over, and there being, therefore, no chance of any more lucid intervals, I diplomatized a swift "Good morning," with thanks, and came away with the memory of a tradesman's smile and a Home Ruler's frown, but I fear the frown was last.

We were all bound for Ottawa and Toronto on finally leaving Montreal, after which (save a chance at being together at Niagara) I should have to take my western track alone. But before bidding final adieu to the " City of Churches," we were to make a return excursion higher up the river, going about one hundred and seventy-two miles by railway to Kingston, at the foot of Lake Ontario, for the purpose of taking boat thence down stream again to Montreal, and passing through what is called the Archipelago of the Thousand Islands, immediately below Kingston, and the well-known Lachine Rapids immediately above Montreal, which latter may be readily visited by joining the boat at Lachine, should the distance to Kingston for the whole excursion be inconvenient.

My land navigator's book of tickets was a little thrown out of its reading by these arrangements as far as Toronto; but it should be known that in such case all unused tickets are allowed for at the New York head office, at a fair percentage of reduction, and I will say here at once, that on my whole volume I was readily reimbursed in Broadway, in a sum of very nearly £5.

We were to go by the Grand Trunk Railway to Kingston, and accordingly, at 8.30 on the morning of

the 26th of June, "rendered ourselves "—why not that French phrase, among others we are now so ridiculously translating into false English?-to the station. of that well-known but not so well-favoured line, to get our tickets. I have no pleasant associations with this proceeding, for first I found the station about the darkest and the dirtiest I ever entered; then there was permitted an indiscriminate rush into the cars, and when we had squeezed, or rather been squeezed, into what we were erroneously told was ours, we were all turned out again. And there came upon me the vulgar discovery that, in the squeeze, some one among the heterogeneous had squeezed out my pocket-book from a side pocket.

"Impossible!" said my friends.

said an American or two.

"Of course!"

"How could

they pick the

"That is just

inside coat-pocket?" said my friends. what they do pick," said the Americans. My chief loss, however, was not money, for that I always carry in an inside waistcoat-pocket; but I lost private memoranda enough to make me angry enough to record the incident. And all joking and all spleen apart, I cannot but say that we all thought the then condition of that station little less than vile. was another " of course" in the matter-new arrangements and improvements were about to be made. It is a public question.

There

We started at nine o'clock. Our course lay through a fertile but uninteresting country, wholly naked of the copses and hedgerows that sweeten

our English scenery. This total absence of hedgerows throughout what I saw of Canada and the States is a remarkable feature. I do not, however, mean mere want of fencing, which is familiar to us all in France and Germany, but open, rough, loose, ragged timber fencing instead, put up as if in a hurry and with scant hands, and yet all holding well together. It illustrates, in some sort, free and exploring man taking new possession of regions destined to be subdued and fairly populated, but only in a yet far-distant future, and gives a certain curious look of liberty to the landscape. From time to time we passed spreads of growing crops, with large stumps of trees yet remaining all over the surface, which at first created certain remonstrative observations from Colonel Ravenhill, but which, as it happened, were far from new, and far from being matter for blame, to myself, who had seen the fight with the forests of new coffee and maize planters in Brazil. The wide extent of this aspect gradually revealed to my friend the fact that to refuse to cultivate till these stumps were torn out would be to refuse for True it is that a machine has been invented for forcibly tearing out the monsters, and here and there we saw one at work, the fencings being composed of the vanquished roots, subsidized for that purpose; while everywhere else the rudely fashioned bones of the trees themselves had served for constructing the large, loose, zigzag divisions that now adorn the landscape with an appearance so uncomfortable to the

ever.