ds the blue smoke, which has now, by an eddy of the wind, filled a
large space between the trees.

You stand before the fire, made under three or four sticks set up
tenwise, to which a large cauldron is hung, bubbling and seething, with
a very strong odour of fat pork; a boy, dirty and ill-favoured, with a
sharp glittering axe, looks very suspiciously at you, but calls off his
wolfish dog, who sneaks away.

A moment shows you a long hut, formed of logs of wood, with a roof of
branches, covered by birch-bark, and by its side, or near the fire,
several nondescript sties or pens, apparently for keeping pigs in,
formed of branches close to the ground, either like a boat turned
upside down, or literally as a pigsty is formed, as to shape.

In the large hut, which is occasionally more luxurious and made of slabs
of wood or of rough boards, if a saw-mill is within reasonable distance,
and there is a passable wood road, or creek, or rivulet, navigable by
canoes, you see some barrel or two of pork, and of flour, or biscuit, or
whiskey, some tools, and some old blankets or skins. Here you are in the
lumberer's winter home--I cannot call him woodman, it would disgrace the
ancient and ballad-sung craft; for the lumberer is not a gentle woodman,
and you need not sing sweetly to him to "spare that tree."

The larger dwelling is the hall, the common hall, and the pig-sties the
sleeping-places. I presume that such a circumstance as pulling off
habiliments or ablution seldom occurs; they roll themselves in a blanket
or skin, if they have one, and, as to water, they are so frequently in
it during the summer, that I suppose they wash half the year
unintentionally. Fat pork, the fattest of the fat, is the lumberer's
luxury; and, as he has the universal rifle or fowling-piece, he kills a
partridge, a bear, or a deer, now and then.

I was exploring last year some woods in a newly settled township, the
township of Seymour West, in the Newcastle district of Upper Canada,
with a view to see the nakedness of the land, which had been represented
to me as flowing with milk and honey, as all new settlements of course
are said to do. I wandered into the lonely but beautiful forest, with a
companion who owned the soil, and who had told me that the lumberers
were robbing him and every settler around of their best pine timber.
After some toiling and tracing the sound of the axes, few and far
between, felling in the distance, we came upon the unvary