f white-breasted fowl jostling one another in their
flight as they still thronged up towards the north.

We almost always think of Canada as a cold country. Its summer counts
for little; nor meadow-grass waist deep, over which swarms of mosquitoes
hover, tormenting man and horse; nor sunshine that blisters the face,
nor natural strawberry-grounds as wide as Yorkshire, nor a sky clearer,
purer, and more intensely blue than any that spans Italian plains. No;
Canada means winter, snow, quivering northern lights, log-fires, and
sledge-bells!

Brandon found Canada hot, but when he had finished his work there, he
left it, and betook himself to the south, while it became the Canada of
our thought.

He went through the very heart of the States, and pleased himself with
wild rough living in lands where the rich earth is always moist and
warm, and primeval forest still shelters large tracts of it.

Camping out at night, sometimes in swampy hollows, it was strange to
wake when there was neither moon nor star, and see the great decaying
trees that storm had felled or age had ruined, glow with a weird
phosphorescent light, which followed the rents in them, and hovered
about the seams in their bark, making them look like the ghosts of huge
alligators prone in the places they had ravaged, and giving forth
infernal gleams. Stranger yet it was to see in the dark, moving near the
pine-wood fire, two feeble wandering lights, the eyes of some curious
deer that had come to gaze and wonder, and show its whereabouts by those
soft reflections.

And then, when he and his companions wanted venison, it was strange to
go forth into the forest in the dark, two of them bearing a great iron
pot slung upon a long rod, and heaped with blazing pine-cones. Then
several pairs of these luminous spots would be seen coming together, and
perhaps a dangerous couple would glare down from a tree, and a wounded
panther would come crashing into their midst.

After that, he went and spent Christmas in Florida. He had had frequent
letters from home and from his step-father. He wished to keep away till
a certain thing was settled one way or the other, but every letter
showed that it was still unsettled; the sea-nymph that he had been
wasting his heart upon had not yet decided to accept his brother's, but
there was every likelihood that she would.

As time went on, however, he felt happy in the consciousness that
absence was doing its work upon him, and that c