TABLE OF CONTENTS.

  Introductory Remarks
  New Brunswick—­by whom settled
  Remarks on State of Morals and Religion
  American Physiognomy
  The Spring Freshets
  Cranberries
  Stream Driving
  Moving a House
  Frolics
  Sugar Making
  Breaking up of the Ice
  First appearances of Spring
  Burning a Fallow
  A Walk through a Settlement
  Log Huts
  Description of a Native New Brunswicker’s House
  Blowing the Horn
  A Deserted Lot
  The Bushwacker
  The Postman
  American Newspapers
  Musquitoes
  An Emigrant’s House
  Unsuccessful Lumberer
  The Law of Kindness exemplified in the Case of a Criminal
  Schools
  The School Mistress
  The Woods
  Baptists’ Association
  A Visit to the House of a Refugee
  The Indian Bride, a Refugee’s Story
  Mr. Hanselpecker
  Burning of Miramichi
  The Lost One—­a tale of the Early Settlers
  The Mignionette
  Song of the Irish Mourner
  A Winter’s Evening Sketch
  The School-mistress’s Dream
  Library in the Backwoods
  The Indian Summer
  The Lost Children—­a Poem
  Sleigh Riding
  Aurora Borealis
  Getting into the Ice
  Conclusion

These sketches of the Backwoods of New Brunswick are intended to illustrate the individual and national characteristics of the settlers, as displayed in the living pictures and legendary tales of the country.  They have been written during the short intervals allowed from domestic toils, and may, perhaps, have little claim to the attention of the public, save that of throwing a faint light upon the manners and customs of that little-known, though interesting, appendage of the British empire.  A long residence in that colony having given me ample means of knowing and of studying them in all their varying hues of light and shade.  There, in the free wide solitude of that fair land whose youthful face “seems wearing still the first fresh fragrance of the world,” the fadeless traces of character, peculiar to the dwellers of the olden climes, are brought into close contrast with the more original feelings of the “sons of the soil,” both white and red, and are there more fully displayed than in the mass of larger communities.  Of political, or depth of topographical information, the writer claims no share, and much of deep interest, or moving incident, cannot now be expected in the life of a settler in the woods.  The days when the war-whoop of the Indian was yelled above the burning ruins of the white man’s dwelling are gone—­their memory exists but in the legend of the winter’s eve, and the struggle is now with the elements which form the climate; the impulse of “going a-head” giving impetus to people’s “getting along”—­forcing the woods to bow beneath their sturdy stroke, and fields to shine with ripened grain, where erst the forest shadows fell; or floating down the broad and noble streams the tall and stately pine, taken from the ancient bearded wilderness to bear the might of England’s fame to earth and sea’s remotest bounds.