I could see a smile hover on the lips of my fellow travellers on hearing of our projected plans for the adornment of our future dwelling.

“If you go into the backwoods your house must necessarily be a log-house,” said an elderly gentleman, who had been a settler many years in the country.  “For you will most probably be out of the way of a saw-mill, and you will find so much to do, and so many obstacles to encounter, for the first two or three years, that you will hardly have opportunity for carrying these improvements into effect.

“There is an old saying,” he added, with a mixture of gravity and good humour in his looks, “that I used to hear when I was a boy, ’first creep* and then go’. [* Derived from infants crawling on all-fours before they have strength to walk.] Matters are not carried on quite so easily here as at home; and the truth of this a very few weeks’ acquaintance with the bush, as we term all unbroken forest land, will prove.  At the end of five years you may begin to talk of these pretty improvements and elegancies, and you will then be able to see a little what you are about.”

“I thought,” said I, “every thing in this country was done with so much expedition.  I am sure I have heard and read of houses being built in a day.”  The old gentleman laughed.

“Yes, yes,” he replied, “travellers find no difficulty in putting up a house in twelve or twenty-four hours, and so the log-walls can be raised in that time or even less; but the house is not completed when the outer walls are up, as your husband will find to his cost.”

“But all the works on emigration that I leave read,” replied I, “give a fair and flattering picture of a settler’s life; for, according to their statements, the difficulties are easily removed.”

“Never mind books,” said my companion, “use your own reason.  Look on those interminable forests, through which the eye can only penetrate a few yards, and tell me how those vast timbers are to be removed, utterly extirpated, I may say, from the face of the earth, the ground cleared and burnt, a crop sown and fenced, and a house to shelter you raised, without difficulty, without expense, and without great labour.  Never tell me of what is said in books, written very frequently by tarry-at-home travellers.  Give me facts.  One honest, candid emigrant’s experience is worth all that has been written on the subject.  Besides, that which may be a true picture of one part of the country will hardly suit another.  The advantages and disadvantages arising from soil, situation, and progress of civilization, are very different in different districts:  even the prices of goods and of produce, stock and labour, vary exceedingly, according as you are near to, or distant from, towns and markets.”

I began to think my fellow-traveller spoke sensibly on the subject, with which the experience of thirteen years had made him perfectly conversant.  I began to apprehend that we also had taken too flattering a view of a settler’s life as it must be in the backwoods.  Time and our own personal knowledge will be the surest test, and to that we must bow.  We are ever prone to believe that which we wish.