A Few Years Afterwards, I Visited C - -, And Looked About For The
Dreadful Cedar-Swamp Which Struck Such A Chill Into My Heart, And
Destroyed The Illusion Which Had Possessed My Mind Of The Beauty Of
The Canadian Woods.
The trees were gone, the tangled roots were
gone, and the cedar-swamp was converted into a fair grassy meadow,
as smooth as a bowling-green.
About sixteen years after my first
visit to this spot, I saw it again, and it was covered with stone
and brick houses; and one portion of it was occupied by a large
manufactory, five or six stories high, with steam-engines,
spinning-jennies, and all the machinery for working up the wool
of the country into every description of clothing. This is
civilisation! This is freedom!
The sites of towns and villages in Canada are never selected at
random. In England, a concurrence of circumstances has generally led
to the gradual formation of hamlets, villages, and towns. In many
instances, towns have grown up in barbarous ages around a place of
refuge during war; around a fortalice or castle, and more frequently
around the ford over a river, where the detention of travellers has
led to the establishment of a place of entertainment, a blacksmith's
or carpenter's shop. A village or town never grows to any size in
Canada without a saw or a grist mill, both which require a certain
amount of water-power to work the machinery. Whenever there is a
river or stream available for such purposes, and the surrounding
country is fertile, the village rapidly rises to be a considerable
town. Frame-houses are so quickly erected, and the materials are so
easily procured near a saw-mill, that, in the first instance, no
other description of houses is to be found in our incipient towns.
But as the town increases, brick and stone houses rapidly supplant
these less substantial edifices, which seldom remain good for more
than thirty or forty years.
Mr. S - -'s tavern, or hotel, was an extensive frame-building of the
kind common in the country. All the lodgers frequent the same long
table at all their meals, at one end of which the landlord generally
presides. Mr. S - -, however, usually preferred the company of his
family in another part of the house; and some one of the gentlemen
who boarded at the tavern, and who possessed a sufficiently large
organ of self-esteem, voted himself into the post of honour, without
waiting for an invitation from the rest of the company. This happy
individual is generally some little fellow, with a long, protruding
nose; some gentleman who can stretch his neck and backbone almost
to dislocation, and who has a prodigious deal of talk, all about
nothing.
The taverns in this country are frequented by all single men, and
by many married men without children, who wish to avoid the trouble
and greater expense of keeping house. Thus a large portion of the
population of the towns take all their meals at the hotels or
taverns, in order to save both expense and time.
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