A sparkling draught of crystal weather was poured into our stirrup-cup in the morning, as we set out for a drive of fifteen miles across country to the Riviere a l’Ours, a tributary of the crooked, unnavigable river of Alders.  The canoes and luggage were loaded on a couple of charrettes, or two-wheeled carts.  But for us and the guides there were two quatre-roues, the typical vehicles of the century, as characteristic of Canada as the carriole is of Norway.  It is a two-seated buckboard, drawn by one horse, and the back seat is covered with a hood like an old-fashioned poke bonnet.  The road is of clay and always rutty.  It runs level for a while, and then jumps up a steep ridge and down again, or into a deep gully and out again.  The habitant’s idea of good driving is to let his horse slide down the hill and gallop up.  This imparts a spasmodic quality to the motion, like Carlyle’s style.

The native houses are strung along the road.  The modern pattern has a convex angle in the roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic adaptation of the Mansard.  The antique pattern, which is far more picturesque, has a concave curve in the roof, and the eaves project like eyebrows, shading the flatness of the face.  Paint is a rarity.  The prevailing colour is the soft gray of weather-beaten wood.  Sometimes, in the better class of houses, a gallery is built across the front and around one side, and a square of garden is fenced in, with dahlias and hollyhocks and marigolds, and perhaps a struggling rosebush, and usually a small patch of tobacco growing in one corner.  Once in a long while you may see a balm-of-Gilead tree, or a clump of sapling poplars, planted near the door.

How much better it would have been if the farmer had left a few of the noble forest-trees to shade his house.  But then, when the farmer came into the wilderness he was not a farmer, he was first of all a wood-chopper.  He regarded the forest as a stubborn enemy in possession of his land.  He attacked it with fire and axe and exterminated it, instead of keeping a few captives to hold their green umbrellas over his head when at last his grain fields should be smiling around him and he should sit down on his doorstep to smoke a pipe of home-grown tobacco.

In the time of adversity one should prepare for prosperity.  I fancy there are a good many people unconsciously repeating the mistake of the Canadian farmer—­chopping down all the native growths of life, clearing the ground of all the useless pretty things that seem to cumber it, sacrificing everything to utility and success.  We fell the last green tree for the sake of raising an extra hill of potatoes; and never stop to think what an ugly, barren place we may have to sit in while we eat them.  The ideals, the attachments—­yes, even the dreams of youth are worth saving.  For the artificial tastes with which age tries to make good their loss grow very slowly and cast but a slender shade.

Most of the Canadian farmhouses have their ovens out-of-doors.  We saw them everywhere; rounded edifices of clay, raised on a foundation of logs, and usually covered with a pointed roof of boards.  They looked like little family chapels—­and so they were; shrines where the ritual of the good housewife was celebrated, and the gift of daily bread, having been honestly earned, was thankfully received.