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 217

CHAPTER IX.
The Great Fresh-water Seas of Canada 266

CANADA

AND

THE CANADIANS.

CHAPTER I.

Emigrants and Immigration.

Very surprising it seems to assert that the Mother Country knows very
little about the finest colony which she possesses--and that an
enlightened people emigrate from sober, speculative England, sedate and
calculating Scotland, and trusting, unreflective Ireland, absolutely and
wholly ignorant of the total change of life to which they must
necessarily submit in their adopted home.

I recollect an old story, that an old gunner, in an old-fashioned,
three-cornered cocked hat, who was my favourite playfellow as a child,
used to tell about the way in which recruits were obtained for the Royal
Artillery.

The recruiting sergeant was in those days dressed much finer than any
field-marshal of this degenerate, railway era; in fact, the Horse Guards
always turned out to the sergeant-major of the Royal Military Academy of
Woolwich, when that functionary went periodically to the Golden Cross,
Charing Cross, to receive and escort the young gentlemen cadets from
Marlow College, who were abandoning the red coat and drill of the
foot-soldier to become neophytes in the art and mystery of great gunnery
and sapping.

"The way they recruited was thus," said the bombadier. "The gallant
sergeant, bedizened in copper lace from the crown of his head to the
sole of his foot, and with a swagger which no modern drum-major has ever
presumed to attempt, addressed a crowd of country bumpkins.

"'Don't listen to those gentlemen in red; their sarvice is one which no
man who has brains will ever think of--footing it over the univarsal
world; they have usually been called by us the flatfoots. They uses the
musquet only, and have hands like feet, and feet like fireshovels.

"'Mind me, gentlemen, the royal regiment of the Royal Artillery is a
sarvice which no gentleman need be ashamed of.

"'We fights with real powder and ball, the flatfoots fights with