God appears to be listened to with
gladness. May a blessing attend those that in spirit and in truth would
restore again to us the public duties of the Sabbath, which, left to our
own guidance, we are but too much inclined to neglect.

Farewell.

LETTER XVIII.

Busy Spring.--Increase of Society and Comfort.--Recollections of Home.--
Aurora Borealis

THIS has been a busy spring with us. First, sugar-making on a larger
scale than our first attempt was, and since that we had workmen making
considerable addition to our house; we have built a large and convenient
kitchen, taking the former one for a bedroom; the root-house and dairy
are nearly completed. We have a well of excellent water close beside the
door, and a fine frame-barn was finished this week, which includes a
good granary and stable, with a place for my poultry, in which I take
great delight.

Besides a fine brood of fowls, the produce of two hens and a cock, or
_rooster_, as the Yankees term that bird, I have some ducks, and am to
have turkeys and geese this summer. I lost several of my best fowls, not
by the hawk but a horrid beast of the same nature as our polecat, called
here a scunck; it is far more destructive in its nature than either fox
or the hawk, for he comes like a thief in the night and invades the
perch, leaving headless mementos of his barbarity and blood-thirsty
propensities.

We are having the garden, which hitherto has been nothing but a square
enclosure for vegetables, laid out in a prettier form; two half circular
wings sweep off from the entrance to each side of the house; the fence
is a sort of rude basket or hurdle-work, such as you see at home, called
by the country folk wattled fence: this forms a much more picturesque
fence than those usually put up of split timber.

Along this little enclosure I have begun planting a sort of flowery
hedge with some of the native shrubs that abound in our woods and lake-
shores.

Among those already introduced are two species of shrubby honeysuckle,
white and rose-blossomed: these are called by the American botanists
_quilostium_.

Then I have the white _Spiroeafrutex_, which grows profusely on the
lake-shore; the Canadian wild rose; the red flowering raspberry (_rubus
spectabilis_), leather-wood (_dircas_), called American mezereon, or
moose-wood; this is a very pretty, and at the same time useful shrub,
the bark being used by farmers as a substitute for cord in tying sacks,
&c.; th