just suit you."

"So it will," rejoined Character; and a civil engineer he became
accordingly, and a very good one into the bargain; for he had brains,
and had used a yard measure all his lifetime.

I was told this story by a person of veracity, who heard the
conversation, but it is by no means a wonderful one; for such is the
versatility of talent which the climate of Northern America engenders,
that I knew a leading member of parliament provincial, who was a
preacher, a shopkeeper, a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, a militia colonel,
and who undertook to build a suspension bridge across the cataracted
river Niagara, to connect the United States with Canada for L8,000,
lawful money of the colony; an undertaking which Rennie would perchance
have valued at about L100,000; but _n'importe_, the bill was passed, and
a banking shop set up instead of a bridge, which answered every purpose,
for the notes passed freely on both sides until they were worn out.

Behold us, however, at Richmond Hill, having safely passed the Slough of
Despond, which the vaunted Yonge Street mud road presents, between the
celebrated hamlet of St. Alban's and the aforesaid hill, one of the
greatest curiosities of which road, near St. Alban's, is the vicinity of
a sort of Mormon establishment, where a fellow of the name of David
Wilson, commonly called David, has set up a Temple of the Davidites,
with Virgins of the Sun, dressed in white, and all the tomfooleries of a
long beard and exclusive sanctity. But America is a fine country for
such knavery. Another curiosity is less pitiable and more natural. It
is Bond Lake, a large narrow sheet of water, on the summit between Lake
Simcoe and Lake Ontario, which has no visible outlet or inlet, and is
therefore, like David Wilson, mysterious, although common sense soon
lays the mystery in both cases bare; one is a freak of Nature concealing
the source and exitus, the other a fraud of man.

The oak ridges, and the stair-like descents of plateau after plateau to
Ontario, are also remarkable enough, showing even to the most
thoughtless that here ancient shores of ancient seas once bounded the
forest, gradually becoming lower and lower as the water subsided. Lyell
visited these with the late Mr. Roy, a person little appreciated and
less understood by the great ones of the earth at Toronto, who made an
excellent geological survey of this part of the province, and whose
widow had infinite difficulty in obtaining a p