Up to the period of which I now speak, we had not experienced much inconvenience from our very limited means.  Our wants were few, and we enjoyed many of the comforts and even some of the luxuries of life; and all had gone on smoothly and lovingly with us until the birth of our first child.  It was then that prudence whispered to the father, “you are happy and contented now, but this cannot always last; the birth of that child whom you have hailed with as much rapture as though she were born to inherit a noble estate, is to you the beginning of care.  Your family may increase, and your wants will increase in proportion; out of what fund can you satisfy their demands?  Some provision must be made for the future, and made quickly, while youth and health enable you to combat successfully with the ills of life.  When you married for inclination, you knew that emigration must be the result of such an act of imprudence in over-populated England.  Up and be doing, while you still possess the means of transporting yourself to a land where the industrious can never lack bread, and where there is a chance that wealth and independence may reward virtuous toil.”

Alas! that truth should ever whisper such unpleasant realities to the lover of ease—­to the poet, the author, the musician, the man of books, of refined taste and gentlemanly habits.  Yet he took the hint, and began to bestir himself with the spirit and energy so characteristic of the glorious North, from whence he sprung.

“The sacrifice,” he said, “must be made, and the sooner the better.  My dear wife, I feel confident that you will respond to the call of duty, and, hand-in-hand and heart-in-heart we will go forth to meet difficulties, and, by the help of God, to subdue them.”

Dear husband!  I take shame to myself that my purpose was less firm, that my heart lingered so far behind yours in preparing for this great epoch in our lives; that, like Lot’s wife, I still turned and looked back, and clung with all my strength to the land I was leaving.  It was not the hardships of an emigrant’s life I dreaded.  I could bear mere physical privations philosophically enough; it was the loss of the society in which I had moved, the want of congenial minds, of persons engaged in congenial pursuits, that made me so reluctant to respond to my husband’s call.

I was the youngest in a family remarkable for their literary attainments; and, while yet a child, I had seen riches melt away from our once prosperous home, as the Canadian snows dissolve before the first warm days of spring, leaving the verdureless earth naked and bare.