end of it, that it goes off without hanging fire.  The diseases of the body, too, that are produced by a damp atmosphere, are uncommon here.  It may be a matter of surprise to some to hear, that pectoral and catarrhal complaints, which, from an association of ideas they may connect with cold, are here hardly known.  In the cathedral at Montreal, where from three to five thousand people assemble every Sunday, you will seldom find the service interrupted by a cough, even in the dead of winter and in hard frost; whereas, in Britain, from the days of Shakspeare, even in a small country church, “coughing drowns the parson’s saw.”  Pulmonary consumption, too, the scourge alike of England and the sea-coast of America, is so rare in the northern parts of New York and Pennsylvania, and the whole of Upper Canada, that in eight years’ residence I have not seen as many cases of the disease as I have in a day’s visit to a provincial infirmary at home.  The only disease we are annoyed with here, that we are not accustomed to at home, is the intermittent fever,—­and that, though most abominably annoying, is not by any means dangerous:  indeed, one of the most annoying circumstances connected with it is, that, instead of being sympathized with, you are only laughed at.  Otherwise the climate is infinitely more healthy than that of England.  Indeed, it may be pronounced the most healthy country under the sun, considering that whisky can be procured for about one shilling sterling per gallon.  Though the cold of a Canadian winter is great, it is neither distressing nor disagreeable.  There is no day during winter, except a rainy one, in which a man need be kept from his work.  It is a fact, though as startling as some of the dogmas of the Edinburgh school of political economy, that the thermometer is no judge of warm or cold weather.  Thus, with us in Canada, when it is low, (say at zero,) there is not a breath of hair, and you can judge of the cold of the morning by the smoke rising from the chimney of a cottage, and shooting up straight like the steeple of a church, then gradually melting away in the beautiful clear blue of the morning sky:  yet in such weather it is impossible to go through a day’s march in your great coat; whereas, at home, when the wind blows from the north-east, though the thermometer stands at from 55 deg. to 60 deg. you find a fire far from oppressive.  The fact is, that a Canadian winter is by far the pleasantest season of the year, for everybody is idle, and everybody is determined to enjoy himself.  Between the summer and winter of Canada, a season exists, called the Indian summer.  During this period, the atmosphere has a smoky, hazy effect, which is ascribed by the people generally to the simultaneous burning of the prairies of the western part of the continent.  This explanation I take to be absurd; since, if it were so to be accounted for, the wind must necessarily blow from that quarter, which is not in all instances the case.  During