Life in the Backwoods | Page 7

are uninjured."
I should have felt more thankful had the crocks been spared too; for,
like most of my sex, I had a tender regard for china, and I knew that no
fresh supply could be obtained in this part of the world. Leaving his
brother to collect the scattered fragments, D---- proceeded on his
journey. We left the road, and were winding our way over a steep hill,
covered with heaps of brush and fallen timber, and as we reached the
top, a light gleamed cheerily from the windows of a log house, and the
next moment we were at my brother's door.
I thought my journey was at an end; but here I was doomed to fresh
disappointment. His wife was absent on a visit to her friends, and it had
been arranged that we were to stay with my sister, Mrs. T----, and her
husband. With all this I was unacquainted; and I was about to quit the
sleigh and seek the warmth of the fire when I was told that I had yet
further to go. Its cheerful glow was to shed no warmth on me, and, tired
as I was, I actually buried my face and wept upon the neck of a hound
which Moodie had given to Mr. S----, and which sprang up upon the
sleigh to lick my face and hands. This was my first halt in that weary
wilderness, where I endured so many bitter years of toil and sorrow.
My brother-in-law and his family had retired to rest, but they instantly
rose to receive the way-worn travellers; and I never enjoyed more
heartily a warm welcome after a long day of intense fatigue, than I did

that night of my first sojourn in the backwoods.
CHAPTER II.
THE WILDERNESS, AND OUR INDIAN FRIENDS.
The clouds of the preceding night, instead of dissolving into snow,
brought on a rapid thaw. A thaw in the middle of winter is the most
disagreeable change that can be imagined. After several weeks of clear,
bright, bracing, frosty weather, with a serene atmosphere and cloudless
sky, you awake one morning surprised at the change in the temperature;
and, upon looking out of the window, behold the woods obscured by a
murky haze--not so dense as an English November fog, but more black
and lowering--and the heavens shrouded in a uniform covering of
leaden-coloured clouds, deepening into a vivid indigo at the edge of the
horizon. The snow, no longer hard and glittering, has become soft and
spongy, and the foot slips into a wet and insidiously-yielding mass at
every step. From the roof pours down a continuous stream of water,
and the branches of the trees collecting the moisture of the reeking
atmosphere, shower it upon the earth from every dripping twig. The
cheerless and uncomfortable aspect of things without never fails to
produce a corresponding effect upon the minds of those within, and
casts such a damp upon the spirits that it appears to destroy for a time
all sense of enjoyment. Many persons (and myself among the number)
are made aware of the approach of a thunder-storm by an intense pain
and weight about the head; and I have heard numbers of Canadians
complain that a thaw always made them feel bilious and heavy, and
greatly depressed their animal spirits.
I had a great desire to visit our new location, but when I looked out
upon the cheerless waste, I gave up the idea, and contented myself with
hoping for a better day on the morrow; but many morrows came and
went before a frost again hardened the road sufficiently for me to make
the attempt.
The prospect from the windows of my sister's log hut was not very
prepossessing. The small lake in front, which formed such a pretty

object in summer, now looked like an extensive field covered with
snow, hemmed in from the rest of the world by a dark belt of sombre
pine-woods. The clearing round the house was very small, and only just
reclaimed from the wilderness, and the greater part of it covered with
piles of brushwood, to be burned the first dry days of spring. The
charred and blackened stumps on the few acres that had been cleared
during the preceding year were every thing but picturesque; and I
concluded, as I turned, disgusted, from the prospect before me, that
there was very little beauty to be found in the backwoods. But I came
to this decision during a Canadian thaw, be it remembered, when one is
wont to view every object with jaundiced eyes.
Moodie had only been able to secure sixty-six acres of his government
grant upon the Upper Kutchawanook Lake, which, being interpreted,
means in English, the "Lake of the Waterfalls," a very poetical meaning,
which