“No; where did he sit?”

“At the foot of the table.  You must have seen him, he was too big to be overlooked.  What a delightful squint he had!  What a ridiculous likeness there was between him and the roast pig he was carving!  I was wondering all dinner-time how that man contrived to cut up that pig; for one eye was fixed upon the ceiling, and the other leering very affectionately at me.  It was very droll; was it not?”

“And what do you intend doing with yourself when you arrive in Canada?” said I.

“Find out some large hollow tree, and live like Bruin in winter by sucking my paws.  In the summer there will be plenty of mast and acorns to satisfy the wants of an abstemious fellow.”

“But, joking apart, my dear fellow,” said my husband, anxious to induce him to abandon a scheme so hopeless, “do you think that you are at all qualified for a life of toil and hardship?”

“Are you?” returned Tom, raising his large, bushy, black eyebrows to the top of his forehead, and fixing his leaden eyes steadfastly upon his interrogator, with an air of such absurd gravity that we burst into a hearty laugh.

“Now what do you laugh for?  I am sure I asked you a very serious question.”

“But your method of putting it is so unusual that you must excuse us for laughing.”

“I don’t want you to weep,” said Tom; “but as to our qualifications, Moodie, I think them pretty equal.  I know you think otherwise, but I will explain.  Let me see; what was I going to say?—­ah, I have it!  You go with the intention of clearing land, and working for yourself, and doing a great deal.  I have tried that before in New South Wales, and I know that it won’t answer.  Gentlemen can’t work like labourers, and if they could, they won’t—­it is not in them, and that you will find out.  You expect, by going to Canada, to make your fortune, or at least secure a comfortable independence.  I anticipate no such results; yet I mean to go, partly out of a whim, partly to satisfy my curiosity whether it is a better country than New South Wales; and lastly, in the hope of bettering my condition in a small way, which at present is so bad that it can scarcely be worse.  I mean to purchase a farm with the three hundred pounds I received last week from the sale of my father’s property; and if the Canadian soil yields only half what Mr. C—–­ says it does, I need not starve.  But the refined habits in which you have been brought up, and your unfortunate literary propensities—­(I say unfortunate, because you will seldom meet people in a colony who can or will sympathise with you in these pursuits)—­they will make you an object of mistrust and envy to those who cannot appreciate them, and will be a source of constant mortification and disappointment to yourself.  Thank God!  I have no literary propensities; but in spite of the latter advantage, in all probability I shall make no exertion at all; so that your energy, damped by disgust and disappointment, and my laziness, will end in the same thing, and we shall both return like bad pennies to our native shores.  But, as I have neither wife nor child to involve in my failure, I think, without much self-flattery, that my prospects are better than yours.”