Who strives with Nature's laws is over-bold, And Time to his commandments bids us bow. Like fire which waves have quenched, I calmly vow In life's long dream no more my sense to fold. And while I think, our swift existence flies, And none can live again earth's brief career, Then in my deepest heart the voice replies

Of one who now has left this mortal sphere, But walked alone through earthly destinies, And of all women is to fame most dear.

How true this was! Who can wonder that women prize beauty, and are intoxicated by their own fascinations, when these fragile gifts are yet strong enough to outlast all the memories of statesmanship and war? Next to the immortality of genius is that which genius may confer upon the object of its love. Laura, while she lived, was simply one of a hundred or a thousand beautiful and gracious Italian women; she had her little loves and aversions,

joys and griefs; she cared dutifully for her household, and embroidered the veil which Petrarch loved; her memory appeared as fleeting and unsubstantial as that woven tissue. After five centuries we find that no armor of that iron age was so enduring. The kings whom she honored, the popes whom she revered, are dust, and their memory is dust, while literature is still fragrant with her name. An impression which has endured so long is ineffaceable; it is an earthly immortality.

"Time is the chariot of all ages to carry men away, and beauty cannot bribe this charioteer." Thus wrote Petrarch in his Latin essays; but his love had access to a treasury more potent, and for Laura the chariot stayed.

characteristic

THE monotony so characteristic generally of the woodlands of Upper Canada is mitigated, to a great extent, by the pleasant waters with which many of the tracts of that country are intersected.

Away back from the great lakes, chains of smaller lakes glisten in the bosom of the immense forest. Rivers take their course from these, narrow at first, but noisy, rushing along by sparse settlements and lonely Indian camps to their junction with the big lakes, where mills, and factories, and ships, and human dross in general, soon pollute with unclean contact their fair waters. Many of the early settlers of these regions were of a stamp far different from that of the rough pioneers by whom new settlements have generally been opened in the United States and their territories. Here and there throughout Upper Canada there are communities - some of them progressive, if not actually flourishing, others yet in a backward state which were founded by men

whose early lives had been passed amid the highest refinements of Old World civilization. Among these, retired officers of the army and navy were very frequently to be met with. They were generally married men, with incomes wretchedly inadequate to the support of themselves and their families on the "European plan." Land in Canada was to be acquired in fee for a mere song, and it was something for the cadet of a landed family to become the squire of a thousand acres upon some remote Canadian lake or river, even although six hundred of his acres might be nothing but cedar swamp. The native British keenness for the pursuit of wild creatures had much to do with the choice of locality by the adventurers, who generally set up their log-houses in districts where game and fish were to be had in abundance. Communication by road, until within the last twenty years or so, was so imperfect in many of these tracts, that but little intercourse existed between

one settlement and another. On this account agricultural operations were very limited, being confined, generally, to the raising of sufficient grain for family use. In these communities somebody was always found to build a mill; and as the gentleman settlers themselves were not above doing carpenter and blacksmith work, no matter how bunglingly, things were made to look shapely enough in the course of time, and thus were founded villages, some of which have since expanded into towns of considerable size and local importance.

Strangely grotesque, with their halfcivilization, were these places in their earlier days. Characters which would not have been out of place at a bal masqué were frequently to be met with in all of them. Blanket coats in winter, adorned with beaded epaulets, scarlet woollen stockings pulled up over the legs to fend off the snow, and Indian moccasons, were considered quite the proper thing. Once, as I was travelling by sleigh in a comparatively settled part of the country, a young man, who was driving rapidly in the opposite direction, pulled up to greet my companion, with whom he was acquainted. He was coming to the town, from his residence in the heart of the woods, thirty or forty miles from where we met him, and certainly I was astonished - being then newly arrived in the country at the extrome slenderness of the outfit of one who was bound to do the "man about town" for a few days, and that in midwinter too. He was in his shirtsleeves, having no coat with him whatever. His black velvet waistcoat, now foxy and threadbare with much use, might once have been a chefd'euvre from the hand of some London tailor whose gossip was of Guardsmen and their measurement. The rest of his costume consisted of a pair of buckskin breeches fastened at the knee with pearl buttons, heavy woollen stockings, and pegged boots, flatter indebted for their lustre more to the rind of pork than to the black

But

ing-brush. Singularly incongruous with this get-up was the kid-gloved hand with which he removed the black pipe from his mouth; nor was his straw hat exactly the sort of head-dress that one might have expected to meet with during a Canadian sleigh-ride. it was only when he rose to his feet on the little rough sleigh, three feet by two, on which he had been sitting, that the full splendor of his wardrobe became revealed to us; for then he threw around his shoulders a magnificent cloak, made, I think, of some kind of Siberian fur, and which, folded up, had served him for a cushion on his journey. I frequently afterwards met this exquisite of the backwoods, wrapped in that showy mantle, walking in the streets of the little wooden town, where his appearance, so strange to me, did not seem to excite any particular comment. In those parts, men would often come into the towns, in winter, dressed in blanket. coats, with the rather inappropriate accompaniment of white duck trousers and straw hats. Residents did not appear to see anything eccentric in this; but in the mind of a stranger a sense of the ludicrous was naturally excited by it.

Contrasts were ever to be observed among the striking features of these queer settlements. In one very remote township of which I have memories, there dwelt a family whose eccentricities of costume and manner of life entitle them to some brief record here. A retired officer of the army, with a large troop of well-grown sons and daughters, had built himself a loghouse in this dreary wilderness, the roads leading to which were impassable for four months in the year. The girls of this family were of a beauty that may truthfully be described as magnificent. No painter that I know of ever gave to the world a Diana on canvas at all comparable in beauty of face and form to the eldest of these. The family, although English, had been brought up, I think, in the Greek Archipelago, with the language and dia

lects of which they were familiar. At home these young wood-nymphs always went barefooted in summer. Their costume, whether in the woods or when they visited the more advanced settlements, was of the Oriental style. Ahead of Mrs. Bloomer, whose note of reform had not yet ruffled the sweeping skirts of the period, they walked fearlessly abroad in loose trousers, fastened at the ankle. Close-fitting bodices, with narrow skirts falling a little below the knee, completed their costume, and the luxuriant masses of their golden-brown hair fell in natural curls to their shoulders from beneath their wide-brimmed straw hats. It was strange thus to find a leaf from "Eothen" amid the black-ash swamps and rickety "corduroy" causeways of one of the dreariest districts of Canada.

In the social life of these places, where rough hospitality is often curiously mingled with a strain of former luxury, incidents of a humorous character will sometimes attract the notice of the visitor. I remember being told by an acquaintance about a visit once made by him to the family of an English gentleman, who had settled upon a small clearing in the depth of the forest. The young men of the family were engaged in burning brush-wood when my informant arrived, and he, anxious to win their approbation, set to work with a will, and toiled with them until the distant horn announced that dinner-time had arrived. Ablution became necessary before the visitor, who by this time was as black as a charcoalburner, could venture to greet the ladies of the household, and pails of water were accordingly furnished hard by the gable end of the house. There was no towel visible, however, and the visitor, with his hands and face dripping from recent immersion, was pained to see that some difficulty had arisen out of his request for one. Then, with sudden impulse, one of the young men went away, and returned in a minute or two with a long and richly embroidered scarf, the golden web interwoven with

which, as well as the deep lace border, stamped it as a tissue of price. Assured by the young men that this brocade was inured to duty as the regular family towel, the visitor made use of it as such. The texture of it, as he told me, was not pleasant to the face, and it abraded a good deal of the skin from his nose. It went the rounds after he had used it, and the party adjourned to the dinner-table, where some remark was made as to the non-appearance of the daughter of the house. Presently that young lady entered, however, and took her place at the dinner-table. She had evidently bestowed some extra care upon her toilet in honor of the guest from beyond the "timber limits"; but what chiefly attracted his notice in her costume was a curious, gold-embroidered scarf, with deep lace edges, the folds of which, although artfully cast, revealed here and there the smudges of soiled hands. Indeed, my informant who was a little given to exaggeration, perhaps - used to aver that he recognized upon the mystic garment, just at the point where it was crossed upon the bosom of the lovely sylvan damsel, a portion of the cuticle of his own Roman nose.

In another of these settlements, — it was remote, then, though now it has a great line of railway running through it,- things used to be carried to an extreme just the opposite of that above noticed. It was a little English colony, several of the members of which were persons of tolerably good means, with influential family connections at home. Engaged, mostly, in agricultural pursuits, they could chop down trees, and drive oxen, and plough, and mow, as well as any lout in the country round, and some of them built their own houses and made furniture for them. They had been swells, though, before they became "hawbucks," and they brought some of their standard manners and customs with them. It was considered proper in this community to dine at the fashionable hour of six, when every person was expected to be precise in the matter of costume, the ladies

décolletées to the admissible extent, and the gentlemen in black dress-coats and white "chokers." The necessity of supporting the position suggested by this attempt at style, though, induced extravagance. Many of the swells became bankrupt. Their farms passed into more homespun hands.

Their black dress-coats have long since become rusty and out of the mode, and the mortiferous whiskey of the country now tantalizes such of them as it has not killed with melancholy remembrances of the Burgundy that was.

The simple faith and primitive arrangements that existed in some of these clearings before the advent of the iron horse were peculiarities that never failed to impress visitors from far-off cities and settlements of older growth. Bolts and bars were the last things that a settler would think about, when fitting up his house. A man would leave his rifle in the canoe, upon the river's bank, for days together, without the least misgiving as to its being spirited away. Rust would not touch it, the climate of Western Canada being singularly free from moisture; and the roving Indians who traversed these woods were dependent in a great measure upon the white man, and had learned to look upon his property with respect. Looking over one of my note-books, I recall the picture of a deserted old shanty that stood in a meadow by the margin of a bright and swift river. The gentleman who had formerly occupied this weather-stained hut had built himself a larger and more ambitious mansion upon the opposite bank of the stream. For some time after he had moved into this, the interior of the house remained in an unfinished state, and he had no accommodation for his books. Of these he had a choice collection, and they were left in their large wooden cases, for two years or so, on the upper floor of the old shanty, the doors of which had already parted from their hinges, and the windows yielded to the autumnal blasts. To this most curious of circulating libraries the owner accorded free access to the few neighbors who

occupied the clearings around. Many a time I have swung myself up by the crazy ladder that led to the attic where the books were; and in summer I would often sit there for hours, reading Cooper's novels, which had then an attraction enhanced by the circumstances and place. In winter I would take books away. If it was the season for wild ducks I would have a gun beside me, to get a shot at them from the attic window as they flew along the course of the stream. lonely was the hut, that the mink would often haunt it in search of such small plunder as attracts his kind; and once I encountered upon the threshold of it a milk-snake about five feet long, which disappeared through the chinks of the flooring before I could administer to it the coup de grâce by which man feels it to be his stern duty to cut short the serpentine career.

So

There is a wonderful fascination in these grand old Canadian woods for sportsmen, whose wildest experiences of their craft, previous to their essay in it there, had been associated with stalking deer upon Highland mountains, or shooting grouse upon the moors. The solitude of woods is of a more impressive character, I think, than that of bare mountains, — in countries, at least, where one may expect to find traces of civilized man. From mountain peaks there is a wide range of view, in which some points of guidance to the traveller are usually visible. Wandering in the woods is much like groping one's way in the dark; and I know by experience how easy it is for an explorer not well accustomed to them to keep moving in circles, until, after hours of what he imagined to be a straight course, he finds himself back again at some wood-mark long since passed, instead of the place for which he was bound. There is something decidedly sensational in this, especially in winter, as anybody who has ever experienced it will allow. The sounds of the forest are impressive, too, while its stillness, at times almost absolute, is painful. In the mystery

of its voices lies a good deal of the fascination of the wood. In the clear, frosty air of winter the cry of the great black woodpecker rings out like an elfin laugh, as he wings his curved way through the gray stems in quest of some skeleton tree. Explosions caused by the frost are heard among the branches of the trees. They are sometimes as loud as pistol-shots, and — as I can aver from my own observation-the deer, after they have become accustomed to them, will not bound away at the crack of a rifle, and the hunter will often get several shots at one herd, by keeping close in his ambush. But the slightest sound of a twig beneath his moccason, or the tinkle of the powderflask against the muzzle of the rifle as he reloads, will send the herd crashing and flashing away. In the stillness of a summer evening there is something very weird in the cry of the loon, or great Northern diver, as it comes vibrating over the surface of a woodland lake. Where the woods are very thick and dark and lonely, the hooting of owls is commonly to be heard in the daytime. Once only—it was in early summer I heard the wild turkey-cock utter his vehement call. I made my way in the direction whence the sound came, until I was stopped by a river, on the farther side of which I saw a magnificent "gobbler," strutting with drooped wings and expanded tail along the strip of greensward that lay between the water and the woods, while he issued, in very loud and imperious tones, his orders for the ladies of his seraglio to attend. This action, in the case of the domestic turkey, is always provocative of ridicule; but it was absolutely grand and striking as displayed by the large-feathered free bird, parading to and fro there upon the river-bank. I watched him for a while, expecting to see the hen-birds come, but they did not; and so the noble Mormon of the thickets furled his tail at last, and, tucking up his wings, strode moodily into the bush, as if to search for the truants.

To hunters who are accustomed to

glide through the forest observantly and with caution, most interesting little scenes of animal life are sometimes revealed. One day, in the snow-time, as I was roaming the woods close by a Canadian river, after wild- turkeys, I noticed a flock of mergansers, — thereabouts usually called saw-billed ducks, or sheldrakes, — swimming in a small air-hole that had remained open in the frozen surface of the river. There were four or five ducks, and the pool might have been about ten feet by six in size. I watched them for some time, as they kept stemming the current, but without any intention of wasting ammunition upon them. My attention was attracted elsewhere for a moment, and I was surprised, on again looking towards them, to see a splendid red fox sitting at the upper edge of the little pool, where he could not have been more than a couple of yards from the nearest of the ducks. Presently he jumped up, and, running to the other end of the pool, stretched out a paw, as if to seize one of them; but they were too quick for him, placing themselves well beyond his reach with a few strokes of their paddles. He was far too cunning to plunge into the water and risk being carried under the ice by the current; and the ducks appeared to be quite aware of this, for they did not make any attempt to rise, nor indeed did they seem to be at all uneasy at the proximity of their natural enemy. It was exceedingly interesting, not to say amusing, to watch the many stratagems of the fox to get at them. Sometimes he would lie down upon the snow and lash about him with his bushy tail, whimpering in a querulous and imbecile manner at being thus outwitted by simple water-fowl. Then a new idea would take possession of him, and he would start up and run round and round the pool at a tremendous pace, probably to try and get a chance at the ducks by flurrying them; but they knew too much for Master Reynard, and always edged away from him just at the right moment. Tired at last of watching these