elves and a cargo of brothers and sisters to school,
or women with babies taking their wool to the carding mill, they feel
ashamed, and learn to keep the true balance.

Our light skiff, or bark rather, as it might be truely styled, being a
veritable Indian canoe, made of birch bark most cunningly put together,
these being so light as to float in shallow water, and to be easily
removed, are for this reason preferred by the Indians to more solid
materials, who carry them on their backs from stream to stream during
their peregrinations through the country, soon bore us over the diamond
water, whose mirrored surface we scarcely stirred, to the landing place,
whose marshy precincts were now all gemmed with the golden and purple
flowers of the sweet flag or calamus; and as the sun was yet high in the
glorious blue, we resolved to spend the remainder of the day with a
family living near; feeling, in this land of New Brunswick, no qualms
about a sudden visitation, knowing that a people so proverbial for being
"wide awake" can never be taken unawares. Their dwelling, a large frame
building painted most gaily in the bright warm hues the old Dutch
fancies of the states love to cherish, stands in the centre of rich
parks of intervale. The porch is here, as well as at the more humble
log-house, answering as it does in summer for a cool verandah, and in
winter as a shelter from the snows. This, the taste of the country
artist has erected on pillars, not recognisable as belonging to any
known order of architecture, yet here esteemed as tasty and beautiful,
and, as is his custom in the afternoon, is seated the owner of the
dwelling, Silas Mavin, one of that fast declining remnant--the refugees.
He had come from the United States at the revolution, and possessed
himself of this fair heritage in the days when squatting was in vogue;
those palmy days which the older inhabitants love to recall, when
government had not to be petitioned, as it has now, for leave to
purchase land, and when, in place of the now many-worded grant, with its
broad seals and official signatures, people made out their own right of
possession by raising their log-house, and placing the sign manual of
their axe in whatever trees they chose; when moose and caraboo were
plentiful as sheep and oxen are now; when salmon filled each stream, and
the wood-sheltered clearings ripened the Indian corn without failing.

In this land, young as it is, there are those who mourn fo