barrel of pork and a
barrel of flour.

The roads were so bad that it took me three days to perform a journey
of little more than fifty miles. We (that is to say myself and my two
labourers) had numerous upsets; but at last reached the promised land
without any further trouble. My friend in Douro turned out the next day
and assisted me to put up the walls of my shanty and roof it with bass-
wood troughs, which was completed before dark.

I was kept busy for more than a week chinking between the logs and
plastering up all the crevices, cutting out a doorway and place for a
window, casing them; making a door and hanging it on wooden hinges, &c.
I also made a rough table and some stools, which answered better than
they looked. Four thick slabs of lime-stone, placed upright in one
corner of the shanty with clay well packed behind them to keep the fire
off the logs, answered very well for a chimney with a hole cut through
the roof directly above, to vent the smoke.

I made a tolerably good bedstead out of some iron-wood poles, by
stretching strips of elm-bark across, which I plaited strongly together
to support my bed, which was a very good one, and the only article of
luxury I possessed.

I had very foolishly hired two Irish emigrants, who had not been longer
in Canada than myself, and of course knew nothing either of chopping,
logging, fencing, or, indeed, any work belonging to the country. The
consequence of this imprudence was, that the first ten acres I cleared
cost me nearly 5 pounds an acre*--at least 2 pounds more than it should
have done. Experience is often dearly bought, and in this instance the
proverb was fully verified.

[* The usual price for clearing land, and fencing it fit for sowing,
is, for hard wood, from eleven to twelve dollars per acre; for
evergreen, such as pine, hemlock, cedar, or where that kind of timber
predominates, from twelve to fourteen dollars per acre. There is no
fixed price for swamp.]

I found chopping, in the summer months, very laborious. I should have
underbrushed my fallow in the fall, before the leaves fell, and chopped
the large timber during the winter months, when I should have had the
warm weather for logging and burning, which should be completed by the
first day of September. So, for want of experience, it was all up-hill
work with me.

This was the season for musquitoes and black flies. The latter are ten
times the worse of the two. This happened to be a bad fly year