work up in the forests is done with the assistance of no stronger
drink than tea; and it is very hard work. There cannot be much
work that is harder; and it is done amid the snows and forests of a
Canadian winter. A convict in Bermuda cannot get through his daily
eight hours of light labor without an allowance of rum; but a
Canadian lumberer can manage to do his daily task on tea without
milk. These men, however, are by no means teetotalers. When they
come back to the towns they break out, and reward themselves for
their long-enforced moderation. The wages I found to be very
various, running from thirteen or fourteen dollars a month to
twenty-eight or thirty, according to the nature of the work. The
men who cut down the trees receive more than those who hew them
when down, and these again more than the under class who make the
roads and clear the ground. These money wages, however, are in
addition to their diet. The operation requiring the most skill is
that of marking the trees for the axe. The largest only are worth
cutting, and form and soundness must also be considered.

But if I were about to visit a party of lumberers in the forest, I
should not be disposed to pass a whole winter with them. Even of a
very good thing one may have too much, I would go up in the spring,
when the rafts are being formed in the small tributary streams, and
I would come down upon one of them, shooting the rapids of the
rivers as soon as the first freshets had left the way open. A
freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting
snow and ice. The first freshets take down the winter waters of
the nearer lakes and rivers. Then the streams become for a time
navigable, and the rafts go down. After that comes the second
freshet, occasioned by the melting of far-off snow and ice up in
the great northern lakes, which are little known. These rafts are
of immense construction, such as those which we have seen on the
Rhone and Rhine, and often contain timber to the value of two,
three, and four thousand pounds. At the rapids the large rafts
are, as it were, unyoked, and divided into small portions, which go
down separately. The excitement and motion of such transit must, I
should say, be very joyous. I was told that the Prince of Wales
desired to go down a rapid on a raft, but that the men in charge
would not undertake to say that there was no possible danger;
whereupon those who accompanied the prince requested his Royal
Highness to forbear. I fear that, in these careful days, crowned
heads and their heirs must often find themselves in the position of
Sancho at the banquet. The sailor prince, who came after his
brother, was allowed to go down a rapid, and got, as I was told,
rather a rough bump as he did so.

Ottawa is a great place for these timber rafts. Indeed, it may, I
think, be called the headquarters of timber for the world. Nearly
all the best pine-wood comes down the Ottawa and its tributaries.
The other rivers by which timber is brought down to the St.
Lawrence are chiefly the St. Maurice, the Madawaska, and the
Saguenay; but the Ottawa and its tributaries water 75,000 square
miles, whereas the other three rivers, with their tributaries,
water only 53,000. The timber from the Ottawa and St. Maurice
finds its way down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, where, however, it
loses the whole of its picturesque character. The Saguenay and the
Madawaska fall into the St. Lawrence below Quebec.

From Ottawa we went by rail to Prescott, which is surely one of the
most wretched little places to be found in any country.
Immediately opposite to it, on the other side of the St. Lawrence,
is the thriving town of Ogdensburg. But Ogdensburg is in the
United States. Had we been able to learn at Ottawa any facts as to
the hours of the river steamers and railways, we might have saved
time and have avoided Prescott; but this was out of the question.
Had I asked the exact hour at which I might reach Calcutta by the
quickest route, an accurate reply would not have been more out of
the question. I was much struck, at Prescott--and, indeed, all
through Canada, though more in the upper than in the lower
province--by the sturdy roughness, some would call it insolence, of
those of the lower classes of the people with whom I was brought
into contact. If the words "lower classes" give offense to any
reader, I beg to apologize--to apologize, and to assert that I am
one of the last of men to apply such a term in a sense of reproach
to those who earn their bread by the labor of their hands. But it
is hard to find terms which will be understood; and that term,
whether it give offense or no, will be understood. Of course such
a complaint as that I now make is very common as made against the
States. Men in the States, with horned hands and fustian coats,
are very often most unnecessarily insolent in asserting their
independence. What I now mean to say is that precisely the same
fault is to be found in Canada. I know well what the men mean when
they offend in this manner. And when I think on the subject with
deliberation at my own desk, I can not only excuse, but almost
approve them. But when one personally encounters this corduroy
braggadocio; when the man to whose services one is entitled answers
one with determined insolence; when one is bidden to follow "that
young lady," meaning the chambermaid, or desired, with a toss of
the head, to wait for the "gentleman who is coming," meaning the
boots, the heart is sickened, and the English traveler pines for
the civility--for the servility, if my American friends choose to
call it so--of a well-ordered servant. But the whole scene is
easily construed, and turned into English. A man is asked by a
stranger some question about his employment, and he replies in a
tone which seems to imply anger, insolence, and a dishonest
intention to evade the service for which he is paid. Or, if there
be no question of service or payment, the man's manner will be the
same, and the stranger feels that he is slapped in the face and
insulted. The translation of it is this: The man questioned, who
is aware that as regards coat, hat, boots, and outward cleanliness
he is below him by whom he is questioned, unconsciously feels


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