dabbling in mud or dust; but many a
tidy, smart-looking lass was spinning at the cottage-doors, with bright
eyes and braided locks, while the younger girls were seated on the green
turf or on the threshold, knitting and singing as blithe as birds.

There is something very picturesque in the great spinning-wheels that
are used in this country for spinning the wool, and if attitude were to
be studied among our Canadian lasses, there cannot be one more becoming,
or calculated to show off the natural advantages of a fine figure, than
spinning at the big wheel. The spinster does not sit, but walks to and
fro, guiding the yarn with one hand while with the other she turns the
wheel.

I often noticed, as we passed by the cottage farms, hanks of yarn of
different colours hanging on the garden or orchard fence to dry; there
were all manner of colours, green, blue, purple, brown, red, and white.
A civil landlady, at whose tavern we stopped to change horses, told me
these hanks of yarn were first spun and then dyed by the good wives,
preparatory to being sent to the loom. She showed me some of this home-
spun cloth, which really looked very well. It was a dullish dark brown,
the wool being the produce of a breed of black sheep. This cloth is made
up in different ways for family use.

"Every little dwelling you see," said she, "has its lot of land, and,
consequently, its flock of sheep; and, as the children are early taught
to spin, and knit, and help dye the yarn, their parents can afford to
see them well and comfortably clothed.

"Many of these very farms you now see in so thriving a condition were
wild land thirty years ago, nothing but Indian hunting-grounds. The
industry of men, and many of them poor men, that had not a rood of land
of their own in their own country, has effected this change."

I was much gratified by the reflection to which this good woman's
information gave rise. "We also are going to purchase wild land, and why
may not we see our farm, in process of time," thought I, "equal these
fertile spots. Surely this is a blessed country to which we have
emigrated," said I, pursuing the pleasing idea, "where every cottage
abounds with the comforts and necessaries of life."

I perhaps overlooked at that time the labour, the difficulties, the
privations to which these settlers had been exposed when they first came
to this country. I saw it only at a distance of many years, under a high
state of cultivation, perhap