The sagacity of the horses of this country is truly admirable.  Their patience in surmounting the difficulties they have to encounter, their skill in avoiding the holes and stones, and in making their footing sure over the round and slippery timbers of the log-bridges, renders them very valuable.  If they want the spirit and fleetness of some of our high-bred blood-horses, they make up in gentleness, strength, and patience.  This renders them most truly valuable, as they will travel in such places that no British horse would, with equal safety to their drivers.  Nor are the Canadian horses, when well fed and groomed, at all deficient in beauty of colour, size, or form.  They are not very often used in logging; the ox is preferred in all rough and heavy labour of this kind.

Just as the increasing gloom of the forest began to warn us of the approach of evening, and I was getting weary and hungry, our driver, in some confusion, avowed his belief that, somehow or other, he had missed the track, though how, he could not tell, seeing there was but one road.  We were nearly two miles from the last settlement, and he said we ought to be within sight of the lake if we were on the right road.  The only plan, we agreed, was for him to go forward and leave the team, and endeavour to ascertain if he were near the water, and if otherwise, to return to the house we had passed and inquire the way.

After running full half a mile ahead he returned with a dejected countenance, saying we must be wrong, for he saw no appearance of water, and the road we were on appeared to end in a cedar swamp, as the farther he went the thicker the hemlocks and cedars became; so, as we had no desire to commence our settlement by a night’s lodging in a swamp—­ where, to use the expression of our driver, the cedars grew as thick as hairs on a cat’s back,—­we agreed to retrace our steps.

After some difficulty the lumbering machine was turned, and slowly we began our backward march.  We had not gone more than a mile when a boy came along, who told us we might just go back again, as there was no other road to the lake; and added, with a knowing nod of his head, “Master, I guess if you had known the bush as well as I, you would never have been fule enough to turn when you were going just right.  Why, any body knows that them cedars and himlocks grow thickest near the water; so you may just go back for your pains.”

It was dark, save that the stars came forth with more than usual brilliancy, when we suddenly emerged from the depth of the gloomy forest to the shores of a beautiful little lake, that gleamed the more brightly from the contrast of the dark masses of foliage that hung over it, and the towering pine-woods that girt its banks.

Here, seated on a huge block of limestone, which was covered with a soft cushion of moss, beneath the shade of the cedars that skirt the lake, surrounded with trunks, boxes, and packages of various descriptions, which the driver had hastily thrown from the waggon, sat your child, in anxious expectation of some answering voice to my husband’s long and repeated halloo.