of light labor without an allowance of rum; but a Canadian lumberer can manage to do his daily task on tea without milk.  These men, however, are by no means teetotalers.  When they come back to the towns they break out, and reward themselves for their long-enforced moderation.  The wages I found to be very various, running from thirteen or fourteen dollars a month to twenty-eight or thirty, according to the nature of the work.  The men who cut down the trees receive more than those who hew them when down, and these again more than the under class who make the roads and clear the ground.  These money wages, however, are in addition to their diet.  The operation requiring the most skill is that of marking the trees for the axe.  The largest only are worth cutting, and form and soundness must also be considered.

But if I were about to visit a party of lumberers in the forest, I should not be disposed to pass a whole winter with them.  Even of a very good thing one may have too much, I would go up in the spring, when the rafts are being formed in the small tributary streams, and I would come down upon one of them, shooting the rapids of the rivers as soon as the first freshets had left the way open.  A freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting snow and ice.  The first freshets take down the winter waters of the nearer lakes and rivers.  Then the streams become for a time navigable, and the rafts go down.  After that comes the second freshet, occasioned by the melting of far-off snow and ice up in the great northern lakes, which are little known.  These rafts are of immense construction, such as those which we have seen on the Rhone and Rhine, and often contain timber to the value of two, three, and four thousand pounds.  At the rapids the large rafts are, as it were, unyoked, and divided into small portions, which go down separately.  The excitement and motion of such transit must, I should say, be very joyous.  I was told that the Prince of Wales desired to go down a rapid on a raft, but that the men in charge would not undertake to say that there was no possible danger; whereupon those who accompanied the prince requested his Royal Highness to forbear.  I fear that, in these careful days, crowned heads and their heirs must often find themselves in the position of Sancho at the banquet.  The sailor prince, who came after his brother, was allowed to go down a rapid, and got, as I was told, rather a rough bump as he did so.

Ottawa is a great place for these timber rafts.  Indeed, it may, I think, be called the headquarters of timber for the world.  Nearly all the best pine-wood comes down the Ottawa and its tributaries.  The other rivers by which timber is brought down to the St. Lawrence are chiefly the St. Maurice, the Madawaska, and the Saguenay; but the Ottawa and its tributaries water 75,000 square miles, whereas the other three rivers, with their tributaries, water only 53,000.  The timber from the Ottawa and St. Maurice finds its way down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, where, however, it loses the whole of its picturesque character.  The Saguenay and the Madawaska fall into the St. Lawrence below Quebec.