Part 2

In summer, the country round is rich and beautiful, with a number of farms all in a high state of cultivation; but Canada in winter and in summer must be like two different regions. At present the mouth of the creek is frozen up; all trade, all ship-building suspended. Oakville presents the appearance of a straggling hamlet, containing a few frame and log-houses; one brick-house (the grocery store, or general shop, which in a new Canadian village is always the best house in the place), a little Methodist church, painted green and white, but as yet no resident preacher; and an inn dignified by the name of the "Oakville House Hotel." Where there is a store, a tavern, and a church, habitations soon rise around them. Oakville contains at present more than three hundred inhabitants, who are now subscribing among themselves for a schoolmaster and a resident clergyman.

I stood conversing in the porch, and looking about me, till I found it necessary to seek shelter in the house, before my nose was absolutely taken off by the ice-blast. The little parlour was solitary, and heated like an oven. Against the wall were stuck a few vile prints, taken out of old American magazines; there was the Duchess de Berri in her wedding-dress, and, as a pendant, the Modes de Paris--"Robe de tulle garnie de fleurs--coiffure nouvelle, inventee par Mons. Plaisir." The incongruity was but too laughable! I looked round for some amusement or occupation, and at last spied a book open, and turned down upon its face. I pounced upon it as a prize; and what do you think it was? "Devinez, madame! je vous le donne en trois, je vous le donne en quatre!" it was--Don Juan! And so, while looking from the window on a scene which realised all you can imagine of the desolation of savage life, mixed up with just so much of the common-place vulgarity of civilised life as sufficed to spoil it, I amused myself reading of the Lady Adeline Amundeville and her precious coterie, and there anent.

Society is smoothed to that excess, That manners hardly differ more than dress. Our ridicules are kept in the background, Ridiculous enough, but also dull; Professions, too, are no more to be found Professional, and there is nought to cull Of Folly's fruit; for tho' your fools abound, They're barren, and not worth the pains to pull. Society is now one polished horde, Form'd of two mighty tribes--the _bores_ and _bored_.

A delineation, by the way, which might almost reconcile one to a more savage locality than that around me.

While I was reading, the mail-coach between Hamilton and Toronto drove up to the door; and because you shall understand what sort of a thing a Canadian mail is, and thereupon sympathise in my irrepressible wonder and amusement, I must sketch it for you. It was a heavy wooden edifice, about the size and form of an old-fashioned lord mayor's coach, placed on runners raised about a foot from the ground: the whole was painted of a bright red, and long icicles hung from the roof. This monstrous machine disgorged from its portal eight men-creatures, all enveloped in bear-skins and shaggy dreadnoughts, and pea-jackets, and fur-caps down upon their noses, looking like a procession of bears on their hind-legs, tumbling out of a showman's caravan. They proved, however, when undisguised, to be gentlemen, most of them going up to Toronto to attend their duties in the House of Assembly. One of these, a personage of remarkable height and size, and a peculiar cast of features, was introduced to me as Mr. Kerr, the possessor of large estates in the neighbourhood, partly acquired, and partly inherited from his father-in-law Brandt, the famous chief of the Six Nations. Kerr himself has Indian blood in his veins. His son, young Kerr, a fine boy about ten years old, is the present acknowledged chief of the Six Nations, in his mother's right, the hereditary chieftainship being always transmitted _through_ the female, though passing _over_ her. Mrs. Kerr, the eldest daughter of Brandt, is a squaw of unmixed Indian blood, and has been described to me as a very superior creature. She has the good sense to wear habitually her Indian costume, slightly modified, in which she looks and moves a princess, graceful and unrestrained, while in a fashionable European dress the effect would be exactly the reverse.

Much mischief has been done in this neighbourhood by beasts of prey, and the deer, driven by hunger, and the wolves from their forest haunts, have been killed, near the settlements, in unusual numbers. One of the Indians whom I saw at Toronto, on returning by this road, shot with his new rifle eight deer in one day, and sold them at Hamilton for three dollars each--no bad day's hunting. The venison in Canada is good and abundant, but very lean, very unlike English venison; the price is generally four or six cents (twopence or threepence) a pound.

After taking some refreshment, we set forth again. The next village we passed was called, oddly enough, Wellington Square; it has been recently laid out, and contains about twenty wooden houses;--then came Port Nelson, Mr. Kerr's place. Instead of going round the head of the lake by Hamilton, we crossed that very remarkable tongue or slip of land which divides Burlington Bay from Lake Ontario: these were, in fact, two separate lakes till a channel was cut through the narrow isthmus. Burlington Bay, containing about forty square miles, is now one sheet of ice, and on the slip of land, which is near seven miles in length, and about two hundred yards in width, we found the snow lying so deep, and in such irregular drifts, that we proceeded with difficulty. At length we reached Stony Creek, a village celebrated in these parts as the scene of the bloodiest battle fought between the English and Americans during the last war. We had intended to sleep here, but the inn was so uncomfortable and unpromising, that, after a short rest, we determined on proceeding ten miles further to Beamsville.

It was now dark, and the snow falling thick, it soon became impossible to distinguish the sleigh-track. Mr. Campbell loosened the reins and left the horses to their own instinct, assuring me it was the safest way of proceeding. After this I remember no more distinctly, except that I ceased to hear the ever-jingling sleigh-bells. I awoke, as if from the influence of nightmare, to find the sleigh overturned, myself lying in the bottom of it half-smothered, and my companions nowhere to be seen;--they were floundering in the snow behind.

Luckily, when we had stretched ourselves and shaken off the snow, we were found unhurt in life and limb. We had fallen down a bank into the bed of a rivulet, or a mill-race, I believe, which, being filled up with snow, was quite as soft, only a little colder, than a down-bed. Frightened I was, bewildered rather, but "effective" in a moment. It was impossible for the gentlemen to leave the horses, which were plunging furiously up to the shoulders in the snow, and had already broken the sleigh; so I set off to seek assistance, having received proper directions. Fortunately we were not far from Beamsville. My beacon-light was to be the chimney of a forge, from which the bright sparks were streaming up into the dark wintry air, visible from a great distance. After scrambling through many a snow-drift, up hill and down hill, I at last reached the forge, where a man was hammering amain at a ploughshare; such was the din, that I called for some time unheard; at last, as I advanced into the red light of the fire, the man's eyes fell upon me, and I shall never forget his look as he stood poising his hammer, with the most comical expression of bewildered amazement. I could not get an answer from him; he opened his mouth and repeated _aw!_ staring at me, but without speaking or moving. I turned away in despair, yet half laughing, and after some more scrambling up and down, I found myself in the village, and was directed to the inn. Assistance was immediately sent off to my friends, and in a few minutes the supper-table was spread, a pile of logs higher than myself blazing away in the chimney; venison-steaks, and fried fish, coffee, hot cakes, cheese, and whisky punch (the traveller's fare in Canada), were soon smoking on the table: our landlady presided, and the evening passed merrily away.

The old landlady of this inn amused me exceedingly; she had passed all her life among her equals in station and education, and had no idea of any distinction between guests and customers; and while caressing and attending on me, like an old mother or an old nurse, gave me her history, and that of all her kith and kin. Forty years before, her husband had emigrated, and built a hovel, and made a little clearing on the edge of the lake. At that time there was no other habitation within many miles of them, and they passed several years in almost absolute solitude. They have now three farms, some hundred acres of land, and have brought up nine sons and daughters, most of whom are married, and settled on lands of their own. She gave me a horrid picture of the prevalence of drunkenness, the vice and the curse of this country.

I can give you no idea of the intense cold of this night. Next morning we proceeded eighteen miles farther, to St. Catherine's, the situation of which appeared very pretty even in winter, and must be beautiful in summer. I am told it is a place of importance, owing to the vicinity of the Welland Canal, which connects Lake Ontario with Lake Erie: it contains more than seven hundred inhabitants. The school here is reckoned the best in the district. We passed this morning several streams, which in summer flow into the lake, now all frozen up and undistinguishable, except by the wooden bridges which cross them, and the mills, now still and useless, erected along their banks. The streams have the names of Thirty Mile Creek, Forty Mile Creek, Twenty Mile Creek, and so on; but wherefore I could not discover.

From St. Catherine's we proceeded twelve miles farther, to Niagara. There I found some old English or rather Irish friends ready to welcome me with joyous affection; and surely there is not a more blessed sight than the face of an old friend in a new land!

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NIAGARA IN WINTER.

January 26.

The town of Niagara presents the same torpid appearance which seems to prevail everywhere at this season; it is situated at the mouth of the river Niagara, and is a place of much business and resort when the navigation is open. The lake does not freeze here, owing to the depth of its majestic waters; neither does the river, from the velocity of its current; yet both are blocked up by the huge fragments of ice which are brought down from Lake Erie, and which, uniting and accumulating at the mouth of the river, form a field of ice extending far into the lake. How beautiful it looked to-day, broken into vast longitudinal flakes of alternate white and azure, and sparkling in the sunshine!

The land all round Niagara is particularly fine and fertile: it has been longer cleared and cultivated than in other parts of the province, and the country, they say, is most beautiful in summer. The opposite shore, about a quarter of a mile off, is the State of New York. The Americans have a fort on their side, and we also have a fort on ours. What the amount of _their_ garrison may be I know not, but our force consists of three privates and a corporal, with adequate arms and ammunition, i. e. rusty firelocks and damaged guns. The fortress itself I mistook for a dilapidated brewery. This is charming--it _looks_ like peace and security, at all events.

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WINTER STUDIES IN CANADA.

January 29.

Well! I have seen these Cataracts of Niagara, which have thundered in my mind's ear ever since I can remember--which have been my "childhood's thought, my youth's desire," since first my imagination was awakened to wonder and to wish. I have beheld them, and shall I whisper it to you?--but, O tell it not among the Philistines!--I wish I had not! I wish they were still a thing unbeheld--a thing to be imagined, hoped, and anticipated--something to live for:--the reality has displaced from my mind an illusion far more magnificent than itself--I have no words for my utter disappointment: yet I have not the presumption to suppose that all I have heard and read of Niagara is false or exaggerated--that every expression of astonishment, enthusiasm, rapture, is affectation or hyperbole. No! it must be my own fault. Terni, and some of the Swiss cataracts leaping from their mountains, have affected me a thousand times more than all the immensity of Niagara. O I could beat myself! and now there is no help!--the first moment, the first impression is over--is lost; though I should live a thousand years, long as Niagara itself shall roll, I can never see it again for the _first_ time. Something is gone that cannot be restored.

But, to take things in order: we set off for the Falls yesterday morning, with the intention of spending the day there, sleeping, and returning the next day to Niagara. The distance is fourteen miles, by a road winding along the banks of the Niagara river, and over the Queenston heights;--and beautiful must this land be in summer, since even now it is beautiful. The flower garden, the trim shrubbery, the lawn, the meadow with its hedgerows, when frozen up and wrapt in snow, always give me the idea of something not only desolate but dead: Nature is the ghost of herself, and trails a spectral pall; I always feel a kind of pity--a touch of melancholy--when at this season I have wandered among withered shrubs and buried flower-beds; but here, in the wilderness, where Nature is wholly independent of Art, she does not die, nor yet mourn; she lies down to rest on the bosom of Winter, and the aged one folds her in his robe of ermine and jewels, and rocks her with his hurricanes, and hushes her to sleep. How still it was! how calm, how vast the glittering white waste and the dark purple forests! The sun shone out, and the sky was without a cloud; yet we saw few people, and for many miles the hissing of our sleigh, as we flew along upon our dazzling path, and the tinkling of the sleigh-bells, were the only sounds we heard. When we were within four or five miles of the Falls, I stopped the sleigh from time to time to listen to the roar of the cataracts; but the state of the atmosphere was not favourable for the transmission of sound, and the silence was unbroken.

Such was the deep, monotonous tranquillity which prevailed on every side--so exquisitely pure and vestal-like the robe in which all Nature lay slumbering around us, I could scarce believe that this whole frontier district is not only remarkable for the prevalence of vice--but of dark and desperate crime.

Mr. A., who is a magistrate, pointed out to me a lonely house by the way-side, where, on a dark stormy night in the preceding winter, he had surprised and arrested a gang of forgers and coiners; it was a fearful description. For some time my impatience had been thus beguiled--impatience and suspense much like those of a child at a theatre before the curtain rises. My imagination had been so impressed by the vast height of the Falls, that I was constantly looking in an upward direction, when, as we came to the brow of a hill, my companion suddenly checked the horses, and exclaimed, "The Falls!"

I was not, for an instant, aware of their presence; we were yet at a distance, looking _down_ upon them; and I saw at one glance a flat extensive plain; the sun having withdrawn its beams for the moment, there was neither light, nor shade, nor colour. In the midst were seen the two great cataracts, but merely as a feature in the wide landscape. The sound was by no means overpowering, and the clouds of spray, which Fanny Kemble called so beautifully the "everlasting incense of the waters," now condensed ere they rose by the excessive cold, fell round the base of the cataracts in fleecy folds, just concealing that furious embrace of the waters above and the waters below. All the associations which in imagination I had gathered round the scene, its appalling terrors, its soul-subduing beauty, its power and height, and velocity and immensity, were diminished in effect, or wholly lost.

* * * * *

I was quite silent--my very soul sank within me. On seeing my disappointment (written, I suppose, most legibly in my countenance) my companion began to comfort me, by telling me of all those who had been disappointed on the first view of Niagara, and had confessed it. I _did_ confess; but I was not to be comforted. We held on our way to the Clifton hotel, at the foot of the hill; most desolate it looked with its summer verandahs and open balconies cumbered up with snow, and hung round with icicles--its forlorn, empty rooms, broken windows, and dusty dinner tables. The poor people who kept the house in winter had gathered themselves for warmth and comfort into a little kitchen, and, when we made our appearance, stared at us with a blank amazement, which showed what a rare thing was the sight of a visitor at this season.

While the horses were cared for, I went up into the highest balcony to command a better view of the cataracts; a little Yankee boy, with a shrewd, sharp face, and twinkling black eyes, acting as my gentleman usher. As I stood gazing on the scene which seemed to enlarge upon my vision, the little fellow stuck his hands into his pockets, and, looking up in my face, said--

"You be from the old country, I reckon?"

"Yes."

"Out over there, beyond the sea?"

"Yes."

"And did you come all that way across the sea for these here falls?"

"Yes."

"My!!" Then after a long pause, and eyeing me with a most comical expression of impudence and fun, he added, "Now, do _you_ know what them 'ere birds are, out yonder?" pointing to a number of gulls which were hovering and sporting amid the spray, rising and sinking and wheeling around, appearing to delight in playing on the verge of this "hell of waters," and almost dipping their wings into the foam. My eyes were, in truth, fixed on these fair, fearless creatures, and they had suggested already twenty fanciful similitudes, when I was roused by his question.

"Those birds?" said I. "Why, _what_ are they?"

"Why, them's EAGLES!"

"Eagles?" it was impossible to help laughing.

"Yes," said the urchin sturdily; "and I guess you have none of them in the old country?"

"Not many eagles, my boy; but plenty of _gulls_!" and I gave him a "pretty considerable" pinch by the ear.

"Ay!" said he, laughing; "well now you be dreadful smart--smarter than many folks that come here!"

We now prepared to walk to the Crescent fall, and I bound some crampons to my feet, like those they use among the Alps, without which I could not for a moment have kept my footing on the frozen surface of the snow. As we approached the Table Rock, the whole scene assumed a wild and wonderful magnificence; down came the dark-green waters, hurrying with them over the edge of the precipice enormous blocks of ice brought down from Lake Erie. On each side of the Falls, from the ledges and overhanging cliffs, were suspended huge icicles, some twenty, some thirty feet in length, thicker than the body of a man, and in colour of a paly green, like the glaciers of the Alps; and all the crags below, which projected from the boiling eddying waters, were encrusted, and in a manner built round with ice, which had formed into immense crystals, like basaltic columns, such as I have seen in the pictures of Staffa and the Giant's Causeway; and every tree, and leaf, and branch, fringing the rocks and ravines, was wrought in ice. On them, and on the wooden buildings erected near the Table Rock, the spray from the cataract had accumulated and formed into the most beautiful crystals and tracery work; they looked like houses of glass, welted and moulded into regular and ornamental shapes, and hung round with a rich fringe of icy points. Wherever we stood we were on unsafe ground, for the snow, when heaped up as now to the height of three or four feet, frequently slipped in masses from the bare rock, and on its surface the spray, for ever falling, was converted into a sheet of ice, smooth, compact, and glassy, on which I could not have stood a moment without my _crampons_. It was very fearful, and yet I could not tear myself away, but remained on the Table Rock, even on the very edge of it, till a kind of dreamy fascination came over me; the continuous thunder, and might and movement of the lapsing waters, held all my vital spirits bound up as by a spell. Then as at last I turned away, the descending sun broke out, and an Iris appeared below the American Fall, one extremity resting on a snow mound; and motionless there it hung in the midst of restless terrors, its beautiful but rather pale hues contrasting with the death-like colourless objects around; it reminded me of the faint ethereal smile of a dying martyr.

It was near midnight when we mounted our sleigh to return to the town of Niagara, and, as I remember, I did not utter a word during the whole fourteen miles. The air was still, though keen, the snow lay around, the whole earth seemed to slumber in a ghastly, calm repose; but the heavens were wide awake. There the Aurora Borealis was holding her revels, and dancing and flashing, and varying through all shapes and all hues--pale amber, rose tint, blood red--and the stars shone out with a fitful, restless brilliance; and every now and then a meteor would shoot athwart the skies, or fall to earth, and all around me was wild, and strange, and exciting--more like a fever dream than a reality.

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TORONTO.

Toronto, February 7.

Mr. B. gave me a seat in his sleigh, and after a rapid and very pleasant journey, during which I gained a good deal of information, we reached Toronto yesterday morning.

The road was the same as before, with one deviation however--it was found expedient to cross Burlington Bay on the ice, about seven miles over, the lake beneath being twenty, and five-and-twenty fathoms in depth. It was ten o'clock at night, and the only light was that reflected from the snow. The beaten track, from which it is not safe to deviate, was very narrow, and a man, in the worst, if not the last stage of intoxication, noisy and brutally reckless, was driving before us in a sleigh. All this, with the novelty of the situation, the tremendous cracking of the ice at every instant, gave me a sense of apprehension just sufficient to be exciting, rather than very unpleasant, though I will confess to a feeling of relief when we were once more on the solid earth.

It is a remarkable fact, with which you are probably acquainted, that when one growth of timber is cleared from the land, another of quite a different species springs up spontaneously in its place. Thus, the oak or the beech succeeds to the pine, and the pine to the oak or maple. This is not accounted for, at least I have found no one yet who can give me a reason for it. We passed by a forest lately consumed by fire, and I asked why, in clearing the woods, they did not leave groups of the finest trees, or even single trees, here and there, to embellish the country? But it seems that this is impossible--for the trees thus left standing, when deprived of the shelter and society to which they have been accustomed, uniformly perish--which, for mine own poor part, I thought very natural.