ying to his
father, "Here, take my boots, old fellow, and clean them." The father
looks a little amazed, upon which the manikin ejaculates, "Why don't you
take them? what's the use of having a father?"

There will be a railway smash in this, as well as in the locomotive
mania. Republicanism towards elders and parents is unnatural; the child
and the man were not born equal.

I remember reading in a voluminous account of the terrors of the French
revolution a remarkable passage:--servants denounced masters, debtors
denounced creditors, women denounced husbands, children denounced
parents, youth denounced protecting age; gratitude was unknown; a favour
conferred led to the guillotine: but never, never in that awful period,
in that reign of the vilest passions of our nature over reason, was
there one instance, one single instance, of a parent denouncing its
child.

It is not a good sign when extreme youth pretends to have discovered the
true laws of the universe, when the son is wiser than the father, or
when immature reason usurps the functions of the ripened faculties.

I have put this together because I hear hourly parents deprecating the
system of education in the greatest city of Western Canada; because I
hear and see children of fourteen swaggering about the streets with all
the consequence of unfledged men, smoking cigars, frequenting
tavern-bars and billiard-rooms, and no doubt led by such unbridled
license into deeper mysteries and excesses; because I hear clergymen
lament that boys of that age lose their health by excesses too difficult
of belief to fancy true. Surely a salutary check in time may be applied
to such an evil.

But liberty and equality, as I said before, are extending on both sides
of the Atlantic: and in their train come these evils, simply because
liberty and equality are as much misunderstood as real republicanism and
limited monarchy are.

CHAPTER VIII.

The old Canadian Coach--Jonathan and John Bull passengers--"That
Gentleman"--Beautiful River, beautiful drive--Brock's
Monument--Queenston--Bar and Pulpit--Trotting horse Railroad--Awful
accident--The Falls once more--Speculation--Water
privilege--Barbarism--Museum--Loafers--Tulip-trees--Rattlesnakes--The
Burning Spring--Setting fire to Niagara--A charitable Woman--The
Nigger's Parrot--John Bull is a Yankee--Political
Courtship--Lundy's Lane--Heroine--Welland Canal.

I can make no stay at Niagara for the present