the sake of a dish of gossip, while lolling her elbows on the counter of a village-shop, this foolish woman would have forgone the advantages, real solid advantages, of having land and cattle, and poultry and food, and firing and clothing, and all for a few years’ hard work, which, her husband wisely observed, must have been exerted at home, with no other end in view than an old age of poverty or a refuge from starvation in a parish workhouse.

The female of the middling or better class, in her turn, pines for the society of the circle of friends she has quitted, probably for ever.  She sighs for those little domestic comforts, that display of the refinements and elegancies of life, that she had been accustomed to see around her.  She has little time now for those pursuits that were ever her business as well as amusement.  The accomplishments she has now to acquire are of a different order:  she must become skilled in the arts of sugar-boiling, candle and soap making, the making and baking of huge loaves, cooked in the bake-kettle, unless she be the fortunate mistress of a stone or clay oven.  She must know how to manufacture hop-rising or salt-rising for leavening her bread; salting meat and fish, knitting stockings and mittens and comforters, spinning yarn in the big wheel (the French Canadian spinning-wheel), and dyeing the yarn when spun to have manufactured into cloth and coloured flannels, to clothe her husband and children, making clothes for herself, her husband and children;—­for there are no tailors nor mantua-makers in the bush.

The management of poultry and the dairy must not be omitted; for in this country most persons adopt the Irish and Scotch method, that of churning the milk, a practice that in our part of England was not known.  For my own part I am inclined to prefer the butter churned from cream, as being most economical, unless you chance to have Irish or Scotch servants who prefer buttermilk to new or sweet skimmed milk.

There is something to be said in favour of both plans, no doubt.  The management of the calves differs here very much.  Some persons wean the calf from the mother from its birth, never allowing it to suck at all:  the little creature is kept fasting the first twenty-four hours; it is then fed with the finger with new milk, which it soon learns to take readily.  I have seen fine cattle thus reared, and am disposed to adopt the plan as the least troublesome one.

The old settlers pursue an opposite mode of treatment, allowing the calf to suck till it is neatly half a year old, under the idea that it ensures the daily return of the cow; as, under ordinary circumstances, she is apt to ramble sometimes for days together, when the herbage grows scarce in the woods near the homesteads, and you not only lose the use of the milk, but often, from distention of the udder, the cow is materially injured, at least for the remainder of the milking season.  I am disposed to think that were care