when fairy crystals are
reflecting their cold bright beams on the glistening ice, while the
sleigh flies merrily along, "with bell and bridle ringing," on the same
path we held in summer with the light canoe; when the breath congeals in
a sheet of ice around the face, and the clearness of the atmosphere
makes respiration difficult. To tell us that we are in the same latitude
with the sunny clime of Boulogne, in France, shows us that America
cannot be measured by the European standard. A quarter of the globe lies
between us; they go to bed four hours before we do, and are fast asleep
while we are wide awake. No one attempts to live in the country
districts without a farm. As the place where we lived had but a house
and one acre of land, none being vacant in that immediate neighbourhood,
and finding firing and pasturage expensive, and furthermore wishing to
raise our own potatoes, and, if we liked, live in _peas_, a lot of two
hundred acres was purchased in the settlement, styled, "_par
excellence_," "the English," (from the first settlers being of that
illustrious nation,) a distance of two miles from where we then lived.
Our house was a good one. We did not like to leave it. Selling was out
of the question: so we e'en resolved to take it with us, wishing, as the
Highland robber did of the haystack, that it had legs to walk. A
substitute for this was found in the universal resource of New
Brunswickers for all their wants, from the cradle to the coffin, "the
tree, the bonny greenwood tree," that gives the young life-blood of its
sweet sap for sugar--and even when consumed by fire its white ashes
yield them soap. I have even seen wooden fire-irons, although they do
not go quite so far as their Yankee neighbours, who, letting alone
wooden clocks, deal besides in _wooden hams_, nutmegs, and cucumber
seeds. Two stout trees were then felled (the meanest would have graced a
lordly park), and hewed with the axe into a pair of gigantic sled
runners. The house was raised from its foundation and placed on these.
Many hands make light work; but, had those hands been all hired
labourers, the expense would have been more than the value of the house,
but 'twas done by what is called a "frolic." When people have a
particular kind of work requiring to be done quickly, and strength to
accomplish it, they invite their neighbours to come, and, if necessary,
bring with them their horses or oxen. Frolics are used for building log
huts, choppi