topped a little at Smith's Inn,
three miles and a half from our night's halt. Here the soil changes to
clay, and the country is not much settled, but is beginning to be so.
We saw bevies of quail on the roadside, which the driver cut at with
his whip, but they were not disposed to fly. We arrived at Freeman's
Inn at half-past six p.m., twelve miles, and brought up for the night
at Thamesville, where there is a dam and an extensive bridge, and
altogether the preparation for the plank road is a very extraordinary
work, embracing much deep cutting. Here all is sand again, but the
occasional glimpses of the Thames, as you approach this village, are
very fine and picturesque. Squirrels, particularly the ground species,
or chippemunk, amused us a good deal by their gambols as we drove
along. The village of Thamesville is very small.

Oh, Father Thames, did you ever dream of having _ville_ tacked to your
venerable name? But, as the Nevilles have it, _ne vile velis_.

I amused myself here on a scorching evening with looking about me, as
well as the heat would permit; and here I first heard and first saw
that curious little Canadian bird, the mourning dove. It came hopping
along the ground close to the inn, but the evening was not light
enough for me to distinguish more than that it was very small, not so
big as a quail, and dark-coloured. It seemed to prefer the sandy road;
and, as it had probably never been molested, picked up the oats or
grain left in feeding the horses. It became so far domesticated as to
approach mankind, although the slightest advance towards it sent it
away. My host, a very intelligent man, told me that it always came
thus on the hot summer nights; and we soon heard at various distances
its soft but exceedingly melancholy call. It appears peculiar to this
part of Canada, and is the smallest of the dove kind. I know of
nothing to compare with its soft, cadenced, and plaintive cry; it
almost makes one weep to hear it, and is totally different from the
coo of the turtle dove. When it begins, and the whip-poor-will joins
the concert, one is apt to fancy there is a lament among the feathered
kind for some general loss, in the stillness and solemnity of a
summer's night, when the leaves of the vast and obscure forest are
unruffled, when the river is just murmuring in the distance, and the
moon emerging from and re-entering the drifting night-cloud, in a land
of the mere remnant of the Indian tribes gone to the