uch of the card-house. In
short, it is as fine as you can conceive, and sets off the village
wonderfully well.

The red pine, near Barrie and through all the Penetanguishene country,
grows to an enormous size. I measured one near Barrie no less than
twenty-six feet in girth, and this was merely a chance one by the
path-side. Its height, I think, must have been at least two hundred
feet, and it was vigorously healthy. What was its age? It would have
made a plank eight feet broad, after the bark was stripped off.

But the woods generally disappoint travellers, as they never penetrate
them; and the lumberers have cut down all available pines and oaks
within reach of the settlements, excepting where they were not worth the
expence of transport. The pines, moreover, take no deep root; and, as
soon as the underbrush or thicket is cleared, they fall before the
storm. Provident settlers, therefore, rarely leave large and lofty trees
near their dwellings for fear of accident.

The pine, in the Penetanguishene country, has a strange fancy to start
out of the earth in three, five, or more trunks, all joined at the base,
and each trunk an enormous tree. I have an idea that this has arisen
from the stony, loose soil they grow in, which has caused this strange
freak of Nature, by making it difficult for the young plant to rear its
head out of the ground. Whatever is the reason, however, all the masts
of some "great Amiral" might be truly provided out of a single
pine-tree.

But we must leave Barrie, after just mentioning Kempenfeldt, about a
mile or so distant, which was the original village; and, although at the
actual terminus of the land road, has never flourished, and still
consists of some half dozen houses. The newer Admiral superseded the
more ancient one; for Barrie did deeds of renown, which it suited the
Canadians to commemorate much more than the unfortunate Kempenfeldt and
his melancholy end.

If ever there was an infamous road between two villages so close
together, it is the road between these two places; I hope it will be
mended, for it is both dark and dangerous.

I always wondered not a little how it happened that Bingham of Barrie
kept such a good table, where fresh meat was as plentiful as at Toronto.
I looked for the market-place of the capital of Simcoe: there was none.
But the mystery was solved the moment I put my foot on board the Beaver
steamer to go back by the water road.

What will the reader thin