I could hardly help smiling at your notion that we in the backwoods can have easy access to a circulation library.  In one sense, indeed, you are not so far from truth, for every settler’s library may be called a circulating one, as their books are sure to pass from friend to friend in due rotation; and, fortunately for us, we happen to have several excellently furnished ones in our neighbourhood, which are always open to us.  There is a public library at York, and a small circulating library at Cobourg, but they might just as well be on the other side of the Atlantic for any access we can have to them.

I know how it is; at home you have the same idea of the facility of travelling in this country as I once had:  now I know what bush-roads are, a few miles’ journey seems an awful undertaking.  Do you remember my account of a day’s travelling through the woods?  I am sorry to say they are but little amended since that letter was written.  I have only once ventured to perform a similar journey, which took several hours hard travelling, and, more by good luck than any other thing, arrived with whole bones at my destination.  I could not help laughing at the frequent exclamations of the teamster, a shrewd Yorkshire lad, “Oh, if I had but the driving of his excellency the governor along this road, how I would make the old horses trot over the stumps and stones, till he should cry out again; I warrant he’d do summut to mend them before he came along them again.”

Unfortunately it is not a statute-road on this side the river, and has been cut by the settlers for their own convenience, so that I fear nothing will be done to improve it, unless it is by the inhabitants themselves.

We hope soon to have a market for our grain nearer at hand than Peterborough; a grist-mill has just been raised at the new village that is springing up.  This will prove a great comfort to us; we have at present to fetch flour up at a great expense, through bad roads, and the loss of time to those that are obliged to send wheat to the town to be ground, is a serious evil; this will soon be remedied, to the joy of the whole neighbourhood.

You do not know how important these improvements are, and what effect they have in raising the spirits of the emigrant, besides enhancing the value of his property in no trifling degree.  We have already experienced the benefit of being near the saw-mill, as it not only enables us to build at a smaller expense, but enables us to exchange logs for sawn lumber.  The great pine-trees which, under other circumstances, would be an encumbrance and drawback to clearing the land, prove a most profitable crop when cleared off in the form of saw-logs, which is easily done where they are near the water; the logs are sawn to a certain length, and dragged by oxen, during the winter, when the ground is hard, to the lake’s edge; when the ice breaks up, the logs float down with the current and enter the mill-race; I have seen the lake opposite to our windows covered with these floating timbers, voyaging down to the saw-mill.