The peninsular situation of this county is its only disadvantage—­being out of the line of the land travel and of the telegraphic communication which passes through Belleville.  The county of Prince Edward having nearly exhausted its exportation lumber—­the people are thus freed from the evils of a trade that is always more or less demoralising in its tendency and can now give their undivided attention to the cultivation of their farms.  Certain it is, that more quiet, industrious, and prosperous settlers, are not to be found in the Province.

A few miles below Belleville, on the south side of the bay, is a very remarkable natural curiosity, called “The Stone Mills.”  On the summit of a table-land, rising abruptly several hundred feet above the shore of the bay, there is a lake of considerable size and very great depth, and which apparently receives a very inadequate supply from the elevated land on which it is situated.  The lake has no natural outlet, and the common opinion is that it is unfathomable, and that it is supplied with water by means of a subterranean communication with Lake Huron, or some other lake at the same level.  This is, of course, extremely improbable, but there can be no doubt of its great depth, and that it cannot be supplied from the Bay of Quinte, so far beneath its level.  As a small rivulet runs into this lake from the flat ground in its vicinity, and as the soil of this remarkable excavation, however it may have been originally formed, is tenacious, I think we require no such improbable theory to account for its existence.  Availing himself of the convenient position of this lake, a farmer in the neighbourhood erected a mill, which gives its name to the lake, on the shore of the Bay of Quinte, and which he supplied with water by making a deep cutting from the lake to the edge of the precipice, from whence it is conveyed in troughs to the mill.

There is a somewhat similar lake in the township of Sidney in the county of Hastings, covering some hundred acres.  This lake is also of great depth, though situated on the summit of a range of high hills, from whence it gets the name of the “Oak Hill Pond.”

The Bay of Quinte abounds in excellent fish of various kinds, affording excellent sport to those who are fond of fishing.  When the ice breaks up in the spring, immense shoals of pickerel commence running up the Moira river, at Belleville, to spawn in the interior.  At that time a number of young men amuse themselves with spearing them, standing on the flat rocks at the end of the bridge which crosses the river They dart their spears into the rushing waters at hap-hazard in the darkness, bringing up a large fish at every second or third stroke.  My eldest son, a youth of fifteen, sometimes caught so many fish in this manner in two or three hours, that we had to send a large wheelbarrow to fetch them home.  Formerly, before so many mills were erected, the fish swarmed in incredible numbers in all our rivers and lakes.