“What are the most useful articles for a settler to bring out?”

Tools, a good stock of wearing-apparel, and shoes, good bedding, especially warm blankets; as you pay high for them here, and they are not so good as you would supply yourself with at a much lower rate at home.  A selection of good garden-seeds, as those you buy at the stores are sad trash; moreover, they are pasted up in packets not to be opened till paid for, and you may, as we have done, pay for little better than chaff, and empty husks, or old and worm-eaten seeds.  This, I am sorry to say, is a Yankee trick; though I doubt not but John Bull would do the same if he had the opportunity, as there are rogues in all countries under the sun.

With respect to furniture and heavy goods of any kind, I would recommend little to be brought.  Articles of hardware are not much more expensive here than at home, if at all, and often of a kind more suitable to the country than those you are at the trouble of bringing; besides, all land-carriage is dear.

We lost a large package of tools that have never been recovered from the forwarders, though their carriage was paid beforehand to Prescott.  It is safest and best to ensure your goods, when the forwarders are accountable for them.

You ask, “If groceries and articles of household consumption are dear or cheap?”

They vary according to circumstances and situation.  In towns situated in old cleared parts of the country, and near the rivers and navigable waters, they are cheaper than at home; but in newly-settled townships, where the water-communication is distant, and where the roads are bad, and the transport of goods difficult, they are nearly double the price.  Where the supply of produce is inadequate to the demand owing to the influx of emigrants in thinly-settled places, or other causes, then all articles of provisions are sold at a high price, and not to be procured without difficulty; but these are merely temporary evils, which soon cease.

Competition is lowering prices in Canadian towns, as it does in British ones, and you may now buy goods of all kinds nearly as cheap as in England.

Where prices depend on local circumstances, it is impossible to give any just standard; as what may do for one town would not for another, and a continual change is going on in all the unsettled or half-settled townships.  In like manner the prices of cattle vary:  they are cheaper in old settled townships, and still more so on the American side the river or lakes, than in the Canadas*.

[* The duties on goods imported to the Canadas are exceedingly small, which will explain the circumstance of many articles of consumption being cheaper in places where there are facilities of transit than at home; while in the Backwoods, where roads are scarcely yet formed, there must be taken into the account the cost of carriage, and increased number of agents; the greater value of capital, and consequent increased rate of local profit, &c.—­items which will diminish in amount as the country becomes settled and cleared.—­Ed.]