This Racing Is Sometimes Productive Of
Very Serious Collisions.
The town is built upon very low and aguish ground, at the foot of a
peculiar and steep eminence, which the inhabitants dignify with the name
of the Mountain.
I ascended this mountain, which might better be called a
molehill, by a flight of a hundred and thirty steps. The view from the top
was very magnificent, but, as an elevated building offered us one still
more extensive, we ascended to the roof by six flights of steps, to see a
camera obscura which was ostentatiously advertised. A very good camera
obscura might have been worth so long an ascent in a house redolent of
spirits and onions; but after we had reached the top, with a great
expenditure of toil and breath, a ragged, shoeless little boy very
pompously opened the door of a small wooden erection, and introduced us to
four panes of coloured glass, through which we viewed the town of
Hamilton, under the different aspects of spring, summer, autumn, and
winter!
Dundurn Castle, a handsome, castellated, baronial-looking building, the
residence of the present Premier, Sir Allan M'Nab, is near Hamilton, and
it has besides some very handsome stone villa residences. There I saw, for
the first and only time in the New World, beautifully kept grass lawns,
with flower-beds in the English style. One very fine morning, when the
maple-leaves were tinted with the first scarlet of the fall, my friends
took me to see Ancaster and Dundas; the former, an old place, very like
some of our grey, quiet Lancashire villages - the latter a good type of the
rapid development and enterprising spirit which are making Canada West to
rival the States in rapidity of progress. There were bridges in course of
construction - railway embankments swarming with labourers - macadamised
roads succeeding those of corduroy and plank - snake-fences giving place to
those of posts and rails, and stone walls - and saw and grist mills were
springing up wherever a "water privilege" could be found. Laden waggons
proceeded heavily along the roads, and the encouraging announcements of
"Cash for wheat," and "Cash for wool," were frequently to be seen. The
views were very fine as we skirted the Mountain, but Canadian scenery is
monotonous and rather gloomy; though the glorious tints of the American
fall give the leaves of some of the trees the appearance rather of
tropical flowers than of foliage.
Ancaster is an old place, outstripped by towns of ten years' existence, as
it has neither a port nor a river. There was an agricultural show, and
monster pumpkins and overgrown cabbages were displayed to admiring crowds,
under the shadow of a prodigious union jack.
Dundas, a near neighbour of Ancaster, has completely eclipsed it. This
appears to be one of the busiest little places in Canada West. It is a
collection of woollen-mills, grist-mills, and iron-foundries; and though,
in my preformed notions of political economy, I had supposed manufactures
suited exclusively to an old country, in which capital and labour are
alike redundant, the aspect of this place was most thriving.
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