of the poor dog, and by a noise, as if everything in the room had been violently thrown down.  I jumped out of bed instantly, and seizing my gun, crept cautiously along the passage, till I came to the kitchen-door, which I threw open, whereupon some large dark-looking object made a rush for the unfinished part of the floor.  I immediately fired; but it was so dark, and the beast so quick in its movements, that I had little chance of hitting him.  Whether or not, it had the effect of scaring him so much that he never resumed his nocturnal visitation.  Indeed, I stopped his supplies from my larder by finishing the floor and building up the hole between the lower log of the house and the ground.

But to return to my story.  As soon as the beast had made his exit, we lighted a candle and examined the room, which we found in confusion and disorder.  The barrel of pork was upset and the brine running in miniature rivers over the floor, while poor little Suffolk was bleeding from his wounds—­indeed nearly killed.  From what I could make out of the footprints outside I am inclined to think my unwelcome visiter was a bear; but this, of course, will for ever remain a mystery.

I have heard many stories of their boldness, to some instances of which I have been an eye-witness.  Not very long after the occurrence I have just related, the wife of an Irish emigrant saw a large bear walking very deliberately towards the shanty, which no doubt he mistook for a pigsty, and the inmates for pigs, for they were quite as dirty, therefore it was no great mistake, after all.  The woman and her three children had barely time to get into the potato-cellar and shut down the trap-door, when his bear-ship made his forcible entrance through the feeble barrier the door opposed to his strength, much to the dismay and terror of the subterranean lodgers, who lay shaking and quaking for more than an hour, till the dying screams of their fatted pig told them he was after game of a more savoury nature.

In the fall of the year it is no uncommon thing for farmers to have their pigs killed by the bears, particularly in the new settlements.

Bears are, we know, very fond of good things.  They are epicures in their way.  They like honey, and love pork, and, you may be sure, often pay the settler a visit for the sake of his pigs.  As Bruin makes very good eating himself, these visitations are sometimes made at the risk of his own bacon; his warm jacket, which makes comfortable robes for the settler’s sleigh, keeping him warm during his journeys on pleasure or business throughout the long Canadian winters.

One day, I was assisting my father-in-law and his sons in logging up his fallow, when we heard a great outcry among the pigs in a belt of woods between Mr. Reid’s and Mr. Stewart’s clearing, when, suspecting it was a bear attacking the swine, we ran for our guns, and made the best of our way towards the spot from whence the outcry proceeded.