in a comparatively new township. With one farmer it may be a new gate; with another, a neglected corner cleared up; this one, a bit of new and better fence; that, a new house or barn, or a young orchard set out; or it may be a garden enclosed, or some shade trees planted in front ;--such changes in the aggregate and added to from year to year, soon wonderfully alter the face of the landscape. And the change is just as great in the towns. For instance, I remember Galt as it was in 1837. South Water

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Street was a row of log houses. One bridge (Main Street), no dam; no hydraulic canal; no water power from the river. On the south-west corner of Main and Water Streets stood a little red-painted one-storey store,' where J. K. Andrews sold goods and kept the post-office. There was nothing on the west side of the river that I remember, but the Kirk, the Queen's Arms Hotel, and the Hon. William Dickson's house. An unsavoury green pond was in the middle of Main Street, crossed by a new stone viaduct. The population was probably under 500. A year or two afterwards, a ‘Fair' was instituted in the autumn. Two or three yoke of oxen might be sold; and I know a good deal of whiskey and beer were drunk, and a good many mutton pies eaten. That, at first, was nearly all the business done. In 1844 or 1845, Mr. B. C. Hearle, a little man, who wore a short coat, started a newspaper in Galt. Peter Jaffray, who bought him out, described his 'plant' to me, as consisting chiefly of a lot of old worntype, which he thought must have been in use since the war of 1812!' However, Hearle went on with the paper for a year or two. It was called the Dumfries Courier; and in that journal I made my literary debût. Α 'poem,' painfully elaborated, and dreadfully sentimental, was secretly copied out, and mailed (postage 44d.), and in due time appeared. I don't know whether my parents ever saw

it; I cannot remember that they did. My only confidant was the late Joseph Caldwell Brown, who was about my own age. He too, was 'Fame-struck;' but he affected the heroic' in prose. He had a 'story'-of the age of chivalry, I remember-in the Brantford Courier, which ran through four weeks' issues. He told me that he got dreadfully sick of it' before he got through. The fact was, he said, he had introduced so many characters he did not know what to do with them; and determining that it should not run on beyond four weeks, he

made his hero tumble off his horse and break his neck. By similar and summary process he got rid of the rest of the characters, and wound up his story! Mr. Henry Lemon, the proprietor, meeting him afterwards observed: That the story wasn't quite so good at the end, as it was at the beginning., 'No,' said Brown, demurely. I have been an editor myself, and have since learned that it is always safest to have the whole of a story in hand before inserting any part of it!

Hearle was determined not to offend anybody; and the Courier was not only neutral, but perfectly milk-and-waterish in all political matters. As far as it was concerned, Duke' Campbell's strictures were not deserved. The 'Duke' lived on the river bank, a couple of miles below Galt, and was quite an oracle in his day. 'Na, na!' he used to remark, Nane o' your newspapers here! Ye are a' in pairties and diveesions already; and if ye get a paper among ye, ye'll just be pykin' each other's een out!' However, the press' came in and it has not, on the whole, turned out a bad thing for Galt! The Reporter, as the new paper was called, which succeeded the Courier, took the same neutral position in politics. But not long afterwards, when the Reformer was started by Mr. Ainslie, and very pronouncedly took up the Liberal side, it became a sort of necessity that the Reporter should be the

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Conservative mouthpiece, though still nominally independent.' Both my brother, John Anderson Smith, and myself have, from time to time, been indebted to the Galt press for space, always courteously given us-he with humorous sketches, I with rhymeand for kindly editorial notices.

One of the charcters I best remember was Francis McElroy. He was, I think, a wheelwright; but started a Temperance Hotel at the head of Main Street. A Galt citizen is reported as coming home from a Temperance meeting, and soliloquizing thus: 'Yon Frankie McElroy wad gar a body believe onything! There he was threepin' [insisting,] that the wine at the waddin' in Cana o' Galilee was nae wine ava, but just a kind o' treacle drink! And the poor howlets o' Jews didna' ken nae better, but gat roarin' fou on't!' Frankie was not, perhaps, altogether unaccustomed to the long bow; as for instance: He on one occasion addressed a party of us thuswe had been talking of foreign countries. Once when I was down in Texas, I just happened to think how they used to live on figs and milk in olden times. You know we read of Abraham and those fellows living on "figs and milk." Well, I tried it ;-took a breakfast of it-and it did not go so bad at all, I tell you!' I said nothing, but doubted the correctness of the quotation, and have never got over doubting it!

Two other characters of those old days were Mr. Benn and Mr. Burnett, both shoemakers, and both Liberals of the most pronounced type; with a good deal of eloquence, and no end of boldness and perseverance. They were a sad thorn in the side of the aristocratic party. Their dismay was something like that of the Squire and family at 'Bracebridge Hall,' when the 'Radical' came to the village,- as depicted in the lively pages of Washington Irving. One of these-I think, it was in a Hamilton paper I read it-struggling with the Latin proverb, Ne sutor ultra

crepidam, got off the following (presumably original) rendering :

'Cobblers should mind their pegs and awls;
For they shine best when in their stalls;
On points of leather they may dilate
More fitly than on those of State !'

My own village, St. George, to which I have often trotted barefootNature's buskins were fashionable in those days-was so small, that it was a standing joke that immigrants frequently went into the store or tavern there, to ask how far it was to St. George?' There was not a brick nor a stone house in the place; there was not a sidewalk, nor a church, nor a school, nor a steam engine, nor a piano! Dr. Stimson introduced the first piano the village could boast of, and Robert Snowball, the first steam-engine. I raised $120 and started a library; others have improved the place since. It is now one of the prettiest villages in Ontario; and has long outlived the description given of it by honest John Macpherson, the bootmaker, 'This is a finished city! for you don't see any new houses going up and cumbering the streets with bricks and lumber.

Brantford had, in 1837, about a thousand inhabitants. Most of the stores were wooden buildings, which stood end wise to the street, with the slope of the roof hidden behind a battlement en echelon,--what the Scotch would call a 'corbie-stair,'-only of an exaggerated type. John A. Wilkes & Sons and P. Cockshutt were among the leading dealers. The Mansion House, a great rambling, wooden tavern, with a two-storey veranda, stood on the western corner of the Marketsquare and Colborne Street; only there was no 'market-square,' at least known or used as such, then. The Post-office was in a little building, with a picket fence and a small door-yard in front, with an evergreen tree at each corner of it. The site was the spot long occupied by Leeming & Patterson, confec tioners; only on twelve or fifteen feet

of a higher level-for the street has since then been very much lowered at the west end. It rose, with about an even grade, all the way from where the Engine house is now, to the brink of the steep hill that led down to the bridge over the river. How vividly do I remember 'a young blood,' stuffing imaginary letters into his coat. tail pockets, and springing into the saddle, in front of the little Post-office, and clattering down the street on a small pony that lifted its feet quicker, I think, than ever I saw any other able to do. And this, I was told, he did several times a day. His breakneck course would be brought up at the Mansion House; and on the way, of course, he was, or imagined he was, 'the admired of all the ladies!' Twenty years after, I was a witness in a case before Judge Jones, in the Court house. A man, having fallen asleep on one of the empty benches, burst out into a tremendous bellow, in some frightful dream. 'Remove that man,' very quietly ordered the Judge. Not at all as quietly, however, did the constable take hold of him. Come out o' here,' said he, roughly, as he collared the poor fellow, who was curling himself up for another sleep. He quickly hustled the poor, disconsolatelooking creature into the street. Who is that man?' I whispered to somebody. 'Old Jim,' answered the other. The same man; the Exquisite of twenty years before! A year or two after, he was found dead in a disreputable den on Vinegar hill. 'O, Spirit of Wine! if there were no other name by which to know thee, let me call thee Devil!'

The printing office, the only one in the town, that of the Brantford Cou rier, was for many years in a wooden building near the English Church, at the intersection of some oblique streets -nameless then-at least to the eye -and nameless to me still. The 73rd and part of the 93rd Highland regiments were a year or two in Brantford; and the guard-house was on the

corner opposite the printing office. In May, 1840, I hurried off on footwithout shoes, no doubt-to get fifty posters printed in Brantford for a sale my father was announcing. I was then thirteen years of age, very small, and with little of self-assertion in my manner-though with a tremendous amount of it secretly in my mind. Mr. Lemon was very kind and patronizing; and while I was waiting on the 'job,' he asked me if I could read? I was dreadfully annoyed at his query, and scarcely knew how to answer him. I who had stood, at ten years old, eighth or tenth in one of the great Public Schools of New York ('No. 3'), among three hundred and eighty boys. of all ages! I to be asked in a country village, if I could read?' I got my revenge, however, fourteen or fifteen years afterwards, when getting some official blanks printed at the same office. The proprietor and the foreman got up a discussion as to what 'L. S.' meant, in the lower left-hand corner of the blank; and they both agreed at last that it meant Law Society!' I took a note of it in my mind, but said nothing.

It will seem odd to the younger inhabitants of Brantford to state that near where the two railways cross, on the north edge of the city, was a millpond, supplying power to a mill some distance below. I once, when a boy, wandered out there, and had an exciting engagement with a snappingturtle that was sunning himself on the bank. And in 1852 I remember getting on board a queer flat-bottomed steamer-a regular old tea pot-to go to Buffalo. I was very glad to find that we changed boats at Dunnville, for I did not think much of the seaworthiness of 'The Queen'; which I believe was the name of the old scow I made the passage in. Probably the navigation of the Grand River (Lord Dorchester, the 'Sir Guy Carleton' of history, called it, in 1798, the 'Ouse ;' but the name did not appear to stick), will never be revived. For one thing,

URING the month of May and

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through early June, every season, at various points through the Dominion, flocks of wild geese may be seen warping northward. They fly with a regular and seeming lazy motion, like travellers who have journeyed, and still have to journey, far. They have come from the South, under whose genial skies they have spent their winter. They are now winging their way towards their favoured habitations in the North, where the year before they had laid their eggs and hatched out their broods, or where they first saw the light. Their chosen haunts in the north are usually far away from the abodes of men. Uninhabited regions of the larger rivers and islands in secluded lakes are their chief resorts. They wing their way in large bodies over long stretches of 'muskeg,' and the larger number of them seek out desert islands in the lakes of the great lone land where the the foot of man has never trod. the fur countries their arrival in spring from southern latitudes is eagerly

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looked for by the inhabitants. When the birds come they are hunted with guns, sticks and stones; killed and carefully preserved in ice, with the feathers on, for the winter, during which rigorous season they are the chief food of the inhabitants. Wary though the goose is at points along its passage, when it reaches its destination it seems to become bewildered, rather than startled, at the approach of its enemy.

It is found during the breeding season in great numbers about all the uninhabited regions of the great rivers in the maritime provinces, such as the St. John, the Restigouche, and the Miramichi; and often of a still summer's morning, as the Indian paddles his canoe along the rim of the misty, dreamy river, an unmusical din breaks through the stillness upon his ear. The watchful bird has seen his canoe or heard his paddle drip, and set up this clamour in fear for its callow brood.

But they go even beyond the wild and unfrequented regions of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In the middle of spring, when a steady southwest breeze blows across the Gulf of St. Lawrence the wild geese spread their wings to the gale, and after a fly of from twelve to twenty hours. reach the coast of Newfoundland. During my boyhood, it was my delight in the spring to watch from some great cliff for flocks of geese coming in from over the sea with a south-west gale. Often were my wishes gratified, as,