doing so.  In Canada the vehicles are much better got up than they are in England, and the horses too look better.  Taking Ireland as a whole, they are more respectable in appearance there than in England.  From all which it appears that pace is the article that costs the highest price, and that appearance does not go for much in the bill.  In Canada the roads are very bad in comparison with the English or Irish roads; but, to make up for this, the price of forage is very low.

I have said that the cross-mail conveyances in Canada did not seem to be very closely bound as to time; but they are regulated by clock-work in comparison with some of them in the United States.  “Are you going this morning?” I said to a mail-driver in Vermont.  “I thought you always started in the evening.”  “Wa’ll, I guess I do; but it rained some last night, so I jist stayed at home.”  I do not know that I ever felt more shocked in my life, and I could hardly keep my tongue off the man.  The mails, however, would have paid no respect to me in Vermont, and I was obliged to walk away crest-fallen.

We went with the mails from Sherbrooke to a village called Magog, at the outlet of the lake, and from thence by a steamer up the lake, to a solitary hotel called the Mountain House, which is built at the foot of the mountain, on the shore, and which is surrounded on every side by thick forest.  There is no road within two miles of the house.  The lake therefore is the only highway, and that is frozen up for four months in the year.  When frozen, however, it is still a road, for it is passable for sledges.  I have seldom been in a house that seemed so remote from the world, and so little within reach of doctors, parsons, or butchers.  Bakers in this country are not required, as all persons make their own bread.  But in spite of its position the hotel is well kept, and on the whole we were more comfortable there than at any other inn in Lower Canada.  The Mountain house is but five miles from the borders of Vermont, in which State the head of the lake lies.  The steamer which brought us runs on to Newport, or rather from Newport to Magog and back again.  And Newport is in Vermont.

The one thing to be done at the Mountain House is the ascent of the mountain called the Owl’s head.  The world there offers nothing else of active enterprise to the traveler, unless fishing be considered an active enterprise.  I am not capable of fishing, therefore we resolved on going up the Owl’s Head.  To dine in the middle of the day is absolutely imperative at these hotels, and thus we were driven to select either the morning or the afternoon.  Evening lights we declared were the best for all views, and therefore we decided on the afternoon.  It is but two miles; but then, as we were told more than once by those who had spoken to us on the subject, those two miles are not like other miles.  “I doubt if the lady can do it,” one man said to me.  I asked if