Canadian Crusoes | Page 2

finding themselves at night in the very spot from which they started in the morning. The resources and natural productions of the noble colony of Canada are but superficially known. An intimate acquaintance with its rich vegetable and animal productions is most effectually made under the high pressure of difficulty and necessity. Our writer has striven to interest children, or rather young people approaching the age of adolescence, in the natural history of this country, simply by showing them how it is possible for children to make the best of it when thrown into a state of destitution as forlorn as the wanderers on the Rice Lake Plains. Perhaps those who would not care for the berry, the root, and the grain, as delineated and classified technically in books of science, might remember their uses and properties when thus brought practically before their notice as the aliments of the famishing fellow-creature, with whom their instinctive feelings must perforce sympathies. When parents who have left home comforts and all the ties of gentle kindred for the dear sakes of their rising families, in order to place them in a more independent position, it is well if those young minds are prepared with some knowledge of what they are to find in the adopted country; the animals, the flowers, the fruits, and even the minuter blessings which a bountiful Creator has poured forth over that wide land.
The previous work of my sister, Mrs. Traill, "The Backwoods of Canada, by the Wife of an Emigrant Officer," published some years since by Mr. C. Knight, in his Library of Useful Knowledge, has passed through many editions, and enjoyed, (anonymous though it was,) too wide a popularity as a standard work for me to need to dwell on it, further than to say that the present is written in the same na?ve, charming style, with the same modesty and uncomplaining spirit, although much has the sweet and gentle--author endured, as every English lady must expect to do who ventures to encounter the lot of a colonist. She has now devoted her further years of experience as a settler to the information of the younger class of colonists, to open their minds and interest them in the productions of that rising country, which will one day prove the mightiest adjunct of the island empire; our nearest, our soundest colony, unstained with the corruption of convict population; where families of gentle blood need fear no real disgrace in their alliance; where no one need beg, and where any one may dig without being ashamed. LIST OF ENGRAVINGS.
LOUIS CONFESSING HIS DECEPTION OF CATHARINE
THE FIRST BREAKFAST
CATHARINE FOUND BY THE OLD DOG
WOLF FINDING THE WOUNDED DOE
HECTOR BRINGING THE INDIAN GIRL
KILLING WILD FOWL
INDIAN WOMAN AT THE DOOR OF THE HUT
CATHARINE CARRIED OFF
INDIANA BEFORE THE BALD EAGLE
INDIANA AT THE STAKE
ATTACK ON THE DEER
RETURN HOME THE
CANADIAN CRUSOES.
CHAPTER I.
"The morning had shot her bright streamers on high, O'er Canada, opening all pale to the sky;
Still dazzling and white was the robe that she wore, Except where the ocean wave lash'd on the shore." Jacobite Song.
THERE lies between the Rice Lake and the Ontario, a deep and fertile valley, surrounded by lofty wood-crowned hills, the heights of which were clothed chiefly with groves of oak and pine, though the sides of the hills and the alluvial bottoms gave a variety of noble timber trees of various kinds, as the maple, beech, hemlock, and others. This beautiful and highly picturesque valley is watered by many clear streams of pure refreshing water, from whence the spot has derived its appropriate appellation of "Cold Springs." At the time my little history commences, this now highly cultivated spot was an unbroken wilderness,--all tut two small farms, where dwelt the only occupiers of the soil,--which owned no other possessors than the wandering hunting tribes of wild Indians, to whom the right of the hunting grounds north of Rice Lake appertained, according to their forest laws.
To those who travel over beaten roads, now partially planted, among cultivated fields and flowery orchards, and see cleared farms and herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, the change would be a striking one. I speak of the time when the neat and flourishing town of Cobourg, now an important port on the Ontario, was but a village in embryo--if it contained even a log-house or a block-house it was all that it did, and the wild and picturesque ground upon which the fast increasing village of Port Hope is situated, had not yielded one forest tree to the axe of the settler. No gallant vessel spread her sails to waft the abundant produce of grain and Canadian stores along the waters of that noble sheet of water; no steamer had then furrowed its bosom with her iron wheels, bearing the stream of emigration towards