These sons of toil bear practical testimony to the truth of what the late lamented Sir J. Franklin always declared to be his conviction, from long experience, viz., that the use of spirits is enfeebling rather than invigorating to those who have to work in the most severe climates.  The Lumberers are nearly all teetotallers, and I am told they declare that they find their health bettered, their endurance strengthened, their muscles hardened, and their spirits enlivened by the change.  If this be so, and if we find that the natives of warm climates are, as a mass, also teetotallers, and that when they forsake their temperance colours they deteriorate and eventually disappear, I fear we must come to the conclusion, that however delicious iced champagne or sherry-cobbler may be, or however enjoyable “a long pull at the pewter-pot,” they are not in any way necessary to health or cheerfulness, and that, like all actions, they have their reactions, and thus create a desire for their repetition, until by habit they become a second nature, to the great comfort and consolation of worthy wine-merchants and fashionable medical men, whose balance-sheets would suffer about equally by the discontinuance of their use; not to mention the sad effects of their misuse, as daily exhibited in police reports and other features, if possible worse, which the records of “hells” would reveal.

So strong does the passion become, that I know of a lady who weighs nearly a ton, and is proud of displaying more of her precious substance than society generally approves of, in whom the taste “for a wee drop” is so strong, that, to enable her to gratify it more freely, she has the pleasure of paying two medical men a guinea each daily, to stave off as long as they can its insidious attacks upon her gigantic frame.  You must not, however, suppose that I am a teetotaller.  I have tried it, and never found myself better than while practising it; still I never lose a chance if a bottle of iced champagne is circulating, for I confess—­I love it dearly.

Pardon this digression.—­We are again on the Ottawa; as we advance, the river narrows and becomes studded with little islands covered with wild shrubs and forest trees, from whose stiff unyielding boughs the more pliant shoots droop playfully into the foaming stream below, like the children of Gravity coquetting with the family of Passion.  Of course these islands form rapids in every direction:  we soon, approach the one selected as the channel in which to try our strength.  On we dash boldly—­down rushes the stream with a roar of defiance; arrived midway, a deadly struggle ensues between boiling water and running water; we tremble in the balance of victory—­the rushing waters triumph; we sound a retreat, which is put in practice with the caution of a Xenophon, and down we glide into the stiller waters below.