mmuted pensioners,
and the like, have located themselves and families. Some remain here
under the ostensible reason of providing a shelter for their wives and
children till they have prepared a home for their reception on their
respective grants; but not unfrequently it happens that they are too
indolent, or really unable to work on their lots, often situated many
miles in the backwoods, and in distant and unsettled townships,
presenting great obstacles to the poor emigrant, which it requires more
energy and courage to encounter than is possessed by a vast number of
them. Others, of idle and profligate habits, spend the money they
received, and sell the land, for which they gave away their pensions,
after which they remain miserable squatters on the shanty ground.

The shanty is a sort of primitive hut in Canadian architecture, and is
nothing more than a shed built of logs, the chinks between the round
edges of the timbers being filled with mud, moss, and bits of wood; the
roof is frequently composed of logs split and hollowed with the axe, and
placed side by side, so that the edges rest on each other; the concave
and convex surfaces being alternately uppermost, every other log forms a
channel to carry off the rain and melting snow. The eaves of this
building resemble the scolloped edges of a clamp shell; but rude as this
covering is, it effectually answers the purpose of keeping the interior
dry; far more so than the roofs formed of bark or boards, through which
the rain will find entrance. Sometimes the shanty has a window,
sometimes only an open doorway, which admits the light and lets out the
smoke*. A rude chimney, which is often nothing better than an opening
cut in one of the top logs above the hearth, a few boards fastened in a
square form, serves as the vent for the smoke; the only precaution
against the fire catching the log walls behind the hearth being a few
large stones placed in a half circular form, or more commonly a bank of
dry earth raised against the wall.

[* I was greatly amused by the remark made by a little Irish boy, that
we hired to be our hewer of wood and drawer of water, who had been an
inhabitant of one of these shanties. "Ma'am" said he, "when the weather
was stinging cold, we did not know how to keep ourselves warm; for while
we roasted our eyes out before the fire our backs were just freezing; so
first we turned one side and then the other, just as you would roast a
_guse_ on a spit. Mot