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CANADA;
ITS DEFENCES, CONDITION, AND
RESOURCES.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

In Two Vols., post 8vo, price 21s.,

MY DIARY NORTH AND SOUTH.

OR, PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

“The latter part of Mr. Russell’s Diary is probably droller than anything which our theatrical wits will produce this Christmas. We regret especially that we have no space for the story respecting the President, on page 372 of the second volume. The United States have been a vast burlesque on the functions of national existence, and it was Mr. Russell’s fate to behold their transformation scene, and to see the first tumbles of their clowns and pantaloons. It was time for him to come away, though the shame of his retirement was theirs. He did his duty while he was with them, and he has left them a legacy in this ‘Diary.’”—Times.

CANADA;

ITS DEFENCES, CONDITION, AND
RESOURCES.

BEING

A THIRD AND CONCLUDING VOLUME OF “MY DIARY,
NORTH AND SOUTH.”

BY

W. HOWARD RUSSELL, LL.D.,

LONDON:

BRADBURY AND EVANS, 11, BOUVERIE STREET.

1865.

[The Right of Translation is reserved.]

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

PREFACE.

I began to write this book by way of sequel to “My Diary North and South,” with the intention of describing Canada as I saw it at the close of my visit to North America, but the subject grew upon me as I went on, and at last I discarded much personal detail, and set to work with the view of calling attention to the capabilities of the vast regions belonging to the British Crown on the American Continent, and of pointing out the magnificent heritage which is open to our redundant population. But the subject was too great for the compass of one volume, because connected with it, too intimately to be overlooked, were the questions of the defence and of the future of countries, which the establishment of a Monarchical principle on an imperfect basis, and their dependence on the Crown, exposed to the hostility of a great Republic. I was, therefore, obliged to contract my own experiences, small as they were, and to omit many topics included in the original scope of my writing. The book was nearly finished when suddenly, as it seemed, the whole of the Provinces, yielding to a common sentiment of danger, sent their delegates to consider the policy and possibility of a great Confederation, which had been strongly recommended in the pages already written. The idea of such a Confederation was an old one; but the prompt resolve to carry it into practical effect, and the words spoken and acts done in consequence, rendered it necessary to cancel the work of many hours, as much of what I had written would have been anticipated by what has been printed. There are many dangers inherent in the nature of the proposed Confederation; there are many obstacles to its harmonious and successful working; but on the whole some such scheme appears to be the only practical mode of saving the British Provinces from the aggression of the North American Republicans.

What is to become of the existing Governments of Provinces? How regulate the contentions which may arise between Provincial Parliaments and Provincial Ministers and Provincial Governors by the action of the Federal Parliament and of the representative of the Crown at the seat of Government? The difficulties we foresee may never come to pass, and others far greater, of which we have no foresight, may arise; but for all this the Confederation presents the only means now available, as far as we can perceive, for securing to the Provinces present independence and a future political life distinct from the turbulent existence of the United States. A glance at the map will reveal the extent of the Empire which rests upon the Lakes with one arm on the Atlantic and the other on the Pacific, whilst its face is wrapped in a mantle of eternal snow; but it tells us no more. No reasoning man can maintain that the people whom a few years will behold as numerous as the inhabitants of these islands, will be content to live permanently under the system of the Colonial Office. That system is probably the only one our Constitution permits us to adopt; but it is nevertheless the policy, if not the duty, of this State to foster the youth and early life of the colonies we have founded, and to protect them, as far as may be, from the evils which shall come upon them in consequence of their present connection with Great Britain. Despised, neglected, and abandoned, the Provinces would feel less irritation against their conquerors than against their betrayers, and England might regret with unavailing sorrow the indifference which left her without a foot of land or a friend in the New World. Generosity not inconsistent with justice may yet lay the foundations of an enduring alliance where once there was only cold fealty and unsympathising command. A powerful State may arise whose greatest citizens shall be proud to receive such honours as the Monarch of England can bestow, whose people shall vie with us in the friendly contests of commerce, and stand side by side with us in battle. And when the inevitable hour of separation comes, the parting will not then be in anger. A Constitutional Republic, in which Monarchy would have been possible but for the prudence of the mother-country, may exist without any hatred of Monarchy or of England; and the people, born with equal rights to pursue liberty and happiness, would love the land from which flowed the sources of so many substantial blessings.

I hope that my apprehensions may prove ill-founded, and that the dangers to which our North American possessions now, and England herself and the peace of the world hereafter, are in my opinion exposed, may be for ever averted.

WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL.

Temple, January, 1865.

CONTENTS.

[ Map of Upper and Lower Canada; click here for larger image.]

Stanfords Geographical Estab^t. London.

CANADA:

ITS DEFENCES, CONDITION, AND
RESOURCES.

CHAPTER I.

Introductory—Canada and the Mason and Slidell case—Threats of annexation—Defence of Canada—Reasons for visiting the British Provinces—Illness at New York—Hostility displayed there—Monotony of New York—Hotel life—“Birds of a feather”—Nationality absorbed—Start for Canada—Railway Companions—Public credulity—A victory in the papers—History of “A Big Fight”—General Pumpkin and Jefferson Brick.

I do not pretend to offer any new observations on the climate, soil, or capabilities of Canada, nor can I venture to call these pages a “work” on that great province. I have nothing novel to advance in the hope of attracting an immigration to its wide-spread territories, and any statistical facts and figures I may use are accessible to all interested in the commerce or in the past, present, and future of the land.

Nor do I write with any particular theory in view, or with any crotchet on the subject of colonies, outlying provinces, and dependencies, and their value or detriment to the dominant commercial and imperial power.

My actual acquaintance with the country and the people is only such as I acquired in a few weeks’ travelling in the depth of winter; and such sort of knowledge as I gathered would certainly afford no great excuse in itself for intruding my remarks or opinions on the public when so many excellent books on Canada already exist.

But it happened that my visit took place at a very remarkable period of Canadian and American history, and at a time, too, when certain doctrines, broached not for the first time, but urged with more than usual ability, as to the relations between what for convenience I call the mother-country and her colonies, were exciting great attention across the Atlantic.

When I left Washington in the winter, a great crisis had been peacefully but not willingly averted by a concession on the part of the Federal Government to what the sentiment of the American people considered an exhibition of brute force. The first year of the war had closed over the Federals in gloom. Their arms were not wielded with credit at home—if credit ever can attach to arms wielded in a civil war—and the foreign power which it had been their wont to treat with something as near akin to disrespect as diplomatic decency would permit, aroused by an act which outraged the laws of nations and provoked the censure of every European power with business on the waters, had made preparations which could only imply that she would have recourse to hostility if her demands for satisfaction were refused.

It was under these circumstances that England obtained the reparation for which she sought, and in the eyes of Americans filched a triumph over their flag and took an insolent advantage over their weakened power “to do as they pleased.” General McClellan, playing the part of Fabius, perhaps because he knew not how to play any other part, had fallen sick and was nigh at death’s door in the malarious winter at Washington. The great Union army, like a hybernating eel in the mud, lay motionless, between the Potomac and the clever imposture of the Confederate lines and wooden batteries at Manassas.

But haughty and hopeful as ever, in tone if not in heart, the Americans raved about vengeance for their own just concessions. They boasted that the seizure of Canada would be one of the measures of retaliation to which they intended promptly to resort, as the indemnity to their injured vanity and as compensation for the surrender of Messrs. Mason and Slidell.

Meanwhile the small force of British troops stationed in Canada was reinforced by the speedy dispatch of some picked regiments from England, which did not raise it much beyond its regular strength, and tardy steps were taken to organise an efficient militia in the province. The volunteer movement had extended its influence across the ocean, and a commendable activity all over the British Colonies and Canada falsified the complacent statements of the American papers that the people were not loyal to the Crown nor careful of the connection, which, it was alleged, they would gladly substitute for the protection of the standard of the Northern Republic.

All these necessary precautions against the consequences of the refusal of the American Government to yield the passengers taken from under our flag, were watched angrily and jealously in the States. The British reinforcements were ridiculed; their tedious passages, their cheerless marches, were jeeringly chronicled. Whole ships were reported to have gone down with living cargoes. Those who landed were represented as being borne on sleighs by sufferance routes, which would be impracticable in war. The Canadians were abused—and so were the Provincialists. The volunteers were assailed with the weapons which the American press knows so well how to use.

But that was false policy. It gave a stimulus to the loyal feeling of the subjects of the Crown. The Canadian press retorted, and, exulting in the triumph of the Home Government over the Republican Administration, uttered the taunts which Americans least brook to hear.

It was assumed that the task of vengeance and conquest would be light. I received letters in which it was maintained that Canada could not be defended, and that she was not worth defending; others merely urged that if the Canadians would not take a prominent part in aid of imperial measures for their protection, they must be handed over to the invading Americans; that their country cost more than it was worth, and that it was a mistake to keep any connection with the wrong side of the ledger, no matter what the results of rupturing it might be.

Americans told me “General Scott declares the Canadian frontier is not capable of defence.” True, Americans had told me some months ago that General Scott, now mis en retraite in New York, after a hasty return from Europe—not, as was asserted, with diplomatic authority or with the view of invading Canada, but to save his pension in case of foreign war—would be in Richmond about July 22nd or 24th, 1861. I heard some views of the same kind from our own officers, who expressed doubts respecting the possibility of a successful resistance to American invasion.

Now if that were so, it struck me that the troops we had in the country could prove but of little use, and that at the same time the relative condition of strength between the United States and Great Britain had undergone a vital change in face of the very agencies which ought to have established more solidly the results obtained in the last trial of force and resources between them on Canadian ground. It was worth while trying to ascertain the truth and to resolve these questions.

The United States, dreading a foreign war which might interfere with their invasion of the Southern States, had ungraciously made a concession, in revenge for making which their press declared they would on the first convenient occasion make war on the Power they had offended, in a country which they had invaded with all their united power—when Great Britain, steamless and remote, was engaged in European conflicts and destitute of maritime allies—only to meet with defeat, or with success of a nature to prove their incompetency to conquer.

Was the power of this distracted republic, contending furiously with rebellious members, then, become so great? If so, with what motive was Great Britain hurrying across the sea the élite of her troops—too few to save these vast domains, too many to lose, and far too many to return as paroled prisoners? Why try to defend on such terms what was worthless and indefensible? Canada, if not susceptible of defence, would be certainly unsuitable as a base for offensive operations against the States. Obviously the matter stood thus: that the military question depended on the temper and spirit of the people themselves.

The whole force of the Canadians, sustained by Great Britain, might, apparently, defy all the offensive power of the United States; and I desired to ascertain in what condition were their temper and defences.

At this time British officers were endeavouring to prepare the possessions of the Crown against threatened invasion. The Americans on their side were busy fortifying some important points on the lakes.

General Totten, an officer of the United States Engineers, well known for his ability, was understood to be engaged on a very elaborate plan of works along the frontier. Colonel Gordon, whose name will be for ever associated with the left attack at the siege of Sebastopol, aided by an experienced staff, was employed on our side, studying the capabilities of the frontier, and maturing a plan for the consideration of the Government in case of an American war.

There were reasons, too, of a personal character for my visiting Canada. I had a fever, which was contracted at Washington and laid me prostrate at New York. It was of the low typhoid type, which proved fatal to so many in the Federal army at the same time, and its effects made me weaker for the time than I ever remember to have been. There was no promise whatever of military operations, and I read every day of the arrival of friends and acquaintances in Canada, whose faces it would be pleasant to see, after the endurance of so many hostile glances and such public exhibition of ill-will.

I do not wish to dwell on private annoyances, but as an instance of the feeling displayed towards me in New York I may mention one circumstance. On my arrival in 1861 I was elected an honorary member of the club which derives its name from the state or city, and was indebted to its members for many acts of courtesy and for more than one entertainment. Returning to the city from Washington early this year, I was invited to dine at the same club by one or two of my friends. Certain members, as I afterwards heard, took umbrage at my presence, and fastened a quarrel on my entertainers. A day or two subsequently the people of New York were called on, by the notorious journalist who had honoured me with his animosity ever since I refused the dishonour of his acquaintance, to express their indignation at the conduct of the club; and the members received a characteristic reprimand for their presumption in letting me into the club, from which they had kept their censor and his clientele carefully out. My offence was rank; and public opinion—or what is called so—perhaps was in favour of the ostracism at that moment; for, as far as I know, the people must have believed I was the sole cause of the Federal defeat and flight at Bull Run.

There was some novelty in the idea of starting for Canada in the midst of the bitter winter wind and the dazzling snow; but I would have gone to Nova Zembla at the time to have escaped the monotony of New York, which the effects of recent illness rendered more irksome.

New York is among cities, what one of the lower order of molluscous animals, with a single intestinal canal, is to a creature of a higher development, with various organs, and full of veins and arteries. Up and down the Broadway passes the stream of life to and from the heart in Wall-street. In the narrow space from water to water on either side of this dry canal there is comparatively little animation, and nothing at all to reward the researches of a stranger.

Johnson’s remark about Fleet-street would apply with truth to the gawky thoroughfare of the Atlantic Tyre. In the Broadway or its “west-end” extensions are to be found all the hotels, which are the ganglia of the feverish nervous system so incessantly agitated by the operations of the journalistic insects living in secret cysts nigh at hand. All day the great tideway is rolling in, headed by a noisy crest of little boys, with extras under their arms, and heralded by a confused surfy murmur of voices telling “lies” for cents, and enunciating “Another Great Union Victory!” in one great bore; or it is rushing out again with a dismal leaden current, laden with doubts and fears, as the news of some disaster breaks through the locks of government reservoirs and floods the press.

In my hotel, where I was fain to seclude myself in my illness, and to follow the very un-American practice of living in a suite of private rooms, there was but little conflict of opinion on any great event, real or fictitious, which turned up from day to day. The guests and visitors were well-nigh all of one way of thinking. They were of the old conservative party, so oddly denominated Democrats, who believed in States Rights: in the right of states to create and maintain their domestic institutions—to secede, if they pleased, from the Union—to resist the attempts of the General Government of the other states to coerce them by force of arms.

Some of these gentlemen were satisfied the South would not be coerced; some hoped the South would resist successfully. None, I fear, were “loyal” to President Lincoln and Mr. Seward, and I am sure none would have said so much for either of them or their friends as I would.

The majority principle forces people who hold similar views to meet together, and to select the same hotels to live in. This is unfortunate for a stranger who desires to hear the views of both sides. In the New York, from the highly artistic and skilful operator who flashed out cocktails at the bar, up to the highest authority, there was no man who would like to say that he was on good terms with Mr. Sumner, or that he did not think Mr. Seward the representative of evil principles. The rule was proved by the exceptions: two I suspect there were—stout Irish waiters, who did not approve of the attempts to destroy “our glorious Union,” but who did not find the atmosphere of the place quite favourable to the free expression of the opinion they mildly hinted at to myself.

The sameness of ideas, of expressions, of faces, became unbearable. I could tell quite well by the look of men’s faces what news they had heard, and what they were saying or going to say about it. Here were crafty politicals and practical men of business, and persons of a philosophical and reflective temperament, as well as the foolish, the mere pleasure-hunters, and the unthinking mass of an hotel world, all looking forward to a near to-morrow to end the woes of the state, always waiting for a “decisive” battle or “an indignant uprising of the people” to drive the Republicans out of power and office.

Not one of them could or would see that the contest, when terminated, would give birth to others—that the vast bodies of diverse interests, prejudices, hatreds, and wrongs set in motion by war over so enormous a surface, where they had been kept suspended and inert by the powers of compromise, could never be reconsolidated and restored to the same state as before, and that it would be the work of time, the labour of many years, ere they could settle to rest in any shape whatever.

I am told respectable Americans do not use the word “Britisher,” but I am bound to say I heard Americans who looked very respectable using the word at the time of which I speak, when there was still irritation on both sides in consequence of the surrender of Mason and Slidell—in the minds of the friends of the South, because they were balked in their anticipation of a foreign war; in the Federal mind, because, after much threatening and menaces, they had seen the captives surrendered to the British by the President, or, more properly speaking, by Mr. Seward.

Hence it was, perhaps, that Canada was always mentioned in such a tone of contempt, as though the speakers sought to relieve their feelings by abuse of a British dependency.

“Goin’ to Canada!” exclaimed the faithful Milesian who had been my attendant—in fact, my substitute for a nurse. “Lord help us! That’s a poor place, anyhow. I thought you’d be contint wid the snow we’ve got here. It’s plinty, anyhow. But Canada!” The man had never been there in his life, but he spoke as if it were beyond the bounds of civilisation. He had served in a British regiment for many years; many of his brothers had been, I think he told me, in the service, but now they were all in the States, and to his notion thriving like himself.

In no country on earth is an old nationality so soon absorbed as in America. I am inclined to think the regard professed for England by American literary men is sentimental, and is produced by education and study rather than by any feeling transmitted in families or by society.

The emigrant, it is remarked, speedily forgets—in the hurry of his new life the ways of the old slip out of his memory. One day I said to my man, as a regiment of volunteers was marching down Broadway, “Those fellows are not quite as well set up as the 41st, Pat.” “Well, indeed, and that’s thrue; but they’d fight as well I b’lieve, and better maybe, if they’d the officers, poor craychures! Anyhow,” continued he with great gravity, “they can’t be flogged for nothin’ or for anything.” “Were you ever flogged?” “No, sirir—not a lash ever touched my back, but I’ve known fine sogers spiled by it.” It is likely enough that he had never thought on the subject till he came to the States—a short time before and he would have resented deeply the idea that any regiment on earth could stand before Her Majesty’s 41st.

It was now near the end of January, and as a gleam of fine weather might thaw the glorious Union army of the Potomac, and induce them to advance on the inglorious army of the Confederacy, I resolved to make the best of my way northwards forthwith.

My companions were a young British officer, distinguished in the Crimea, in India, and in China, who represented a borough in Parliament, and had come out to see the great contest which was raging in the United States; and an English gentleman, who happened to be at New York, and was anxious to have a look at Niagara, even in its winter dress.

On the 27th January we were all packed to start by the 5.30 P.M. train by Albany to Niagara, and thence to Toronto. The landlord made me up a small assortment of provisions, as in snow-time trains are not always certain of anything but irregularity. I was regarded as one who was about to make myself needlessly miserable when he might continue in much happiness. “You had better stay, sir, for a few days. I have certain intelligence, let me whisper you, that the Abolitionists will be whipped at the end of this week, and old Abe driven out of Washington.”

The little boys still shout out, “Another great Union victory.” The last, by-the-bye, was of General Thomas, at Somerset, which has gradually sublimed into uncertainty, though he handled his men well, and is not bad at a despatch.

The credulity of the American mind is beyond belief. Populus vult decipi—and certainly its wishes are complied with to the fullest extent. The process of a Union victory, from its birth in the first telegram down to its dissolution in the last despatch, is curious enough.

Out comes an extra of the New York Herald—“Glorious Union Victory off Little Bear Creek, Mo.!—Five Thousand Rebels Disposed of!—Grand Skedaddle!—General Pumpkin’s Brilliant Charge!—He Out-Murats Murat!—Sanguinary Encounters!—Cassius Mudd’s Invincibles!—Doom of the Confederacy!—Jeff Davis gone to Texas!” and so on, with a display of large type, in double-headed lines, and a profusion of notes of admiration.

There is excitement in the bar-rooms. The Democrats look down-hearted. The War Christians are jubilant. Fiery eyes devour the columns, which contain but an elaboration of the heading—swelled perhaps with a biographical sketch of Brigadier-General Cyrus Washington Pumpkin, “who was educated at West Point, where he graduated with Generals Beauregard and McDowell, and eventually subsided into pork-packing at Cincinnati, where he was captain of a fine company till the war broke out, when he tendered his sword,” &c. Cassius Mudd’s biography is of course reprinted for the twentieth time, and there is a list of the names of all the officers in the regiments near the presumed scene of action.

Then comes the action:—“An intelligent gentleman has just arrived at Chicago, and has seen Dr. Bray, to whom he has given full particulars of the fight. It was commenced by Lieutenant Epaminondas Bellows (‘son of our respected fellow-citizen, the President of the Bellowstown and Bellona Railway’—here follows a biography of Bellows), who was out scouting with ten more of our boys when they fell into an ambuscade, which opened on them with masked batteries, uttering unearthly yells. With Spartan courage the little band returned the fire, and kept the Seceshers, who were at least 500 strong, at bay till their ammunition was exhausted. Bellows, his form dilated with patriotism, his mellow tones ringing above the storm of battle, was urged to fly by a tempter, whose name we suppress. The heroic youth struck the cowardly traitor to the earth, and indignantly invited the enemy to come on. They did so at last. The lieutenant, resisting desperately, then fell, and our men carried his body to the camp, to the skirts of which they were followed by the Secesh cavalry and four guns. Our loss was only two more—the enemy are calculated to have lost 85. The farmers at Munchausen say they were busy all day carrying away their dead in carts.

“On reaching the camp, General Pumpkin thought it right to drive back the dastardly polluters of our country’s flag. He disposed his troops in platoons, according to the celebrated disposition made by Miltiades at Marathon, covering his wings with squadrons of artillery in columns of sub-divisions, with a reserve of cavalry in echelon; but he improved upon the idea by adding the combination of solid squares and skirmishers in the third line, by which Alexander the Great decided the Battle of Granicus.

“In this order, then, the Union troops advanced till they came to Little Bear Creek. Here, to their great astonishment, they found the enemy under General Jefferson Brick in person (Brick will be remembered by many here as the intelligent clerk in our advertisement department, but he was deeply tainted with Secesh sentiments, and on the unfurling of our flag manifested them in such a manner that we were obliged to dispense with his services). The infamous destroyer of his country’s happiness had posted his men so that we could not see them. They were at least three to one—mustering some 7,000, with guns, caissons, baggage waggons, and standards in proportion—and were arranged in an obtuse angle, of which the smaller end was composed of a mass of veterans, in the order adopted by Napoleon with the Old Guard at Waterloo: the larger, consisting of the Whoop-owl Bushwackers and the Squash River Legion in potence, threatened us with destruction if we advanced on the other wing, whilst we were equally exposed to danger if we remained where we were.

“General Pumpkin’s conduct is, at this most critical moment, generally described as being worthy of the best days of Roman story. He simply gave the word ‘Charge.’ ‘What, General?’ exclaimed our informant. ‘Charge! Sir,’ said the general, with a sternness which permitted no further question. With a yell our gallant fellows dashed at the enemy, but the water was too deep in the creek, and they retired with terrific loss. The enemy then dashed at them in turn. They drove our right for three miles; we drove their left for three-and-a-quarter miles. Their centre drove our left, and our right drove their centre again. They took five of our guns; we took six of theirs and a bread-cart.

“Night put an end to this dreadful struggle, in which American troops set an example to the war-seamed soldiers of antiquity. Next morning General Pumpkin pushed across to Pugstown, and occupied it in force. Union sentiment is rife all through Missouri. We demand that General Pumpkin be at once placed at the head of the Army of the Potomac.”

Now all this—in no degree exaggerated—and the like of which I have read over and over again, affords infinite comfort or causes great depression to New York for an hour or so, coupled with an “editorial,” in which the energy and enterprise of the Scarron are duly eulogised, old Greeley’s hat and breeches and umbrella handled with charming wit and eloquence, and the inevitable flight of the Richmond Government to Texas clearly demonstrated. Next day some little doubt is expressed as to the exact locality of the fight—“Pumpkin’s force was at Big Bear, 180 miles west of the place indicated. We doubt not, however, the account is substantially correct, and that the Secesh forces have been pretty badly whipped.”

Next day the casualties are reduced from 200 killed and 310 wounded to 96 killed and none wounded; and scrutinising eyes notice a statement, in small type, that the “father of Lieutenant Bellows has written to us to state his son was not engaged on the occasion in question, but was at home on furlough.” And by the time “Another Great Union Victory!” is ready, the fact oozes out, but is by no means considered worth a thought, that General Pumpkin has had an encounter with the Confederates in which he suffered a defeat, and that he has gone into winter quarters.

I do not suppose for a moment that these deceitful agencies are exercised only in the North, but am persuaded, from what I know, that the Southern people are at least as anxious for news, and as liable to be led away by suppressions of truth or distorted narratives, as those of the Free States. If we had had a telegraphic system and a newspaper press during the Wars of the Roses, or the struggle of 1645, it is probable our partisans, on both sides, would have been as open to imposture; but I do not think they would have continued long in the faith that the ever-detected impostor was still worthy of credence.

CHAPTER II.

To the Station—Stars and Stripes—Crowd at Station—Train impeded by Snow—Classic ground—“Manhattan”—“Yonkers”—Fellow-travellers and their ways—“Beauties of the Hudson”—West Point: their education, &c.—Large Towns on the banks of the Hudson—Arrive at East Albany—Delavan House—Beds at a premium—Aspect of Albany not impressive—Sights—The Legislature.

As we drove over the execrable snow-heaps to the station, the streets seemed to me unusually dreary. The vast Union flags which flapped in the cold air, now dulled and dim, showed but their great bars of blood, and the stars had faded out into darkness.

Apropos of the stripes and stars, I may say I never could meet any one in the States able to account for the insignia, though it has been suggested that they are an amplification of the heraldic bearing of George Washington. Strange indeed if the family blazon of an English squire should have become the flaunting flag of the Great Republic, which with all its faults has done so much for the world, and may yet, purged of its vanity, arrogance, and aggressive tendency, do so much more for mankind! Not excepting our own, it is the most widely-spread flag on the seas; for whilst it floats by the side of the British ensign in every haunt of our commerce, it has almost undisputed possession of vast tracts of sea in the Pacific and South Atlantic.

At last we got to the end of our very unpleasant journey, and approached the York and Albany Terminus, over an alpine concrete of snow-heaps, snow-holes, and street-rails. At the station my coach-driver affectionately seized my hand, and bade me good-bye with a cordiality which might have arisen from the sensitiveness of touch in his palm as much as from personal affection. The terminus was crowded with citizens (eating apples, lemon-drops, and gingerbread-nuts, and reading newspapers) and a few men in soldier’s uniform, going north—only one or two of what one calls in Europe gentlemen or ladies, but all well-dressed and well-behaved, if they would only spare the hissing stoves and the feelings of prejudiced foreigners.

The train, with more punctuality than we usually observe in such matters, started to the minute, but only went ten yards or so, and then halted for nearly half an hour—no one knew why, and no one seemed to care, except a gentleman who was going, he said, to get his friend, “the Honourable Something Raymond, to do something for him at Albany,” and was rather in a hurry. When the engine renewed the active exercise of its powers, the pace was slow and the motion was jerking and uneven, owing to snow on the rails, and the obstacles increased as the train left the shelter of the low long-stretching suburb which clings to it, and is dragged, as it were, out of the city with it along the bank of the Hudson. But even 181st and 182nd streets abandoned their attempts to keep up with the rail; and all that could be seen of civilisation were sundry chimneys and walls and uncouth dark masses of wood or brick rising above the snow. The lights in the wooden stations shone out frostily through the dimmed windows as we struggled on.

We were passing through at night what is to Americans classic ground, in spite of odd names: for here is “Manhattan” (associated in my mind for ever with a man who, unfortunately for himself and me, had a wooden leg, as he planted the iron ferule of that insensible member on the only weak point of my weaker foot)—and next is “Yonkers,” where a lady once lived with whom Washington was once in love, and several “fights” took place all around, in which the Americans were more often beaten than victorious;—“Dobb’s Ferry” “Tarrytown” (poor André! let those who wish to know all that can be known of the “spy” read Mr. Sargent’s life of him, published in Philadelphia), which is “nigh on to Sleepy Hollow,” where Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker had such a remarkable interview with the ancient Hollander;—“Sing Sing,” where many gentlemen, not so well known to fame, have interviews of a less agreeable character with modern American authorities. We are passing, too, by Sunnyside, where Washington Irving lived. I would rather have seen him than all the remarkable politicians in the States—old Faneuil, or Bunker’s Hill, or all the wonders of the great nation; though I am told he was unbearably prosy and sleepy of late days.

Cold and colder it becomes as we creep on, and slower creaks the train with its motley freight. The men round the stoves “fire up” till the iron glows and gives out the heated air to those who can stand it, and an unsavoury odour, as of baked second-hand clothing, and a hissing noise to those beyond the torrid circle. The slamming of the door never ceases. Sometimes it is a conductor, sometimes it is not. But no matter who makes the disturbance, he has a right to do so. No one can sleep on account of that abominable noise, even if he could court slumber in a seat which is provided with a rim to hurt his back if he reclines, and a ridge to smite his face if he leans forward. Apples and water and somebody’s lemon-drops are in demand; and vendors of vegetable ivory furtively deposit specimens of ingenious manufacture but inscrutable purpose in the lap of the unoffending stranger, who in his sleepy state often falls a victim to these artifices, and finds himself called on to pay several dollars for quaint products of the carver, which he has unduly detained in his unconsciousness.

The train arrives at Poughkeepsie, seventy-five miles from New York, an hour and a half late. We hear that, instead of reaching Albany at 10.30 or 11 P.M., we shall not be in till 1 or 1.30 A.M., and will “lose communications;” therefore we eat in desperation at refreshment-rooms large oysters boiled in milk out of small basins. In the night once more. We have passed West Point long since, and an enthusiastic child of nature, who has been pointing out to me the “beauties of the Hudson,” which is flowing down under its mail of ice close to our left, has gone to sleep among the fire-worshippers at the stove.

Now, the fact is, that scenery under snow is, I may safely affirm, very like beauty under a mask, or a fine figure in a waterproof blanket. The hills were mere snow-mounds, and the lines of all objects were fluffy and indistinct; and I was glad my eulogistic friend slept at last. West Point I longed to see; for though its success in turning out great generals has as yet not been very remarkable, I had met too many excellent specimens of its handiwork in making good officers and pleasant gentlemen not to feel a desire to have purview of the institution. Had I not heard a live general sing “Benny Haven, ho!”—had I not seen Mordecai sitting at the gate of Pelissier in vain, and McClellan and Delafield engaged in a geological inquiry on the remains of the siege of Sebastopol? Above all, does not West Point promise to become something like a military academy, in a country such as America is likely to be after the war?

It is a mistake rather common in England, and in Europe, to suppose that a majority, or even a minority, of the American generals are civilians. With very few exceptions indeed, they have either been some time at West Point, or have graduated there. In a country which has no established lines to mark the difference of classes, which nevertheless exists there as elsewhere, there is a positive social elevation acquired by any man who has graduated at West Point; and if he has taken a high degree, he is regarded in his State as a man of mark, whose services must be secured for the military organisation and public service in the militia or volunteers.

There is no country in the world where so many civilians have received their education in military academies without any view to a military career. There are of course many “generals” and “colonels” of States troops who have had no professional training, but not nearly so many as might be imagined.

But the great defect under which American officers laboured until this unhappy war broke out, was the purely empirical and theoretical state of their knowledge. They had no practical experience. The best of them had only such knowledge as they could have gleaned in the Mexican war. A man whose head was full of Jomini was sent off to command a detachment in a frontier fort, and to watch marauding Indians, for long years of his life, and never saw a regiment in the field. As to working the three arms together creditably in the field, I doubt if there is an officer in the whole army who could do it anything like so well as the Duke of Cambridge, or as an Aldershot or Curragh brigadier.

It would be hard for any Englishman to be indifferent to the advantages of military training in a country where every village around could have told tale’s of the helpless, hopeless blundering which characterised the operations of the British generals hereabouts in the War of Independence. Deflecting thus, too, I felt less inclined to wonder at the mistakes made by the Federals, and by the Confederates. Had the British generals proved more lucky and skilful, should we now have been passing the towns which cluster on the banks of the Hudson, or would “monarchy” have impeded the march of life, commerce, and civilisation out here?

Towns of 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, and even of 30,000 inhabitants rise on the margin of the fine river, which in summer presents, I am assured, a scene of charming variety and animation, and in autumn is fringed by the most beautiful of all beautiful American landscapes, surcharged with the glorious colours of that lovely season. Through the darkness by the bright starlight we could see the steamboats locked fast in the ice, like knights in proof, awaiting the signal to set them free for the charge. But, ah me! how weary it was!—how horrible the stoves! At last and at last the train stopped, and finally deposited us at three o’clock in the morning on the left bank of the Hudson, at East Albany.

The city proper lies on the opposite shore of the river; and I got, as I was directed, into a long low box called the omnibus, which was soon crowded with passengers. In a few minutes we were off. Then I was made aware that the ’bus was a sleigh, and that it was on runners and—— Just at that moment the machine made a headlong plunge, like a ship going down by the bows at sea, and in an instant more had pierced the depths of darkness, and with a crashing scrunching bump touched the bottom. “We’re on the river now, I guess,” quoth one. And so it was. We had shot down the bank, which must be higher than one would like to leap, even on snow, and were now rolling, squeaking, and jerking over the frozen river, amid the groans and shrieks and grumbling protests of the ice, which seemed in some places to give way as if it were going to let us down bodily, and in others to rise up in strong ridges to baffle the horses’ efforts. Then, after a most disagreeable drive, which seemed half-an-hour long—and about thrice as long as it really was, I suppose—a prodigious effort of horse muscle and whipping, and of manual labour, accomplished the ascent of the other bank, and the vehicle passed through the deserted streets of Albany—the capital of the great State of New York—to the Delavan House, which was open to receive but not to entertain us. A rush of citizens was made to “the office” of the hotel. More citizens followed out of fast-arriving vehicles from the train—for there was no means of getting on till the forenoon—and all went perforce to the Delavan House.

The hotel office consisted of a counter with a raised desk, enclosing a man with a gold chain, a diamond stuck in the front of a dress shirt—not as pin to a scarf or as a stud, but as a diamond per se, after the fashion of those people and of railway conductors in the land—his hat cocked over one eye, a toothpick even at that hour in his mouth, a black dress suit of clothes, a dyed moustache and beard à la Rowdy Americain, and an air of sovereign contempt for his customers. The crowd pressed around and hurled volleys of questions—“Can we have beds, sir?” &c. But the man of Delavan House replied not. To all their entreaties he returned not a word. But he did take out a great book and spread it on the counter, and putting a pen in the ink he handed it to the citizen nearest, who signed himself and his State, and asked meekly “if he could have a bed at once, as he was so” &c. To him the man of Delavan House deigned no reply. The pen was handed to another, who signed, and so on—the arbiter of our destinies watching each inscription with the air of an attorney’s clerk who takes signatures to an attestation.

There were at least fifty people to sign before me, and I heard from a waiter there were only ten beds—which on the most ample allowance would only accommodate some thirty people—vacant. Were the Britishers to be beaten? Never! Leaving our luggage, we dashed out into the snow. And lo! a house nigh at hand, with lights and open doors. A black waiter sallied out at the tramp of feet in the hall. He told us, “De rooms all tuk, sar.” He was told to be less indiscreet in his assertions, and all the time of colloquy the invading Celts and Saxons pushed onwards and upwards to the first landing. Here were doors standing open. We entered one. Three small rooms—beds empty! no luggage! This will do. “Massa, dis room’s all ——” “You be quiet!” And the luggage was dragged over by our own right hands, eventually aided by the Ethiop.

I had the satisfaction, as I was gliding away with my hat-box, to hear the man of Delavan House reading the book of fate, and selecting his victims at his grim pleasure. In fact, the house on which we had stumbled was a sort of succursal to the hotel; and the proprietor, afraid of offending so mighty a potentate, was shocked at the idea of letting in any one without his leave. What became of the victims I know not, but I do know that the beds—though we went to them supperless—of the humble hostelry were very grateful.

I went to bed about 4 A.M., with the fixed intention of getting up early and visiting the capitol, when I could have seen with these eyes the glories of the Hon. —— Raymond as Speaker in the State Hall, and have heard something more of the interesting proceedings against a New York alderman, who accused senators and representatives of being accessible as Danaë to the golden shower, and even to greenbacks.

No man can see the real merits of a city in snow. I shall repeat the remark no more; therefore if I say I don’t like a place, let the snow bear the blame: but Albany did not impress me when I did get up, and the sight of the State Capitol at the top of a steep street was so utterly depressing, that I abandoned my resolve, and sought less classic ground. What have not these Greeks to answer for in this new land?

There was a comforting contrast to the hideous domes and mock porticoes, and generally to the ugliness of the public buildings, in the solid unpretentious look of the old Dutch-built houses of private citizens. Though there is an aspect of decadence about Albany, it seems more, far more respectable and gentlemanly than its smug, smirking, meretricious but overwhelming rival, New York.

I was informed by an American that it was called after the second name in the title of James the Second, before he ascended the throne. “Bad as the Stuarts were to you, they were a great deal better for the colonies,” said he, “than your Hanover House, and perhaps if you hadn’t changed them you might not have lost us.” It was curious to hear an American saying a good word for the luckless house, though I am by no means of the opinion that England could ever have ruled colonies which were saturated with the principles of self-government.

It was too cold at such a season as this for philosophical research in a sleigh, and too slippery for sauntering; and we were whirled out of the State capital without seeing much of it, except church steeples, and some decent streets, and the ice-bound river studded with hard-set steamers.

There are, however, in summer time, as I hear, and can well imagine, many fine sights to be seen. There is the Fall of Cohoes, where the Mohawk River, a stream of greater body than the Thames at Richmond, leaps full seventy feet down into a gulf, whence it collects itself to pursue its course to the Hudson. There are Shaker settlements, and many communities of “isms” and astounding congregations of “ists;” and there are clean Dutch streets, and Dutch tenures and customs to this day. With the tenures, however, the rule of the majority has made rough work; and the lords in capite, or padroons, have suffered pauperisation by the simple process of nonpayment of their rents.

The Legislature is now in solemn conclave. They are investigating charges implied in the speech of a New York alderman, who declared he could get any measure passed he liked, by paying the members—of course extra-officially, because the payment, per se, could only be an agreeable addition to their income. The Speaker is Mr Raymond, of the New York Times, who, in spite of or perhaps in consequence of the opposition of the Caledonian Cleon, his rival, was elected to that high office. It was in course of conversation with an American gentleman respecting the election, that I learned there was no more certain way of succeeding in any contest in the State, than to obtain the abuse of the organ under that person’s control. Be it senator, mayor, or common-councilman, the candidate he favours is lost, for all respectable people instinctively vote against him.

CHAPTER III.

Unpleasant journey to Niagara—Mr. Seward—The Union and its dangers—Pass Buffalo—Arrival at Niagara—A ‘Touter’—Bad weather—The Road—Climate compared—Desolate appearance of houses—The St. Lawrence viewed from above—One hundred years ago—Canada the great object of the Americans—The Welland Canal—Effect of the Falls from a distance—Gradual approach—Less volume of water in winter—Different effect and dangers in winter—Icicles—Behind the Cataract—Photographs and Bazaar—Visit the “Lions” generally—Brock—American and Canadian sides contrasted—Goat Island—A whisper heard—Mills and Manufactories.

It was past noon ere the train once more began its contest with the snow—now conquering, now stubbornly resisted, and brought to a standstill:—the pace exceedingly slow, the scenery that of undulating white tablecloths, the society dull.

The journey to Niagara was as unpleasant as very bad travelling and absence of anything to see could make it. The train contained many soldiers or volunteers going back to their people, who discussed the conduct of the war with earnestness and acuteness; but though we were so far north, I could not hear any of them very anxious about the negro.

Well-dressed men and women got in and out at all the stations, nor did I see persons in the whole line of the cars who seemed to have rubbed elbows with adversity. Schenectady! Utica! Syracuse! Auburn! Here be comminglings!—the Indian, the Phœno-Numidian, the Greek-Sicilian, the Anglo-Irish, all reviving here in fair towns, full of wealth, commerce, and life.

The last-named is, I believe, the birthplace, and is certainly what auctioneers call the residential abode, of Mr. Seward. I remember his Excellency relating how, after the Battle of Bull Run—when he was threatened by certain people from Baltimore with hanging, as the reward of his misdeeds in plunging the country into civil war—he resolved to visit his fellow-citizens and neighbours, to ascertain whether there was any change of feeling amongst them. He was received with every demonstration of kindness and respect, and then, said he, “I felt my head was quite safe on my shoulders.” It is but just to say, Mr. Seward altogether disclaims the intention of seizing on Canada, which has been attributed to him in England; although he certainly is of opinion, that the province cannot continue long to be a dependency of the English Crown. How long does he think California will be content to receive orders from a government at Washington?

The danger which menaces the Union will become far greater after the success of the Unionists than it was during the war, because the extinction of the principle of States Rights will naturally tend to centralise the power of the Federal Government. They cannot restore that which they have pulled down. In virtue of their own principles, they must maintain a strict watch and supreme control over the State Governments and Legislatures. Endless disputes and jealousies will arise. The Democrats, at once the wealthiest and the ablest party in each State, will take every opportunity of opposing the centralised Government; and although the Republicans may raise armies to fight for the Union, they will not be able to prevent the slow and certain action of the State Legislatures, which will tend to detach the States more and more from any federation in which their interests are not engaged, and to form them into groups, bound together by community of commerce, manufacture, feeling, and destiny.

Canada must of course accept its fate with the rest; but Englishmen, at least, will not yield it to the menaces or violence of the Northern Americans, as long as the people of the province prefer being our fellow-subjects to an incorporation in the Great Republic, or any section of it that may be desirous of the abstraction.

I fear we mostly look at Mr. Seward’s conduct and language from a point which causes erroneous inferences. It should be remembered that he is an American minister—that he has not only the interests but the passions and prejudices of the American people to consult, and that, like Lord Palmerston, he is not the minister of any country but his own. His son, the Under-secretary of State, is the proprietor and editor of a journal here, which is conducted with the moderation and tact to be expected from the amiable character of the gentleman alluded to.

There was little to be seen of the towns at which we halted, and our journey was continued from one to the other monotonously enough. The weary creeping of the train, the foul atmosphere, the delays, however inevitable and unavoidable, rather spoiled one’s interest in the black smoky-looking cities on the white plains through which we passed; and night found us still “scrooging on,” and occasionally stopping and digging out. Thus we passed by Rochester and the Genessee Falls, which seem extensively used up in mill-working, and arrived at Buffalo (278 miles) a little before midnight. There we branched off to Niagara, which is 22 miles further on.

Up to this time we had been minded to go to the Clifton House, which is on the Canadian side of the river, though it is kept by Americans, and of which we had agreeable memories in the summer, when it was the headquarters of many pleasant Southerners. There were only three or four men in our car, one of whom was, even under such hopeless circumstances, doing a little touting for an hotel at the American side. After a while he threw a fly over us and landed the whole basket. All the large hotels, he said, were shut up on both sides of the Falls, but he could take us to a very nice quiet and comfortable place, where we would meet with every attention, and it was the only house we would find open. This exposition left us no choice.

We surrendered ourselves therefore to the tout, who was a very different being from the type of his class in England: a tall, pleasant-faced man, with a keen eye and bronzed face, ending in an American Vandyke beard, a fur collar round his neck, a heavy travelling coat—from which peered out the ruffles of a white shirt and a glittering watch-chain—rings on his fingers, and unexceptionable shoeing. He smoked his cigar with an air, and talked as if he were conferring a favour. “And I tell you what! I’ll show you all over the Falls to-morrow. Yes, sir!” Why, we were under eternal obligations to such a guide, and internally thanking our stars for the treasure-trove at once accepted him.

At the gloomy deserted station we were now shot out, on a sheet of slippery deep snow, an hour after midnight. We followed our guide to an hostelry of the humbler sort, where the attention was not at first very marked or the comfort at all decided. The night was very dark, and a thaw had set in under the influence of a warm rain. The thunder of the Falls could not be heard through the thick air, but when we were in the house a quiet little quivering rattle of the window-panes spoke of its influence. The bar-room was closed—in the tawdry foul-odoured eating-room swung a feeble lamp: it was quite unreasonable to suppose any one could be hungry at such an hour, and we went to bed with the nourishment supplied by an anticipation of feasting on scenery. All through the night the door and window-frames kept up the drum-like roll to the grand music far away.

We woke up early. What evil fortune! Rain! fog! thaw!—the snow melting fast in the dark air. But were we not “bound” to see the Falls? So after breakfast, and ample supplies of coarse food, we started in a vehicle driven by the trapper of the night before. He turned out to be a very intelligent, shrewd American, who had knocked about a good deal in the States, and knew men and manners in a larger field than Ulysses ever wandered over.

The aspect of the American city in winter time is decidedly quite the reverse of attractive, but there was a far larger fixed population than we expected to have seen, and the fame of our arrival had gone abroad, so that there was a small assemblage round the stove in the bar-room and in the passage to see us start. I don’t mean to see us in particular, but to stare at any three strangers who turned up so suspiciously and unexpectedly at this season. The walls of the room in the hotel were covered with placards, offering large bounties and liberal inducements to recruits for the local regiment of volunteers; and I was told that a great number of men had gone for the war after the season had concluded—but Abolition is by no means popular in Niagara.

It was resolved that we should drive round to the British side by the Suspension Bridge, a couple of miles below, as the best way of inducting my companions into the wonders of the Falls; and I prepared myself for a great surprise in the difference between the character of the scene in winter and in summer.

For some time the road runs on a low level below the river bank, and does not permit of a sight of the cataract. The wooden huts of the Irish squatters looked more squalid and miserable than they were when I saw them last year—wonderful combinations of old plank, tarpaulin, tinplate, and stove pipes. “It’s wonderful the settlement doesn’t catch fire!” “But it does catch fire. It’s burned down often enough. Nobody cares: and the Irish grin, and build it up again, and beat a few of the niggers, whom they accuse of having blazed ’em up. They’ve a purty hard time of it now, I think.”

There are too many free negroes and too many Irish located in the immediate neighbourhood of the American town, to cause the doctrines of the Abolitionists to be received with much favour by the American population; and the Irish of course are opposed to free negroes, where they are attracted by papermills, hotel service, bricklaying, plastering, housebuilding, and the like—the Americans monopolising the higher branches of labour and money-making, including the guide business.

At a bend in the road we caught a glimpse of the Falls, and I was concerned to observe they appeared diminished in form, in beauty, and in effect. The cataract appeared of an ochreish hue, like bog-water, as patches of it came into sight through breaks in the thick screen of trees which line the banks. The effect was partly due to the rain, perhaps, but was certainly developed by the white setting of snow through which it rushed. The expression on my friends’ faces indicated that they considered Niagara an imposition. “The Falls are like one of our great statesmen,” quoth the guide, “just now. There’s nothing particular about them when you first catch a view of them; but when you get close and know them better, then the power comes out, and you feel small as potatoes.”

As we splashed on through the snow, I began to consider the disadvantages to which the poor emigrant who chooses a land exposed to the rigours of a six months’ winter, must be exposed; and I wondered in myself that the early settlers did not fly, if they had a chance, when they first experienced the effects of bitter cold. But I recollected how much better were soil, climate, and communications than they are in the sunny South, where, for seven months, the heat is far more intolerable than the cold of Canada—where the fever revels, where noxious reptiles and insects vex human life, and the blood is poisoned by malaria, and where wheat refuses to grow, and bread is a foreign product.

Even in Illinois the winter is, as a rule, as severe as it is in Canada, the heat as great in summer—water is scarce, roads bad. It is better to be a dweller on the banks of the St. Lawrence than a resident in the Valley of the Mississippi, even if a tithe of its fabled future should ever come to pass. There is no reason why the Canadas should be regarded with less favour than the Western States, although the winters are long enough: in the prairie there is a want of wholesome water in summer, and a scarcity of fuel for cold weather, which tend to restore the balance in favour of the provinces.

The country, which I remembered so riant and rich, now was cold and desolate. At the station, near the beautiful Suspension Bridge—which one cannot praise too much, and which I hope may last for ever, though it does not look like it—the houses had closed windows, and half of them seemed empty, but the German proprietors no doubt could have been found in the lagerbeer saloons and billiard-rooms. The toll-takers and revenue officers on the bridge showed the usual apathy of their genus. No novelty moves them. Had the King of Oude appeared with all his court on elephants, they would have merely been puzzled how to assess the animals. They were not in the least disconcerted at a group of travellers visiting the St. Lawrence in winter time.

The sight of the St. Lawrence as we crossed over, roaring and foaming more than a hundred feet below us, and rushing between the precipitous banks on which the bridge rests, gave one a sort of “frisson:” it looked like some stream of the Inferno—the waters, black and cold, lashed into pyramids of white foam, and seeming by their very violence to impede their own escape. Some distance below the bridge, indeed, they rise up in a visible ridge, crested with high plumes of tossing spray; but it is related as a fact that the steamer “Maid of the Mist,” which was wont to ply as a ferry-boat below the Falls, was let down this awful sluice by a daring captain, who sought to save her from the grip of certain legal functionaries, and that she got through with the loss of her chimney, after a fierce contest with the waters, in which she was whirled round and buffeted almost to foundering. At that moment the men on board would no doubt have surrendered to the feeblest of bailiffs for the chance of smooth water.

About one hundred years ago, the spot where we now stood was the scene of continual struggles between the Red man, still strong enough to strike a blow for his heritage, and the British. It was on the 14th September, 1764, that the Indians routed a detachment at Niagara, and killed and wounded upwards of two hundred men; and their organisation seemed so formidable that Amherst was glad to make a treaty with the tribes through the instrumentality of Sir W. Johnston. The colonists then left on us the main burden of any difficulty arising from their great cupidity and indifference to the rights of the natives. In ten years afterwards they were engaged in preparing for the grand revolt which gave birth to the United States and to the greatest development of self-government ever seen in the world.

As they were setting about the work of wresting the New World from the grasp of the monarchical system, Cook was exploring the shores of the other vast continent in the Southern Sea, where the spirit of British institutions, with the widest extension of constitutional liberty, may yet successfully vindicate the attachment of a great Anglo-Saxon race to the Crown.

There are many in America who think the colonies would never have revolted if the French had retained possession of Canada, and, indeed, it is likely enough the Anglo-Saxons would have held to the connection if the Latin race had been sitting upon them northwards; but the political accidents and the military results which expelled the fleur-de-lys from Canada, doubtless created an unnatural bond of union between the absolutist Court of St. Germains and the precursors of Anacharsis Clootz in the colonies. To the seer there might have been something ominous in the coalition.

The men who were battling for the divine right of kings in Europe could scarce fight for the divine right of man in America without danger. The kiss which was imprinted at Versailles on Franklin’s cheek, by the lips of a royal lady, must have had the smack of the guillotine in it.

Anyway, we must allow, the French-Canadians, who stood by us shoulder to shoulder and beat back the American battalions, whose power to invade was mainly derived from foreign support, showed they had a surprising instinct for true liberty. No doubt they would have fought at least as stoutly, had the arrogant colonists been aided by red-coats, for the sake of the white banner and the fleur-de-lys; but in the time of trouble and danger they stood loyally by the Crown and connection of England, and their services in that day should not be lightly forgotten.

It is above all things noteworthy, perhaps, that the Americans in all their wars with the mother-country have sought to strike swift hard blows in Canada, and that hitherto, with every advantage and after considerable successes, they have been driven, weather-beaten back, and bootless home. It was actually on the land shaken by the roar of these falling floods that battles have been fought, and that the air has listened in doubt to the voice of cannon mingling with the eternal chorus of the cataract.

There are here two points at which Canada lies open to the invader. The first lies above the Rapids—the latter is below them, where the St. Lawrence flows into the lake. Three considerable actions and various small engagements have taken place on the Canadian side of the river, all of which were characterised by great obstinacy and much bloodshed. Let us consider them, and see what can or ought to be done in order to guard the tempting bank which offers such an excellent base of operations for future hostile occupation.

An inspection of the map will show the Welland Canal, running from Port Maitland, Dunnville, and Port Colborne, on Lake Erie, to Lake Ontario at Port Dalhousie. The command of this canal would be of the very greatest importance to an invading army, as it would establish a communication inside the Falls of Niagara; but it would be very difficult to obtain such a command so as to prevent the destruction of the canal in case of necessity. It is obvious, however, that the line of it should be defended, and that garrisons should be stationed to hold points inside the line, such as Erie and Chippewa, to render it unsafe for the enemy to move down inside them. At Fort Erie there is a very insignificant work, but, with that exception, the line of the Welland Canal may be considered as perfectly open and defenceless—not by any means as utterly indefensible.

The river is not broad enough to prevent the dwellers on the banks from indulging in hostilities if they pleased; but no practical advantage would be gained in a campaign by any operation which did not settle the fate of the Welland Canal. The locks will permit vessels 142 feet long, with 26 feet beam, and drawing 10 feet of water, to pass between Erie and Ontario; and from the latter lake to the sea, or vice versâ, they can pass by the St. Lawrence Canal, drawing one foot less water. It would be above all things important to prevent an enemy getting possession of this Welland Canal. It would not suffice for us to destroy it by injuring a lock or the like, as such an act would militate against our own lines of communication,—more important to us, who have an inferior power of transport on the lakes, than it would be to the Americans.

In addition to a well-devised system of field-works, it is desirable that permanent fortifications should be constructed to cover the termini of the canal and the feeder above Port Maitland. At present, the defensive means of Fort Erie, at the entrance of the river above the Rapids, are very poor, and quite inadequate to resist modern artillery. However, this subject will be best discussed when I come to speak of the general defence of Canada.

This yawning gap is barrier enough between the two countries should they ever, unhappily, become belligerent, but the banks can be commanded by either; and in case of war the bridge would no doubt be sacrificed by one or other, as well as the grander structure at Montreal would be, without some special covenant.

When still a mile and a half away, a whirling pillar of a leaden gray colour, with wreaths of a lighter silvery hue playing round it, which rose to the height of several hundred feet in the air, indicated the position of the Falls. The vapour was more solid and gloomy-looking than the cloudlike mantle which shrouds the cataract oftentimes in the summer. I doubt if there is a very satisfactory solution of its existence at all. Of course the cloud is caused by particles of water thrown up into the atmosphere by the violent impact of the water on the surface, and by the spray thrown off in the descent of the torrent; but why those particles remain floating about, instead of falling at once like rain, is beyond my poor comprehension. Sure enough, a certain portion does descend like a thick Scotch mist: why not all? As one of my companions, with much gravity and an air of profound wisdom, remarked last summer, “It’s probable electricity has something to do with it!” Can any one say more?

Assuredly, this ever-rolling mighty cloud draping and overhanging the Falls adds much to their weird and wonderful beauty. Its variety of form is infinite, changing with every current of air, and altering from day to day in height and volume; but I never looked at it without fancying I could trace in the outlines the indistinct shape of a woman, with flowing hair and drooping arms, veiled in drapery—now crouching on the very surface of the flood, again towering along and tossing up her hands to heaven, or sinking down and bending low to the edge of the cataract as though to drink its waters. With the aid of an active fancy, one might deem it to be the guardian spirit of the wondrous place.

The wind was unfavourable, and the noise of the cataract was not heard in all its majestic violence; but as we came nearer, we looked at each other and said nothing. It grew on us like the tumult of an approaching battle.

There is this in the noise of the Falls: produced by a monotonous and invariable cause, it nevertheless varies incessantly in tone and expression. As you listen, the thunder peals loudly, then dies away into a hoarse grumble, rolls on again as if swelled by minor storms, clangs in the ear, and after a while, like a river of sound welling over and irrepressible, drowns the sense in one vast rush of inexpressible grandeur—then melts away till you are almost startled at the silence and look up to see the Falls, like a green mountain-side streaked with fresh snowdrifts, slide and shimmer over the precipice.

It may well be conceived with what awe and superstitious dread honest Jesuit Hennepin, following his Indian guides through the gloom of the forest primæval, gazed on the dreadful flood, which had then no garniture of trimmed banks, cleared fields, snug hotels, and cockney gazabos to alleviate the natural terror with which man must gaze on a spectacle which conjures up such solemn images of death, time, and eternity.

No words can describe the Falls; and Church’s picture, very truthful and wonderful as to form, cannot convey an idea of the life of the scene—of the motion and noise and shifting colour which abound there in sky and water. I doubt, indeed, if any man can describe his own sensations very accurately, for they undergo constant change; and for my own part I would say that the effect increases daily, and that one leaves the scene with more vivid impressions of its grandeur and beauty than is produced by the first coup-d’œil.

A gradual approach does not at all diminish the power of the cataract, and the mind is rather unduly excited by the aspect of the Styx-like flood—black, foam-crested, and of great volume, with every indication of profound depth—which hurries on so swiftly and so furiously below the road on which you are travelling, between banks cut down through grim, dark rock, so sheer that the tops of the upper trees which take root in the strata can be nearly touched by the traveller’s stick. The idea that the whole of the great river beneath you has just leaped over a barrier of rock prepares one’s conception for the greatness of the cataract itself.

In summer time there were wild ducks flying about, and terns darted up and down the stream. Now it was deserted and desolate, looking of more inky hue in contrast with the snow. Close to the boiling cataract the fishermen’s tiny barks might then be seen rocking up and down, or the angler sought the bass which loves those turbulent depths; but no such signs of human life and industry are visible in winter.

Before Niagara was, odd creatures enough lived about here, which can now be detected fossilised in the magnesian limestone. How many myriads of years it has been eating away its dear heart and gnawing the rock let Sir Charles Lyell or Sir Roderick Murchison calculate; but I am persuaded that since I saw it some months ago there has been a change in the aspect of the Horseshoe Fall, and that it has become more deeply curved. The residents, however, though admitting the occurrence of changes, say they are very slow, and that no very rapid alteration has taken place since the fall of a great part of Table Rock some years ago: but masses of stone may be washed away every day without their knowing it.

One very natural consequence of a visit in the winter was undeniable—that the Falls were visibly less: they did not extend so far, and they rolled with diminished volume. The water did not look so pure, and incredible icicles and hanging glaciers obscured the outlines of the rocks and even intruded on the watercourse; whilst the trees above, laden with snow, stood up like inverted icicles again, and rendered it difficult to define the boundary between earth, air, and water.

A noiseless drive brought us to the village. Clifton House was deserted—the windows closed, the doors fastened. No gay groups disported on the promenade; but the bird-stuffer’s, the Jew’s museum, the photographer’s shed, the Prince’s triumphal arch, were still extant; and the bazaars, where they sell views, seashells, Indian beadwork and feathers, moccasins, stuffed birds, and the like, were open and anxious for customers. Our party was a godsend; but the worthy Israelite, who has collected such an odd museum here—one, under all the circumstances, most creditable to his industry and perseverance as well as liberality—said that travellers came pretty often in fine winter weather to look at the cataract. We walked in our moccasins to the Table Rock, and thence to the verge of the Falls, and gazed in silence on the struggling fury of the terrible Rapids, which seem as if they wrestled with each other like strong men contending against death, and fighting to the last till the fatal leap must be made.

The hateful little wooden staircases, which like black slugs crawl up the precipice from the foot of the Falls, caught the eyes of my companions; and when they were informed that they could go down in safety and get some way behind the Fall itself, the place was invested with a new charm, and ice, rheumatism, and the like, were set at defiance. I knew what it was in summer, and the winter journey did not seem very tempting; but there was no alternative, and the party returned to the museum to prepare for the descent.

Whilst we were waiting for our waterproof dresses to go under the Falls, we had an opportunity of surveying the changes produced by winter, and I was the more persuaded that the effect is not so favourable as that of summer. The islands are covered with snow—that which divides the sweep of the cataract looking unusually large; the volume of water, diminished in the front, is also deprived of much of its impressive force by a decrease in the sound produced by its fall. The edges of the bank, covered with glistening slabs of ice, were not tempting to the foot, and could not be approached with the confidence with which they are trod by one of steady nerves when the actual brink is visible.

There were some peculiarities, however, worthy of note; and in a brighter day, possibly the effect of the light on the vast ranges of icicles, and on the fantastic shapes into which the snow is cut on the rocks at the margin of the waters, might be very beautiful. These rocks now looked like a flock of polar bears, twined in fantastic attitudes, or extended singly and in groups by the brink as if watching for their prey. Above them rose the bank, now smooth and polished, with a fringe of icicles—some large as church steeples; above them, again, the lines of the pine trees, draped in white, and looking like church steeples too. At one side, near Table Rock, the icicles were enormous, and now and then one fell with a hissing noise, and was dashed on the rock into a thousand gliding ice arrows, or plunged into the gulf.

By this time our toilette-room was ready, and each man, taking off his overcoat, was encased in a tarpaulin suit with a sou’-wester. In this guise we descended the spiral staircase, which is carried in a perpendicular wooden column down the face of the bank near Table Rock, or what remains of it, to the rugged margin, formed of boulders now more slippery than glass.

Our guide, a strapping specimen of negro or mulatto, in thick solid ungainly boots, planted his splay feet on them with certainty, and led us by the treacherous path down towards the verge of the torrent, which now seemed as though it were rushing from the very heavens. On our left boiled the dreadful caldron from which the gushing bubbles, as if overjoyed to escape, leaped up, and with glad effervescence rushed from the abyss which plummet never sounded. On our right towered the sheer precipice of rock, now overhanging us, and garnished with rows of giant teeth-like icicles.

After a slow cautious advance along this doubtful path, we perceived that the thin edge of the cataract towards which we were advancing shot out from the rock, and left a space between its inner surface and a black shining wall which it was quite possible to enter. There was no wind, the day was dull and raw, but the downright rush of the water created a whirling current of air close to it which almost whisked away the breath; and a vapour of snow, fine sleet, and watery particles careered round the entrance to the recess, which no water kelpie would be venturesome or lonesome enough to select, except in the height of the season.

On we thus went, more and more slowly and cautiously, over the polished ice and rock, till at last we had fairly got behind the cataract, and enjoyed the pleasure of seeing the solid wall of water falling, falling, falling, with the grand monotony of eternity, so nigh that one fancied he could almost touch it with his hand. When last I was here, it was possible to have got as far as a ledge called Termination Rock; but the ice had accumulated to such an extent that the guide declared the attempt to do so would be impracticable or dangerous, and indeed where we stood was not particularly safe at the moment. As I was in the cave, gazing at the downpoured ruin of waters with a sense of security as great as that of a trout in a mill-race, an icicle from the cliff above cracked on the rocks outside, and threw its fragments inside the passage. I own the desire I had to get on still further and pierce in behind the cataract, where its volume was denser, was greater than the gratification I derived from getting so far. But we had reached our ultima thule, and, with many a lingering look, retraced our steps—now and then halting to contend the better with the gusts from the falls, which threaten to sweep one from the ledge. If the foot once slipped, I cannot conceive a death more rapid: life would die out with the thought, “I am in the abyss!” ere a cry could escape.

Whilst returning, another icicle fell near at hand; therefore it is my humble opinion that going to Termination Rock in winter is not safe except in hard frost, the safer plan being not to go at all. And yet no one has ever been swept or has slipped in, I believe, and so there is a new sensation to be had very easily. The path on our return seemed worse than it was on our going—a very small slippery ridge indeed between us and the gulf; but danger there can be but little. As we emerged from the wooden pillar we submitted to a photographer for our portraits in waterproof.

Poor man! In summer he has a harvest, perhaps; in winter he gleans his corn with toil and sorrow, making scenes for stereoscopes. I am not aware that we omitted anything proper to be done; for we purchased feather fans—the griffs did—and beadwork and other “mementoes of the Falls,” which are certainly not selected for any apposite quality. As if the Falls needed a bunch of feathers and beads to keep them in remembrance! Well, many a time has a lock of hair, a withered flower, the feeblest little atom of substantial matter, been given as memento ere now, and done its office well.

As I passed by Clifton House on my return to the American side, I observed a solitary figure in a blue overcoat and brass buttons, pacing rapidly up and down under cover of the verandah. Who on earth could it be? It can’t be—yes it is—it is, indeed, our excellent guardian of British customs rights and revenues—good Mr. ——. The kindly old Scotchman stares in surprise when he hears his name from an unknown passer-by, but in a moment he remembers our brief acquaintance in summer time. Every one who knows him would, I am sure, be glad, with me, to hear that some better post were got for Mr. —— in his old age than that of watching smugglers on the waters of the St. Lawrence, below Niagara.

After a brief interview, we proceeded on our way, and continued our explorations. Due honour was paid to the Rapids, Bath Island, Goat Island, the Cave of the Winds, Prospect Tower, and all the water lions of the place, though rain and sleet fell at intervals all the time when there was no snow.

When the Prince was here he laid the last stone of the obelisk which marks the place where Brock was killed, in the successful action against the Americans at Queenstown in 1812. The present monument to that general is certainly in as good taste as most British designs of the sort, and seems but little open to the censure I have heard directed against it. Its predecessor was so atrociously bad, that some gentleman of fine feelings in art, who was probably an American and a Canadian patriot as well, blew it up some years ago.

There are not wanting at the present time many men in Canada of the same stuff as Brock and his men. It is astonishing to find the easy and universal conviction prevailing in the minds of Americans, contrary to their experience, that the conquest of Canada would be one of the most natural and facile feats in the world.

Except in their first war, when they displayed energy and skill in the attack on Quebec, the active operations of the Republicans in Canada were not marked by any military excellence, notwithstanding the very hard fights which took place, but they showed themselves most formidable opponents when they were attacked in position.

The Canadian side of the Falls boasts of charming scenery. Even in the snow, the neat cottages and houses—the plantations, gardens, and shrubberies—evince a degree of taste and comfort which were not so observable on the American side, notwithstanding the superior activity of the population.

Our observations on our return to the right bank of the river confirmed my impression concerning the diminished volume and effect of the cataract. The ice, formed by spray, hung over the torrent, which, always more broken and less ponderous than that on the other side, is in summer very beautiful, by reason of the immense variety of form and colour in the jets and cascades, and of the ease with which you can stand, as it were, amid the very waters of Niagara.

The town half populated; the monster hotel closed; the swimming-baths, in which one could take a plunge into the active rapids safely enclosed in a perforated room, now fastened up for winter,—presented a great contrast to the noise and bustle of the American Niagara in the season. This is the time when the Indians enable the shopkeepers to accumulate their stores of bead and feather work; and a few squaws, dressed in a curious compromise between the garments of the civilised female and the simpler robes of the “untutored savage,” flitted through the snow from one dealer to another with their work. In some houses they are regularly employed all day, and come in from their village in the morning and go home at night when their work is done.

The view of the Rapids from the upper end of Goat Island is not, to my mind, as fine as that obtained from the island on the British side higher up. The sight of that tortured flood, loaded with its charging lines of “sea horses,”—its surging glistening foam-heaps streaking the wide expanse which rolled towards us from a dull leaden horizon,—was inexpressibly grand and gloomy, and struck me more forcibly than the aspect of the Rapids had done in August, when I beheld them in a setting of rich green landscape and forest.

On the whole, I would much rather, were I going to Niagara for the first time, select the Canadian side for my first view. It would be well never to look at the Falls, if that were possible, till the traveller could open his eyes from the remnant of the Table Rock on the Great Horseshoe; but curiosity will probably defeat any purpose of that kind. Still, the Horseshoe is grand enough to grow on the spectator day after day, even if there be some disappointment in the first aspect. The noise, though it shake the earth and air, is not of the violent overwhelming character which might have been expected from its effect on window-panes and shutters. As the voice of a man can be heard in the din of battle by those around him, so can even the low tones of a clear speaker be distinguished most readily close to the brink of a cataract, the roar of which at times is very audible, nevertheless, from twelve to fifteen miles away.

The only drawback to a sojourn on the Canadian side is, perhaps, the feeling of irritation or unrest produced by the ceaseless jar and tumult of the Falls, which become well-nigh unbearable at night, and vex one’s slumbers with unquiet dreams, in which water plays a powerful part. The American side is not so much affected in that way. The Horseshoe presents by far the greatest mass of water; its rush is grander—the terrible fathomless gulf into which it falls is more awe-inspiring than anything on the American side; but the latter offers to the visitor greater variety of colour—I had nigh said of substance—in the water. At its first tremendous blow on the seething surface of the basin, the column of water seems to make a great cavern, into which it plunges bodily, only to come up in myriad millions of foaming particles, very small, bright, and distinct, like minute, highly-polished shot. These gradually expand and melt into each other after a wild dance in the caldron, which boils and bubbles with its awful hell-broth for ever. In the centre of the Horseshoe, which is really more the form of two sides of an obtuse-angled triangle, the water, being of great depth—at least thirty feet where it falls over the precipice—is of an azure green, which contrasts well with the yellow, white, and light emerald colours of the shallower and more broken portions nearer the sides.

It would be considered rather presumptuous in any one to think of improving upon Niagara, but I cannot help thinking that the effect would be increased immensely if the island which divides the cataract into the Horseshoe and the American Falls, and the rock which juts up in the latter and subdivides it unequally, were removed or did not exist; then the river, in one grand front of over one thousand yards, would make its leap en masse. The American Falls are destitute of the beauty given by the curve of the leap to the Horseshoe; they descend perpendicularly, and are lost in a sea of foam, not in an abyss of water, but in the wild confusion of the vast rocks which are piled up below. But they are still beautiful exceedingly, and there is more variety of scene in the islands, in the passage over the bridges to Goat Island and to the stone tower, which has been built amid the very waters of the cataract, so that one can stand on the outside gallery and look down upon the Falls beneath.

Goat Island is happily intersected with good drives and walks, laid out with sufficiently fair taste through the natural forest, and seats are placed at intervals for the accommodation of visitors. It is no disparagement to the manner in which the grounds have been ornamented to say that a good English landscape gardener would convert the island into the gem of the world. The ornamentation need not be overdone; it should be congruous and in keeping with the Falls, which nature has embellished with such infinity of colouring. As it is, the island is much visited. Strange enough, the softest whispered vows can be heard amid the thunder of Niagara, and it is believed that many marriages owe their happy inspiration to inadvertent walking and talking in these secluded yet much-haunted groves. Sawmills, papermills, and manufactories delight the utilitarian as he gazes on the Rapids which have so long been wasting their precious water-power, and it is not unlikely that a thriving town may grow up to distressing dimensions on the American side of the stream, at all events.

CHAPTER IV.

Leave Niagara—Suspension Bridge—In British territory—Hamilton City—Buildings—Proceed eastward—Toronto—Dine at Mess—Pay visits—Public edifices—Sleighs—Amusement of the boys—Camaraderie in the army—Kindly feeling displayed—Journey resumed towards Quebec—Intense cold—Snow landscape—Morning in the train—Hunger and lesser troubles—Kingston, its rise and military position—Harbour, dockyards—Its connection with the Prince of Wales’ Tour—The Upper St. Lawrence—Canada as to defence.

We left the Falls with regret—the “city of the Falls” without any painful emotion. The people at the hotel were perfectly civil and obliging, though they bore no particular good-will, perhaps, to one whom they had been taught to regard as the bitter enemy and traducer of their country and their cause.

Our guide seemed to pity us for our folly in going to such a place as Canada, when we could, if we liked, stay in an American hotel in the States. He assured us it was “only fit for Irish, Frenchmen, and free niggers.” The true American of this type is perhaps the most prejudiced man in the world, not even excepting the old type of the British farmer, or men of the Sibthorp epoch. His conviction of his immense superiority is founded on the readiness with which others flock to serve him. By their service he becomes a sort of aristocrat in regard to all immigrants, and can live without having recourse to any menial office or duty. I presume our hairy friend never brushed his boots in his life, and would sooner wear them dirty for ever than stoop to the unwonted task. At last came our time to depart.

Our sleighs glided smoothly down to the railway station at the Clifton, where the train was waiting to take us over the Suspension Bridge. That structure is, I fear, too beautiful to last. It requires a good deal of coolness and custom to look down from it on the fearful flood of the river rolling below, and mark the vibration as a heavy train passes over it. Then, too, there is the influence of cold on iron to be considered, the effects of tension, and the like: all have been duly provided for; and yet the bridge looks very light and very graceful, and let us hope it may be very strong and very lasting.

In five minutes we were in British territory. The first palpable and outward sign of the fact was an examination of our luggage by the customs officers at a station a few miles from the frontier, during which, or by which, one of the party lost a hat and its guardian box. The examination was rendered as little irksome as possible by the civility of the officials; and it made me quite happy to see the crowns on their brass buttons, degraded British subject as I was. One burly fellow congratulated me on “escaping alive out of the hands of the Yankees—he would not have given a cent for my life for the last six months.”

Our journey was not so much impeded by snow as we expected. It is forty-three miles from Niagara to the rising city of Hamilton, and we were little more than one hour and a quarter in doing the distance. All I am aware of is that on our way we passed through vast snow-fields, by the mineral waters of St. Catherine’s, the frozen canal, and that we caught glimpses on our right of the blue expanse of Lake Ontario.

The first sight of Hamilton caused a rapid change in my mind respecting the condition of Canada, and a most agreeable feeling of surprise. It was evident the Americans were not justified in their affected depreciation of the provinces, if they contained such towns as these. Despite the unfavourable circumstances under which it was visited, the city presented an appearance of comfort and prosperity which even a democratic people might envy, and which scarcely justified the corporation in refusing, as I hear they do, to rely on local sources for liquidation of certain claims against them.

Fine-looking streets, a forest of spires, important public buildings, did no discredit to the old standard which floated over the Custom-house near the station. And yet it was not possible to help remarking that the passengers in the train were reading American not Canadian newspapers. They were enjoying the fruits of American piracy in their more serious studies. The literary thefts of the sanctimonious Harpers, who play for ever on the moods and tenses of the verb to steal—were in the hands of all the people who were reading books.

Not alone the British flag did we see at Hamilton, but the British soldier; for at the doorway of the hotel were two well-known faces. A battalion of the Rifle Brigade was expected every moment, and two officers had been sent on to provide for their reception, as there were no barracks to receive the force, and they were hunting up house-owners to let their premises on the instant. It may be imagined that house-owners take a favourable view for themselves of the value of property thus suddenly in request; and the officers were proportionately indignant with those griping Canadians, as if they would have met different treatment from English colonists anywhere.

Hamilton is a city of some 20,000 inhabitants. It is on a bay (Burlington), which runs in at the west of Lake Ontario north of the peninsula formed by the lake, by the St. Lawrence, by Lake Erie, and by the river falling into Erie at Maitland. It is on the rail between the west from Detroit and London, the south-east from the States, and the east from Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. In event of war it is exposed to an attack by any American gunboat from the harbours on the south shore of Lake Ontario, and yet, to the best of my belief, it is utterly destitute of defence, and has not even a martello tower for its protection.

The name is not fifty years old, and twenty years ago Hamilton had less than 4000 inhabitants. Its growth bears no comparison with that of some American cities, but it is still very remarkable, and its wealth, importance, and defencelessness are quite sufficient to make it an object of attack. The houses are built of stone. Banks, hotels, manufactories, churches—well constructed and handsome—give proof of the prosperity of the community; and the residence there of Sir Alan MacNab, who lived somewhere in the vicinity in a brand new mediæval castle, should be some guarantee for their loyalty. Indeed, I was told that in no place had the Prince a more gratifying or enthusiastic reception.

But men without discipline, organisation, or defensive works can do but little against gunboats. It is true that Hamilton would not be of much service to the enemy, as it would not command the communications; but its possession by them would be very embarrassing, and its destruction, for lack of means to defend it, would be very discreditable. The population ought to yield at least 4000 able-bodied men for local service; and a casemated work, armed with powerful guns, could keep a mere mischief-seeking gunboat at proper distance, and save the place from destruction or injury.

Our halt at Hamilton was brief, and soon we were on our way eastwards once more, skirting the shores of the lake, fenced in by a monotonous line of snow-laden fir trees and palings. The people who got in and out at the stations were of a different race from the Americans—stouter and ruddier of hue, and many of them spoke with a Scotch or Irish accent, the former predominating. They did not talk much about anything but the weather, and did not give themselves concern about anything except the winter and its prospects, having made up their minds long ago that there was to be no fight between England and the United States.

Just as it became dusk we reached Toronto, having accomplished the thirty-eight miles in two hours, but late as it was we could make out the picturesque outlines of a large city. Close to the station a line of sleighs, and a mass of well-dressed people drawn up by the margin of a sheet of ice, on which a skated crowd were whirling about, gave an air of gaiety to the place.

A sharp smart sleigh drive, and we were at the comfortable hotel, called Rossin House, where an invitation from the officers of Her Majesty’s 30th to dinner was awaiting us. They were quartered in a substantial old-fashioned barrack on the shore of lake Ontario, some distance outside the city. The barracks are surrounded by an earthen parapet, provided with traverses and embrasures, and there is a very quaint and fantastic earthen redoubt on the beach, but any ordinary vessel of war could lay the whole establishment in ruins with perfect impunity in half-an-hour.

The mess table was surrounded by an unusual number of old Crimean officers, and I was glad to find the fears I had entertained that the inducements offered by the Americans to soldiers to desert, had not as yet given any considerable increase to the tendency in that direction, which causes such anxiety to regimental officers stationed near the frontier. Whilst I remained at Toronto, I dined daily at the same hospitable board.

A snapping fierce wind, laden with icy arrows, set in the day after our arrival. In the afternoon, however, I sleighed out and visited the bishop, one of the most lively, agreeable men conceivable, of the age of ninety or thereabouts; Mr. Brown, who is one of the powers of the State, and the editor and owner of the ablest paper in West Canada; the mayor, and other Torontians of eminence.

The city is so very surprising in the extent and excellence of its public edifices, that I was fain to write to an American friend at New York to come up and admire what had been done in architecture under a monarchy, if he wished to appreciate the horrible state of that branch of the fine arts under his democracy. Churches, cathedrals, market, post-office, colleges, schools, mechanics’ institute, rise in imperial dignity over the city; but there was a visible deterioration in the beer and billiard saloons, and the drinking exchanges. The shops are large, and well furnished with goods, and trade even now is brisk enough, considering the time of the year. All this is within an enemy’s grasp, and more than this, the command of the railway east and west.

In this winter time the streets are filled with sleighs, and the air is gay with the caroling of their bells. Some of these vehicles are exceedingly elegant in form and finish, and are provided with very expensive furs, not only for the use of the occupants, but for mere display. The horses are small spirited animals, of no great pretension to beauty or breeding. The people in the streets were well-dressed, comfortable-looking, well-to-do—not so tall as the people in New York, but stouter and more sturdy-looking. Their winter brings no discomfort; for fuel is abundant and not dear, and when the wind is not blowing high, the weather is very agreeable.

Here, again, I observed that the young people have a curious custom of going about with small sleighs, which are, to the best of my belief, called “tarboggins,” though I did not see them indulge in the practice by which the youth of New York vex and fret the drivers of all vehicles in sleighing-time. I have been amused by observing the urchins in the Empire City prowling about with these primitive sleighs, watching for an opportunity to exercise their talents. Fortunate it is for the British coachman that the youth of these islands are not acquainted with this pleasing mode of locomotion. Our omnibuses, having a conductor behind, would be better defended than the American vehicles, which have no such protection; but the four-wheeled cabs would fall a helpless prey into their hands.

The sport is carried on in this wise: the youths take their tarboggin or sleigh—a flat piece of board four feet long, with or without runners, will do; through a hole at one end is attached a piece of cord. The boys watch their opportunity, and when a vehicle passes, noiselessly on the snow they run out, slip the cord over the iron or any projection of the carriage behind, and, holding the end fast, throw themselves down on their sleigh, which is dragged along by the vehicle; and if cabby should arise in his wrath, in an instant the end of the cord is let go, and the young navigator, starting to his feet, runs off with his instrument of torture in search of a new victim. It adds much to this entertainment for one boy to catch hold of the leg or the sleigh of another boy, so that a string of four or five youths may be seen in full enjoyment of the recreation. Bless them! If I had not seen them following this sport, I should have fairly doubted if there were any boys in the United States.

If there was not all the cordiality which could be desired between the natives and the military, no fault could be found with the full measure of hospitality dealt out to their own countrymen by the officers of the garrison. Removed from the stiffness of home stations, the genial, kindly character of our young soldiers expatiates, in despite of middling cookery and colonial wines, and keeps open house for friends on foreign service. When sleighing for the day is over, and the skating party has come to an end, it is hard indeed for poor Jones to think of anything more than his dinner; but if he made the most of his opportunities, he might write a book in the solitude of his barrack, as those famous prisoners have done whose brains have conceived and brought forth such brilliant works in the darkness of the Tower.

The snows are well-nigh as binding and environing for a third of the year in bad seasons, and no doubt something would come of it all, but that the officer has his duties to attend to, and cannot escape from Private 1000’s stoppages, grievances, or failings. Now, it is no easy matter indeed for British officers to be very great friends in the same regiment. Of course you will find Pylades and Orestes there, but you may be sure if you do they are men who have no clashing interests, no contest of purses, no conflicting views about leave or steps. It is to me quite wonderful, all things considered, how bravely the natural kindliness of our officers contends against a system which, with all its advantages, creates a source of rivalry and jealousy not known in other services.

In a promotion-by-seniority service there can of course be no feeling against a man on the part of his juniors because he happens to be older; but no one can well brook the greater fortune which depends on the command of money,—though he may be willing to seize on it, if he can, by the same means,—in the case of his own juniors. I do not speak without some small knowledge when I say that there is a much larger amount of camaraderie in our service than ought to be found in it, but that there is much less than exists in some other armies. The French officer is jealous of the man promoted by merit, for the declaration of that superiority is a tacit censure on himself, and he is also prone to take umbrage at the good fortune of the immortels of the État major; but he has little ground for antipathy to any of his own set, as regards social position or military rank in the corps.

Our strong love of field-sports also tends to create small difficulties when at home, from which spring other causes of estrangement. One man, for instance, wants to get to the spring-meeting when another is burning for the spring-fishing—shooting-leaves and hunting-leaves clash together, though in no army in the world is there such a liberal system of furlough as in our own. These causes do not operate in Canada, where there is now, in fact, but little sport of any kind within easy distances. Moose shooting in snow is slow work, and for other game the sportsman must wander far and wide. But when the table is set, and the full tide of conversation flows, what a cheery group of warriors, young and old, may be seen in Canadian quarters! They have had sleighing parties and skating adventures, and altogether have got over the day somehow, and are prepared to look pleasantly on the world, albeit the snow is two feet deep over it.

As to the position afforded by the buildings in these particular old barracks in Toronto, no more uncomfortable place could well be imagined in face of an enemy. The defences are so ludicrous, that a Chinese engineer would despise them. Certainly, we have no right to laugh at Americans, or to hold their works in petto, if we take one glance at the fortifications of Toronto; and yet, as will be seen, it is a place of the very greatest importance.

My stay here would have been longer, perhaps, but that I was informed of a very kindly intention on the part of the people which I did not desire to have carried out, at all events under the existing circumstances—being in hopes that a future opportunity would occur of proving that I was not indifferent to the good feeling and very flattering sentiments of the gentlemen who had commenced the movement towards myself; and so, in the sure hope that I would be back in Toronto ere I left America, I bade my good friends good-bye, never, as it proves, in all likelihood, to see them again, and, in the midst of a snow-fall, resumed my journey with my companions towards Quebec.

After undergoing a year of obloquy, ill-looks, slander, and popular disfavour in a great country, it was very pleasant to meet with such marks of good-will and kindness from one’s countrymen and fellow-subjects on the same continent; and it was quite as gratifying to know that such feelings were entertained by them, as it would have been to receive the outward token of their existence, which alone would have contented my friends.

The evening on which I left Toronto was intensely cold. Never for a moment had the snow and frost relented, and a wind of piercing keenness swept up the frozen dust in thick clouds, which penetrated every chink. The railway officials did their best for us, and the stove in the carriage was poked up to excessive energy; but the heat of these calorifiers is worse than cold itself.

Our way lay through a snow-field bordered by snow-hills, or by the stiff cones of snow-covered firs. Our fellow-passengers were big men in fur-coats and thick boots, who were given to silence and sleep. Slowly the train creaked through the soft barrier which so gently yet stiffly, opposed the tramp of the iron horse. The landscape was simply nothing to see. It looked as if one were going for ever through a vast array of newly-washed sheets spread over the whole country. Darkness fell suddenly out of the skies on the whiteness, but still could not darken it. The whiteness shone through the depths of night, and flashed out in streaks of dazzling light, as the flare of the engine-fires and of the lamps shot out over the surface. And so it came to pass that at last we went to sleep, gathering up rug and greatcoat and wrapper into vast mounds, from which issued many a spiritus asper and susurrous sounds for the livelong night.

On waking up it seemed as though day had just dawned, but the watch said it was nearly eight o’clock. A cold white light, filled with rime, battled through the frost on the windows of the carriage, which was spread over the glass like beautiful damascened white tablecloths. Scraping away a lovely trellis pattern with my nail, I opened a space of clear transparent ocean in the ice-sea, and was rewarded for my pains by a view of a cloud of snow which had been falling all night, and now rested deep on the ground, and turned the pines and firs bounding the line of rail into ragged white tumuli.

The train still creaked and bumped now and then over the snow, squeaked, puffed, and grated, and at last came to a standstill, again went on, and again halted. At last we reached a station. Seven hours behind time! A sensation of hunger by no means slight fell upon us. Frost is an appetizer of undoubted merit. We had neglected laying in a viaticum. More prudent and accustomed travellers produced flasks and brown-paper parcels, and all the wonderful things which Americans consume on the voyage. Let me not be fastidious, however; for after a time I envied men who were discussing pleasantly fragments of unseemly cakes, spice-nuts, and brandy-balls for breakfast.

My companions prowled up and down the horrid car, reeking with the stove-drawn odours of many bodies during the night—they sought food like young lions. Pah! what an atmosphere it was!—all windows closed by reason of cold intense outside, the hateful stoves, one in the centre of the car, and one at each end, heated almost to redness, surrounded by men who crowded up, and chewed tobacco, and smote the iron surface with hissing burnt-sienna-coloured jets!—frowsty, fusty, and muggy exceedingly. There was a deposit of train-oil,—a hot humanised dew all over us. And water, there was none to wash with. So I applied a handful of snow gathered on the carriage platform to my face and hands in lieu thereof, and got back to my seat just as A——n returned from some distant part of the train with hands full of apples. They were delicious, and with three or four of them, and a few cigars, we managed to construct a charming breakfast.

It was so dark when the train reached Kingston, that we could see nothing more than the outlines of the station. I was exceedingly anxious to visit a place of so much importance historically, commercially, and strategically, and fully intended to remain there for some days on my return to Toronto; but the Fates ordained that it was not to be, and all my personal knowledge of Kingston was derived from that glimpse in the dark of the railway terminus, and certain steeples and spires rising above the snow. But the position of the city confers upon it a very high place on the list of military posts for the defence of Canada, and some considerations connected with it will be discussed hereafter.

Politically Kingston has become a dead body since 1844, when its short-lived career as the capital and seat of government was cut short. The military genius of the French occupants in early days, in seizing on the best positions for the defence and maintenance of their conquest, is shown still, by the fact that our forts occupy the sites of those which were originally constructed by them. More than a hundred years before there was any trace of a city at Kingston, or any building save the wigwam of the Indian or the log-huts of the soldiery, the Count de Frontenac built a fort in communication with the great system, from the St. Lawrence to the Ohio, of the French strongholds, which was destined to extend to the Mississippi, and to enclose the troublesome English Colonies within stringent limits. When this fort was captured by Colonel Bradstreet in 1756, the French had only established a kind of military colony and a very insignificant trading-post round the fort. In little more than twenty years subsequently, the present town was founded; and in the war with America the place became of very great consequence.

It is a fact curious enough, and worthy of some consideration, that the great war in the middle of the last century, which ended in the loss to France of her hopes of Indian influence and of empire, and in the seizure of her American Colonies by Great Britain, should have, according to the best of American statesmen and philosophical reasoners, led also to the establishment of the United States, and the foundation of the greatest Republic the world has ever seen.

Kingston commands the entrance to the Rideau Canal, one of the principal means of communication between Lake Ontario and the interior of the country, forming an admirable connection between the Ottawa River and Lake Ontario: it is, in fact, the most important means of inland intercourse, because the difficulties in the way of an enemy are very considerable, either in a direct attack upon Kingston, if properly fortified, or in a flank movement against it from the interior.

The canal is brought into working order with the Grand Trunk Railway; so that if the Americans, our only possible enemy, were to make demonstrations against our frontier and our lines, with a view of intercepting our supplies and internal relations between the east and west of the province, it would be easy to disembark men and munitions at Kingston Mills and forward them by railway. Kingston, again, is an excellent point of observation, and with proper defences and aggressive resources, ought to command Lake Ontario and the entrance from the St. Lawrence. An adequate force stationed there, with a proper flotilla, could effectually keep in check any hostile demonstration from Cape Vincent, Sacket’s Harbour, or the other posts from Oswego to the western extremity of Lake Ontario.

The harbour is said to be excellent; there is a dockyard, which could be rendered capable of doing most of the work required for our light gunboats: and with the additions pointed out and urged by our engineer officers to the existing fortifications, Kingston could be made a position of as much military strength as it undoubtedly now is of strategical importance.

Between Toronto and Kingston there are, however, Port Hope, Coburg, and Belville on the line of railway, all of which present facilities for the landing of an enemy: at any one of these points a hostile occupation would cut the regular communications at once; and indeed it is very much to be regretted, in a military point of view, that engineering, commercial, or other considerations caused the makers of the Grand Trunk Railway to run the line close to the shores of a great inland sea, the opposite side of which belongs to a foreign country which has from time to time announced (if not through the lips of statesmen, by the popular voice) that the conquest of Canada is a fixed principle in its policy.

The Americans, whether by accident or design, have constructed the New York Central, which runs along the south coast, at a distance of many miles from Lake Ontario, but cross-lines connect it with the principal ports upon the lake, from Buffalo to Sandusky; their line runs tolerably close to the shore of Lake Erie higher up, but there is no position on that lake which has to fear the aggression of such a force as could be collected at Kingston.

Perhaps to the generality of people in England, Kingston was first made known by the unpleasant incidence which compelled the Prince of Wales to pass it unvisited, or rather to remain on board the steamer. No doubt the Orangemen are now very sorry for what they did, and, in fact, feel that they were led by the fanaticism or the desire for notoriety of some small local leaders to make themselves very ridiculous and offensive. The zeal of these Defenders of the Faith was no doubt stimulated by the presence of a large number of Irish Roman Catholics, who are at least as violent as their opponents.

The French-Canadians, with just as much fidelity to their faith, do not enter into the violent polemical, political, and miscalled religious controversies which led to such an unseemly result at Kingston; and certainly, it is much to be regretted that the peculiar influence of American institutions, which checks any attempt of religious parties to disturb the public peace or social relations for their own purposes and for the gratification of pride or lust of power, cannot be extended to the provinces and to the British Possessions, where they work such prodigious mischief.

From Kingston the line winds along the shore of the great lake-like river, studded with a thousand islands. Here, again, the Americans would possess considerable advantage in case of war, as their main-line is far inland, but branch-lines from it lead to Cape Vincent and Ogdensburgh, at right-angles to our line of communication. The American water-boundary, I believe, passes outside a considerable number of the more important islands; but the power which possesses naval supremacy on Lake Ontario will probably find the means of commanding the Upper St. Lawrence, no matter which belligerent establishes himself on the islands.

The Canadians with whom I conversed in the train declared they were quite ready to defend their country in case of invasion, but did not understand, they said, being taken away to distant points to fight for the homes of others. It seemed quite clear to them that the United States would only invade Canada to humiliate and weaken the mother-country, and that the general defence of the province ought to devolve on the power whose policy had led to the war; whilst the inhabitants should be ready to give the imperial troops every assistance in the localities where they are actually resident.

CHAPTER V.

Arrive at Cornwall—The St. Lawrence—Gossip on India—Aspect of the country—Montreal—The St. Lawrence Hall Hotel—Story of a Guardsman—Burnside—Dinner—Refuse a banquet—Flags—Climate—Salon-à-manger—Contrast of Americans and English—Sleighs—The “Driving Club”—The Victoria Bridge—Uneasy feeling—Monument to Irish emigrants—Irish character—Montreal and New York—The Rink—Sir F. Williams—Influence of the Northerners.

It was noon ere we reached Cornwall, a place some seventy miles from Montreal, where a rough restaurant at the station enabled us to make a supplement to the deficiencies of our simple repast. The people who poured in and out of the train here were fine rough-looking fellows, with big, broad, sallow faces and large beards, wrapped up in furs, wearing great long boots,—men of a new type. Several of them were speaking in French; but the literature which travelled along with us was American, mostly New York, in the matter of periodicals: it was of course English, and pirated, in the more substantial forms. The frost still clung to the outside of the windows; inside, the foliage and broad tracery of leaves, and cathedral aisles, and plumes of knight and lady, tumbled down in big drops, and by degrees the sun cleared away the crust on one side, so that we could look out on the flat expanse of snow-covered forest.

On our right, now and then glimpses could be caught of a pale blue riband-like streak across the dazzling white plain. “That’s the St. Lawrence you see there. Pitty it’s friz up so long. We wouldn’t envy the Yankees anything they’ve got to show us if we had a port open all the year,” quoth an honest Canadian beside me. For the first time I began to feel sympathy for a country that “can’t get out” for five mortal months, and that breathes through another man’s nostrils and mouth. A horrible semi-suffocated sort of existence. No wonder the Canadians look longingly over at that bit of land which Lord Ashburton yielded to the United States and the State of Maine.

A——n and I, by way of counteracting the influence of the atmosphere and external scenery, talked of India. Some poor creatures half the world’s girth away, whom we were speaking of at that moment, would have given a good deal for some of the despised ice and snow around us, groaning no doubt under that sun which even in February knows no coolness in Central India in mid-day. How oddly things turn up! I had ever firmly believed that a young soldier friend of mine had slain many enemies in that great rebellion, and had, Achilles-like, sent many souls of sepoys to Hades, and so in that faith speaking, suddenly I was interrupted by A——n. “What are you talking of? He kill so many budmashes at Nulla-Nullah! Why, I don’t believe he ever fired a shot or made a cut at a nigger in his life.” My fierce little friend had done both, and many a time and oft. And so, as he knew, away went a reputation, within thirty miles of Montreal; thermometer 10°.

Hereabouts were seen many snug homesteads rising up through the snow, with farmhouses, and outhouses—all clad in the same livery. The country looked well cleared and settled; sleighs glided over the surface, and were drawn up at the stations to carry passengers and luggage. Anon we came upon a great frozen river, and crossed it by a series of arches too great for a bridge; but this was nevertheless the Ottawa itself rolling away under its ice coat, as the blood flows through an artery, to rush unseen into the cold embrace of the St. Lawrence. These two great bridges must be worth visiting when they can be seen in the full exercise of their functions. The river forms an island here which the ice now continentalises.

About four o’clock, very much as land looms up in the ocean, we saw the dark mass of Montreal rising up in contrast to the whitened mountain at the foot of which it lies; the masts of vessels frozen in, and funnels of steamers, mingled with steeples and domes; and as the sun struck the windows a thousand flashes of glowing red darted back upon us. Then the train ran past a “marine factory,” whatever that may be, and a suburb of stone and wooden houses intermixed, and a population of children whose faces looked preternaturally pale, perhaps from the reflection of the snow, and of women in pork-pie hats with thick veils over their faces, and of men, mostly smoking, in great fur coats and boots; and at last the train reached the terminus, where a great concourse of sleigh-drivers, who spoke as though they had that moment left Kingstown jetty, Ireland, claimed our body and property. These were promptly routed by the staff of the St. Lawrence Hall, who carried off our party to an omnibus without wheels, which finally bore us off to the hotel so called.

The soldiers about the streets were all comfortably clad in dark overcoats, fur caps with flaps for the ears, and long boots; but the dress takes from their height, and does not conduce to a smart soldier-like appearance.

The streets through which we passed were lined with well-built lofty houses. It might scarce be fancy which made me think that Montreal was better built than American cities of the same size. In the great cold hall of the hotel there was excessive activity: befurred officers of the regiments sent to Canada during the Trent difficulty, before Mr. Seward had made up his mind and persuaded the President to give up the Southern envoys, were coming in, going out, or were congregated in the passage. Orderlies went to and fro with despatches and office papers. In fact the general-in-chief, Sir Fenwick Williams of Kars, and staff, the commanding officer of the Guards, Lord G. Paulet, and staff, were quartered here, and carried on their office business; and the Commissary-General, Power, and the Principal Medical Officer, Dr. Muir, were also lodging in the hotel, with a host of combatant officers of inferior grade.

There was no rush to the table-d’hôte, after the American fashion, but the dinner itself was very much in the American style. I was much amused at the distress of a Guardsman who made his appearance at the doorway during dinner, with a letter in his hand for one of the officers. He halted stiffly at the threshold, and stood staring at the brilliancy of the splendid ormolu ornaments, and the array of lacquered chandeliers and covers. In vain the waiters pointed out to him the officer he sought; he would not intrude on the gorgeous scene, nor would he trust his missive to another hand. At last, after gazing in a desperate manner on space, and balancing from one leg to another, he took a maddening resolve, put his hand to his cap, held the other out with the letter in it as his dumb apology and in mitigation of punishment, and marching straight to his mark, trampling crowds of waiters in his way, only halted when he came up to the table he sought, where, with eyeballs starting, he put the missive to the level of the captain’s nose, saluted, and ejaculated, “By order of Colonel Jones, sir.” “All right.” With a wheel round and a salute, the perturbed warrior countermarched and escaped into the prosaic outward world. A Frenchman would have come in with the most perfect self-possession, and possibly with some little grace. An American would probably have turned his chew, have addressed some remarks to the waiters on his way, have given the captain a tap on the back or a nudge of the elbow, and would rather have expected a drink. And which of the three, after all, is to be preferred?

I met a whole regiment of men I knew, and after dinner adjourned with some of them to my rooms. They all growled of course, found fault with Canada and abused the Government, and seemed to think it ought not to snow in winter.

I received a most interesting letter from a friend of mine with the Burnside expedition, which revealed as large an amount of bad management as could well be conceived. Burnside, personally, has enough ingenuity, but is quite wanting in self-reliance, presence of mind, and vigour. The expedition from which so much was expected did more than might have been thought possible at one time under the circumstances.

A telegram from Toronto informed me that it was in contemplation to invite me to a public banquet, and desired me to state my wishes. Very much as I appreciated such an honour from my countrymen and fellow-subjects, it was inconsistent, as I conceived, with my position, as it certainly was with my sense of the merits attributed to me, to accept the very great compliment offered to me. It came all the more agreeably as it was in such contrast to the manner in which I had been received in the United States for the last few months; and it touched me very sensibly, more than my friends at Toronto could have imagined.

A——n came in rather wroth about a matter of flags. He had been to see some Frenchmen, whether real or true Zouaves of the Crimea I know not, who gave out on tremendous posters that they were the identical children of the Beni Zoug Zoug, who had acted before us all in that theatre on the Woronzow Road once so charming and well filled; and he had been seized with indignation because they, in that Canadian city, under the British flag, had dared to perform under the folds of the tricolor, and the stars and stripes of the United States. I explained that the British flag was metaphorically and properly supposed to float above both; all which much comforted him, and so to bed—cold enough, in despite of stoves and open fire. The servants here are Irish men and women, with a sprinkling of free negroes.

Next day the weather was not at all warmer. In winter time the cold is by no means unbearable in this Canadian clime, when one is well furred and clad; to the poor it must be very trying, for furs and fuel are dear, and even clothing of an ordinary kind is not cheap. The emigrant, in his rude log hut open in many chinks, must shrink and shiver and suffer in the blast. What do they, who follow, not owe to the hardy explorer who has opened up wood and mountain, and laid down paths on the sea for them?

A thick haze had now settled down on all things, a cold freezing rime, which clung and crept to one, and almost sat down on the very hearth. Descending the stairs, which were in a transition state and in the hands of carpenters, to the long “salon-à-manger,” I found the tables well filled by guardsmen, riflemen, and members of the staff, military and civil, who gave the place the air of a mess-room under disorderly circumstances.

I had before this seen many such rooms in American hotels in cities filled with soldiery, and I am bound to say the difference between the two sets of men was remarkable. The noise, gaiety, and life of these grave English were exuberant when compared to the silence of American gatherings of the same kind, which are, indeed, disturbed by the clatter of plates and dishes, and the horrible squeaking of chair legs over the polished floors, but otherwise are quiet enough. Here, men laughed out, talked loud, shouted to the waiters, aired their lungs in occasional scoldings and objurgations, having reference to chops and steaks and tardy-coming dishes; “old-fellowed” their friends; asked or told the news. I don’t know that the Englishmen were better looking, taller, or in any physical way had the advantage of the men of the continent, except in ruddier cheeks perhaps, and in frames better provided with cellular tissue; but the distinction of style and manner was marked.

The Americans usually came into the salon singly; each man, with a bundle of newspapers under his arm, took a seat at a vacant table, ordered a prodigious repast, which he gobbled in haste, as though he was afraid of losing a train, and then rushed off to the bar or smoked in the passages, never sitting for a moment after his breakfast. The Englishmen came in little knots or groups, exhibited no great anxiety about newspapers, ordered simple and substantial feasts, enjoyed them at their ease, chattered much, and were in no particular hurry to leave the table. The taciturnity of the American was not well-bred, nor was the good humour of the Briton vulgar. It may be said the comparison is not just, because the Americans were engaged in a fearful war, which engrossed all their thoughts; whilst the English officer was merely sent out on a tour of duty. But in the bar-room, restaurants, or streets, the American did not maintain the same aspect: he put on what is called a swaggering air, and was not at all disposed to let his shoulder-straps or his sword escape notice.

The good people at home would have been greatly surprised to hear the way in which the officers spoke of their exile to the snows of Canada; but though they growled and grumbled when breakfast was over, probably till dinner time, they would have fought all the better for it. Indeed there was not much else to do.

The streets were piled with snow; and at the front of the hotel, sleighs, driven by Irishmen, such as are seen managing the Dublin hacks, wrapped up in fur and sheepskins, were drawn up waiting for fares, to the constant jingle of the bells, which enlivened the air. It was too early and too raw and cold for many of the ladies of Montreal to trust their complexions to the cruelties of the climate, thickly veiled though they might be; but now and then a sleigh slid by with a bright-eyed freight half-buried in fourrures, and some handsome private vehicles of this description reached in their way as high a point of richness and elegance as could well be conceived. The horses were rarely of corresponding quality. The guardsmen and other soldiers, “red” and “green,” strode about in cold defiant boots, and seemed to like the town and climate better than their officers. Mr. Blackwell, the amiable and accomplished chief of the Grand Trunk Railway, called for me, and drove me out to an early dinner.

It was a matter of some ceremony to set forth: a fur cap with flaps secured over the ears and under the chin, a large fur cloak, and a pair of moccasins for the feet, had to be put on; and then we climb the sides of the boat-like sleigh, and started off at a rapid pace, which produced a sea-sick sensation—at least what I am told is like it—in very rough places where the runners of the sleighs have cut into the snow. On our way we were rejoiced by the sight of the “Driving Club” going out for an excursion, Sir Fenwick Williams leading. All one could see, however, was a certain looming up of dark forms through the drift gliding along to the music of the bells, which followed one after the other, and were lost in the hazy yet glittering clouds tossed up by the horses’ hoofs from the snow. In the afternoon the rime passed off, and the day became clearer, but no warmer.

At about three o’clock, we sleighed over by rough roads to the terminus of the railway, close to the Victoria Bridge, where a party of the directors and some officers—Colonel Mackensie, Colonel Wetherall, Colonels Ellison and Earle of the Guards, and others recently arrived—were assembled to view the great work which would stamp the impress of English greatness on Canada, if her power were to be rooted out to-morrow. The royal carriage—a prettily decorated long open waggon, with the Prince of Wales’s coat of arms, plume, and initials still shining brightly—was in readiness; and as cold makes one active, or very lazy, as the case may be, we lost no time in starting to explore the bridge, which threw its massive weight in easy stretches across the vast frozen highway of the St. Lawrence—so light, so strong, so graceful, for all its rigid lines, that I can compare the impression of the thing to nothing so much as to that of the bounds of a tiger.

The entrance, in the limestone rock, is grandly simple; but ere we could well admire its proportions the car ran into the darkness of the great tube. The light admitted by the neatly designed windows in the iron sides of the aërial tunnel was not enough to enable us to pierce through the smoke and the fog which clung to the interior. The car proceeded to the end, the thermometer marking 6°. Statistics, though I have them all by me, I am not about to give, as the history of the bridge is well known; but Mr. Blackwell showed me a table which indicated that the monster suffers or rejoices like a living thing, and contracts and expands and swells out his lines wondrously, just in proportion as the temperature alters.

From this end of the magnificent bridge one could see, nearly a hundred feet below him, the rugged surface of the ice, beneath which was rolling the St. Lawrence. It was distinguished from the snowy expanse covering the land by the bluish glint of the ice, and by the torn glacier-like aspect of the course of the stream, where the frozen masses had been contending fiercely with the current and with each other till the frost-king had clutched them and bound them in the midst of the conflict. You could trace the likeness of spires, pinnacles, castles, battlements, and alpine peaks in the wild confusion of those serried heaps, which were tilted up and forced together; but the haze did not permit us to follow the course of the stream for any great distance. It was too cold for enthusiastic enjoyment, and we got into the car and backed into the darkness till we reached the centre of the bridge.

I confess, when it occurred to me that great cold makes iron brittle, the uneasy feeling I experienced of suspense, malgré moi, in passing over any of these great engineering triumphs, was aggravated so far that it required a good deal of faith in the charming diagram of the effects of temperature on the bridge, to make me quite at ease. I suppose it is only an engineer who can be quite above the thought, “Suppose, after all, the bridge does go at this particular moment.” And then the iron did crackle and bang and shriek most unmistakeably and demonstratively.

At the centre of the bridge we got out, and had another look at the river, some sixty feet below. Remarked the thinness of the iron; was informed it was on purpose, every plate being made specially for its place. Examined carefully a bolt driven in by the Prince of Wales; rather liked its appearance, as it was well hammered and seemed sound. Then the car received us, and we were drawn through this ghastly cold gallery once more, and were divulged at the railway station among a crowd of furred citizens.

Thence through the city over the rough road in our carrioles and sleighs. On our way I remarked a stone obelisk standing out of the snow close to the railway, in a low patch of ground near the river. “That,” said my companion, “is a memorial to six thousand Irish emigrants who died here of ship fever.” What a history in those few words—a tale of sorrow and woe unutterable—I hope, not of neglect and indifference too! The railway engineers have thoughtfully erected the monument of the nameless dead, and so far rescued their fate from oblivion.

I am not so philosophic as to witness the desolating emigrations which leave the homes of a country waste, and fill the lands of future kingdoms and possible rivals with an alienated population, without regret. Above all, I pity the fate of the poor pioneers whose hapless lot it is to labour unthanked and despised, to build up the stranger’s cities, to clear his forests, and make his roads, to found his power and greatness, and then to sit at his gate waiting for alms when the hour cometh that no man can work.

It is most strange, indeed, and yet too true, that a race which, above all others, ought to seek the material advantages and the substantial results of hard work, should be the most readily led astray by windy agitators and by political disputes and passions. Here we are driving through the streets of Montreal, which owes much of its existence to Irish labour, and the labourer lives in filth and degradation, in the back slums of the city, intensely interested in elections and clerical discussions, little better cared for or regarded than the dogs thereof till his vote is required.

The city is now in its winter mantle, but it shows fair proportions. The Roman Catholic chapels are well placed and handsome, and excel in size and numbers the Protestant churches. The Quarter-master-General, who has had to hire one of the Catholic colleges to serve as barracks for the troops, says the priests are remarkably keen practitioners at a bargain: good Churchmen always were in old times. The metal-covered domes and spires, the roofs of houses sheeted with tin, now began to glisten in the sun, and gave a bright look to the place which did not make it all the warmer.

Montreal is a much finer-looking place than I had expected. The irregularity of the streets pleased the eye, wearied by straight lines and regular frontage. The houses of stone with double windows have plain bare fronts, and do not present so good an appearance as the best of New York; but the character of the residences as a whole is better, and the effect of the city, to compare small things with great, very much more interesting and picturesque.

Our destination in this drive was the Rink, or covered skating-ground, which is the fashionable sporting resort of Montrealese in the winter time. The crowd of sleighs and sleigh-drivers around the doors of a building which looked like a Methodist chapel, announced that the skaters were already assembled.

Anything but a Methodist-looking place inside. The room, which was like a large public bath-room, was crowded with women, young and old, skating or preparing to skate, for husbands, and spread in maiden rays over the glistening area of ice, gliding, swooping, revolving on legs of every description, which were generally revealed to mortal gaze in proportion to their goodness, and therefore were displayed on a principle so far unobjectionable. The room was lighted with gas, which, with the heat of the crowd, made the ice rather sloppy; but the skating of the natives was admirable, and some hardened campaigners of foreign origin had by long practice learned to emulate the graces and skill of the inhabitants.

It was a mighty pretty sight. The spectators sat or stood on the raised ledge round the ice parallelogram like swallows on a cliff, and now and then dashed off and swept away as if on the wing over the surface, in couples or alone, executing quadrilles, mazurkas, waltzes, and tours de force, that made one conceive the laws of gravitation must be suspended in the Rink, and that the outside edge is the most stable place for the human foot and figure. Mercy, what a crash! There is a fine stout young lady sprawling on the ice, tripped up by Dontstop of the Guards, who is making a first attempt, to the detriment of the lieges. How delighted the ladies are, and pretend not to be; for the fallen fair one is the best contortionist in the place! She is on her legs again—has shaken the powdered ice and splash off her dandy jacket and neat little breeches,—yes, they wear breeches, a good many of them,—and is zigzagging about once more like a pretty noiseless firework.

The little children skate, so do most portentous mammas. A line of recently arrived officers, in fur caps and coats, look on, all sucking their canes, and resolving to take private lessons early in the morning. Some, in the goose-step stage, perform awful first lines with their skates, and leave me in doubt as to whether they will split up or dash out their brains. The young ladies pretend to avoid them with unanimity, but sail round them still as seagulls sweep by a drowning man. And if a fellow should fall—and be saved by a lady? Well! It may end in an introduction, and a condition of “muffinage.” And what that is we must tell you hereafter. I can’t answer your question as to whether the women were pretty; eyes dark generally, and good complexions. The Rink is a bad place to judge of that point.

I paid my respects to Sir Fenwick Williams, who has his quarters in the hotel. The general has plenty of work to do at present, and did not seem quite so well as when I saw him after his return from Kars. There is a general impression that the Federals will keep their armies in good humour at the end of the war, by annexing Canada, if they can. No one asks what they will do with them when that work has been accomplished. Dined at the house of the Hon. John Rose, member for Montreal, and formerly a member of the Government. He had, after his hospitable wont, some young officers to dine also; and, after an agreeable evening, I slid home in a bitter snow drift to the hotel, and so to bed. Here is a page from my diary.

February 6.—The severe cold makes the head ache, and stupefies me ultra modum. I wrote to Mr. Hope, stating my reasons for declining the great compliment of a public dinner intended for me at Toronto. As I move about here, I feel that society is much under the influence of the unruly fellow, our next neighbour. There is no great love for him; but his prodigious kicks and blows, his threats, his bad language, his size and insolence, frighten them up here. There is great anxiety for the American news; and I am bound to say, the Northern Americans must have done something to make the Canadians dislike them, as there is little love for them even where little is felt for England. I saw a great many of the principal personages to-day. Called on the Bishop, whose sweet, benevolent face is an index of his mind. He spoke in high terms of his Roman Catholic coadjutor; indeed, it would be difficult to quarrel with Dr. Mountain. In education, they work harmoniously together. Mr. D’Arcy M’Ghie called on me. He is now a member of the Canadian Parliament, and is giving his support to the authority of the British Crown. His loyalty is, of course, stigmatised by some as treason to what they call the cause of Ireland; but I believe the atmosphere of Canada is found to have a vapour-dispelling, febrifuge character about it which works well on the mind of the Irish immigrant. A most entertaining, witty, well-informed barrister, also an Irishman, paid me a visit, and gave some admirable sketches of Canadian society, of the bar, of the working of parties, as well as his own ideas on all points, in a peculiarly terse and pleasant way.

CHAPTER VI.

Visit the “lions” of Montreal—The 47th Regiment—The city open to attack—Quays, public buildings—French colonisation—Rise of Montreal—Stone—A French-Anglicised city—Loyalty of Canadians—Arrival of Troops—Facings—British and American Army compared—Experience needed by latter—Slavery.

I remained several days at Montreal, examining the lions, and making the most of my brief stay. Here are living a knot of Southern families in a sort of American Siberia, at a very comfortable hotel, who nurse their wrath against the Yankee to keep it warm and sustain each other’s spirits. They form a nucleus for sympathising society to cluster around, and so germinate into innocent little balls, sleigh-parties, and occasional matrimonial engagements.

“Waiting for his regiment,” too, was old General Bell—the veteran who saw his first shot fired in the Peninsula, and his last, forty-four years afterwards, before Sebastopol. There were parades of the 47th Regiment and inspection-drills on the St. Lawrence in snow-shoes; and Penn marched out his Armstrongs in beautiful order, on their sleighs, for all to see.

The position of this fine city leaves it open to attack from the American frontier, which is so near that the blue tops of the mountain ridges of the bordering States can be seen on a clear day. The rail from the centre of New York runs direct to it, through the arsenal and fort of Rouse’s Point on Lake Champlain; and there are two other lines converging on it, so that an enormous force could be swiftly sent against it. The frontier is here a mere line on the map, so drawn as to leave the head of Lake Champlain and Rouse’s Point in the hands of the Americans. Its importance, its beauty, and the feeling of the inhabitants would render it tempting to the Northern armies; and the fierce, relentless, and destructive spirit which has been evoked in their civil war, might lead them to destroy all that is valuable and handsome in a city which stands in strong contrast to the hideousness of American towns, if they were, as of old, obliged to abandon the city.

The quays of Montreal are of imperial beauty, and would reflect credit on any city in Europe. They present a continuous line of cut-stone from the Lachine Canal along the river-front before the city, leaving a fine broad mall or esplanade between the water’s edge and the houses. The public buildings, built of solid stone, in which a handsome limestone predominates, are of very great merit. Churches, court-houses, banks, markets, hospitals, colleges, all are worthy of a capital; and these would present a very different appearance to an invader from that which was offered by the poverty-stricken and insignificant Montreal of 1812.

There are a few guns mounted on a work on the left bank of the river above the city, but for military purposes the place may be considered perfectly open. There are more than 90,000 people in the city, but it is said not to be a fighting population; and there are many foreigners and emigrants of an inferior class, who taint the place with rowdyism. The British element was active in volunteering when I was there, and figures in uniform were frequently to be seen in the streets; but the time was unfavourable for any public displays, and I never saw any of the volunteers working en masse.

Here, as elsewhere, the jealousies of claimants for command, local and personal rivalry, have impeded the good work; but such obstacles would vanish in the presence of danger. National feeling has tended to make the organisation of corps too expensive, and the question of drafting for the militia has also interfered with the full development of the movement.

It would be unjustifiable to assert that the enterprise of the French people, and their capacity for colonisation, have been diminished by republican institutions; but, unquestionably, the great convulsions which have agitated society since the fall of the monarchy appear to have concentrated the energies of the race upon objects nearer home, even though they have annexed Algeria, established a protectorate over Tahiti, and are engaged in war with the Cambodians. Where is the enterprise which, more than 200 years ago, originated a company of merchant adventurers, who pushed out settlements into this wilderness, and founded factories among the Iroquois and the Mohawks? In those days, indeed, the zeal of Jesuits and other Roman Catholic missionaries preceded the march and directed the course of commerce.

Montreal owes its existence to a certain Monsieur Maisonneuve, the factor of the Commercial Association in 1642. More than 100 years afterwards it was nearly destroyed by fire; and ten years after the conflagration the troops of the insurgent colonies took possession of the town, which was a favourite object of attack in the two American wars.

In spite of many misfortunes—fire, hostile occupation, insurrection, riot—Montreal has flourished exceedingly, and the energy of its population has been displayed in securing for it a principal share of the trade between England and the Upper Provinces. Its railway communications have been pushed with great energy, and the canals and quays are in imperial grandeur; but still, in case of war with the States, the only outlet in winter (by rail to Portland) would be effectually blocked up.

The city contains nearly 100,000 inhabitants, of whom 60,000 are Roman Catholics—representing a great variety of nationalities, with a predominance, however, of French-Canadians and Irish. An abundance of fine stone, found near the town, has enabled the inhabitants to build substantial houses in lieu of the wooden edifices from which they were driven by two great conflagrations; but the material is of a dull cold grey colour, and the streets, seen in winter-time, have in consequence a gloomy and melancholy aspect. Many of the cupolas and spires and the roofs of many of the houses are covered with metal plates, which shine out in the sun, and give the city a bright appearance from a distance, which is not altogether maintained on a nearer approach.

The mental activity of the population, displayed in a large crop of newspapers, doubtless indicates a close intimacy with the United States; but Montreal is, after all, French Anglicised, and, notwithstanding the disaffection of which it gave symptoms in the rebellion, the sympathies of its people are very far removed from the bald republicanism of the New England States.

Nuns and priests seem, to a Protestant eye, to be rather too numerous for the good of the people; but having seen the schools of the Christian Brothers, and having heard the testimony of all classes to the services rendered to morals and religion, to charity and to Christianity, by the various religious orders, I am forced to believe that Montreal is much indebted to their labours.

The number of hospitals, schools, scientific institutions—the libraries, reading-rooms, universities, are remarkable. They are worthy of a highly-civilised, wealthy, and prosperous community; but, in fact, the economy with which they are managed is not one of the least remarkable features about the Montreal institutions. Party animosities have now been softened: but there is no doubt of the satisfaction with which the Liberal Canadian points to the fact that those who were imprisoned and persecuted by the Government, for rebellious acts or tendencies, have since been called to office, and have served the Crown in high official positions.

The people of Canada are learning a useful piece of knowledge or two from what is passing so close to them. The annexation party are heard no more: in their room stand the people of Canada, loyal to the Crown and to the connexion, prepared to defend their homes and altars against invasion. So far as I have gone, in no place in the Queen’s dominions is there greater attachment to her person and authority.

The Canadians see with sorrow the ills which afflict their neighbours, in spite of all the ill-advised menaces of the Northern Press; but they felt naturally indignant at being spoken of as if they were a mere chattel, which could be taken away by the United States from Great Britain in order to spite her. With such turbulent and dangerous elements at work close to them, they will no doubt eagerly assist the authorities in their efforts to secure their borders and their country, by putting the militia on a proper footing. The patriotism of the Legislature can be relied on to do this. England will do the rest, and give her best blood, if need be, to aid this magnificent dependency of the same Crown as that to which she is herself subject, in maintaining the present situation.

It was most agreeable to hear praise instead of grumbling, and to know that amid no ordinary difficulties the troops were landed and conveyed across the snows of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the month of January without casualty or mishap worth mentioning, and that the arrangements were worthy of every commendation. It made us feel proud of our army when we saw the cheerfulness, soldierly look, cleanliness, and deportment of the men, and learnt that they had conducted themselves in the most exemplary manner, though exposed to great temptation by the hospitality of the New Brunswickers and the cheapness of intoxicating liquors.

And what wonderful vicissitudes of service those officers and men have seen! Here is a face yet burned by the suns of India, encircled in fur-cap, and peering into the railway carriage to welcome some well-known friend from China or Aldershot. There marches a sturdy Guardsman, one of the few who remain of the men of Alma and Inkerman, with that small ladder of glory on his breast. Here is one of the old Riflemen—alas, most gracious Queen! they feel proud in sadness of their name now—one of “the Prince Consort’s Own Rifle Brigade,” who heard, that bright evening when our good ship was gliding through the blue waters of the Dardanelles, the rich chorus of those manly voices, most of which are silenced for ever:—

“Soldiers, merrily march away!

Soldier’s glory lives in story,

His laurels are green when his locks are grey,