, a collier's hands, and your
smock-frock converted into a charcoal-burner's blouse.

Cutting down the forest is hard labour enough until practice makes you
perfect; chopping is hard work also; but logging, logging--nobody
likes logging.

Then, when you plough afterwards, or dig between the black stumps,
what a pleasure! Every minute bump goes the ploughshare against a
stone or a root, and your clothes carry off charcoal at a railroad
pace.

It takes thirty years for pine-stumps to decay, five or six for the
hard woods; and it is of no use to burn the pine-roots, for it only
makes them more iron-like; but then the neighbours, if you have any,
are usually kind: they help you to log, and to build your log-hut.

Your food too is very spicy and gentlemanlike in the Bush: barrels of
flour, barrels of pork, fat as butter and salt as brine, with tea,
sugar--maple-sugar, mind, which tastes very like candied
horehound--and a little whiskey, country whiskey, a sort of
non-descript mixture of bad kirschwasser with tepid water, and not of
the purest _gout_. Behold your _carte_. If you have a gun, which you
must have in the Bush, and a dog, which you may have, just to keep you
company and to talk to, you may now and then kill a Canada pheasant,
ycleped partridge, or a wild duck, or mayhap a deer; but do not think
of bringing a hound or hounds, for you can kill a deer just as well
without them, and I never remember to have heard of a young settler
with hounds coming to much good. Moreover, the old proverb says, a man
may be known by his followers: and it is as absurd for a poor fellow,
without money, to have