brings his lay so close, that the ear is startled with the human sound on the soft damp air.  The scene is changed when Sirius is triumphant, telling us of the tropics, and that we live in rather an inexplicable climate.  Beneath his burning influence I have glided down this creek when no sound was heard on earth or air save the ripples of the paddle as it rose or fell at the will of the child-like form which guided the fragile bark.  The dwellers on the margin of these fair waters are as much at home upon them as on land, and the children in particular are as amphibious as the musk rats which people its banks, and which scent the air somewhat heavily with what, in a fainter degree, would be thought perfume.  One can hardly recall these dog-star days at that later season when the pearly moon and brilliant stars shine down from the deep blue sky on the crusted snows; when fairy crystals are reflecting their cold bright beams on the glistening ice, while the sleigh flies merrily along, “with bell and bridle ringing,” on the same path we held in summer with the light canoe; when the breath congeals in a sheet of ice around the face, and the clearness of the atmosphere makes respiration difficult.  To tell us that we are in the same latitude with the sunny clime of Boulogne, in France, shows us that America cannot be measured by the European standard.  A quarter of the globe lies between us; they go to bed four hours before we do, and are fast asleep while we are wide awake.  No one attempts to live in the country districts without a farm.  As the place where we lived had but a house and one acre of land, none being vacant in that immediate neighbourhood, and finding firing and pasturage expensive, and furthermore wishing to raise our own potatoes, and, if we liked, live in peas, a lot of two hundred acres was purchased in the settlement, styled, “par excellence,” “the English,” (from the first settlers being of that illustrious nation,) a distance of two miles from where we then lived.  Our house was a good one.  We did not like to leave it.  Selling was out of the question:  so we e’en resolved to take it with us, wishing, as the Highland robber did of the haystack, that it had legs to walk.  A substitute for this was found in the universal resource of New Brunswickers for all their wants, from the cradle to the coffin, “the tree, the bonny greenwood tree,” that gives the young life-blood of its sweet sap for sugar—­and even when consumed by fire its white ashes yield them soap.  I have even seen wooden fire-irons, although they do not go quite so far as their Yankee neighbours, who, letting alone wooden clocks, deal besides in wooden hams, nutmegs, and cucumber seeds.  Two stout trees were then felled (the meanest would have graced a lordly park), and hewed with the axe into a pair of gigantic sled runners.  The house was raised from its foundation and placed on these.  Many hands make light work; but, had those hands been all hired