The winter had now fairly set in—­the iron winter of 1833.  The snow was unusually deep, and it being our first winter in Canada, and passed in such a miserable dwelling, we felt it very severely.  In spite of all my boasted fortitude—­and I think my powers of endurance have been tried to the uttermost since my sojourn in this country—­the rigour of the climate subdued my proud, independent English spirit, and I actually shamed my womanhood and cried with the cold.  Yes, I ought to blush at evincing such unpardonable weakness; but I was foolish and inexperienced, and unaccustomed to the yoke.

My husband did not much relish performing the menial duties of a servant in such weather, but he did not complain, and in the meantime commenced an active inquiry for a man to supply the place of the one we had lost; but at that season of the year no one was to be had.

It was a bitter, freezing night.  A sharp wind howled without, and drove the fine snow through the chinks in the door, almost to the hearth-stone, on which two immense blocks of maple shed forth a cheering glow, brightening the narrow window-panes, and making the blackened rafters ruddy with the heart-invigorating blaze.

The toils of the day were over, the supper things cleared away, and the door closed for the night.  Moodie had taken up his flute, the sweet companion of happier days, at the earnest request of our homesick Scotch servant-girl, to cheer her drooping spirits by playing some of the touching national airs of the glorious mountain land, the land of chivalry and song, the heroic North.  Before retiring to rest, Bell, who had an exquisite ear for music, kept time with foot and hand, while large tears gathered in her soft blue eyes.

“Ay, ‘tis bonnie thae songs; but they mak’ me greet, an’ my puir heart is sair, sair when I think on the bonnie braes and the days o’lang syne.”

Poor Bell!  Her heart was among the hills, and mine had wandered far, far away to the green groves and meadows of my own fair land.  The music and our reveries were alike abruptly banished by a sharp blow upon the door.  Bell rose and opened it, when a strange, wild-looking lad, barefooted, and with no other covering to his head than the thick, matted locks of raven blackness that hung like a cloud over his swarthy, sunburnt visage, burst into the room.

“Guidness defend us!  Wha ha’e we here?” screamed Bell, retreating into a corner.  “The puir callant’s no cannie.”

My husband turned hastily round to meet the intruder, and I raised the candle from the table the better to distinguish his face; while Bell, from her hiding-place, regarded him with unequivocal glances of fear and mistrust, waving her hands to me, and pointing significantly to the open door, as if silently beseeching me to tell her master to turn him out.

“Shut the door, man,” said Moodie, whose long scrutiny of the strange being before us seemed upon the whole satisfactory; “we shall be frozen.”