those beauties abound which usually set poets
rhapsodizing, and young men sentimentalizing, and young girls
tantalizing. Now, in Canada there is nothing of the kind. No Canadian
poet, for instance, would ever affirm that in the spring a livelier
iris blooms upon the burnished dove; in the spring a young man's fancy
lightly turns to thoughts of love. No. For that sort of thing--the
thoughts of love I mean--winter is the time of day in Canada. The fact
is, the Canadians haven't any spring. The months which Englishmen
include under that pleasant name are here partly taken up with
prolonging the winter, and partly with the formation of a new and
nondescript season. In that period Nature, instead of being darkly,
deeply, beautifully green, has rather the shade of a dingy, dirty,
melancholy gray. Snow covers the ground--not by any means the
glistening white robe of Winter--but a rugged substitute, damp, and
discolored. It is snow, but snow far gone into decay and decrepitude--
snow that seems ashamed of itself for lingering so long after wearing
out its welcome, and presenting itself in so revolting a dress--snow,
in fact, which is like a man sinking into irremediable ruin and
changing its former glorious state for that condition which is
expressed by the unpleasant word "slush." There is no an object, not a
circumstance, in visible Nature which does not heighten the contrast.
In England there is the luxuriant foliage, the fragrant blossom, the
gay flower; in Canada, black twigs--bare, scraggy, and altogether
wretched--thrust their repulsive forms forth into the bleak air--there,
the soft rain-shower falls; here, the fierce snow-squall, or maddening
sleet!--there, the field is traversed by the cheerful plough; here, it
is covered with ice-heaps or thawing snow; there, the rivers run
babbling onward under the green trees; here, they groan and chafe under
heaps of dingy and slowly-disintegrating ice-hummocks; there, one's
only weapon against the rigor of the season is the peaceful umbrella;
here, one must defend one's self with caps and coats of fur and
india-rubber, with clumsy leggings, ponderous boots, steel-creepers,
gauntlets of skin, iron-pointed alpenstocks, and forty or fifty other
articles which the exigencies of space and time will not permit me to
mention. On one of the darkest and most dismal of these April days, I
was trying to kill time in my quarters, when Jack Randolph burst in
upon my meditations. Jack Randolph