I have seldom known very serious damage by these fires done in Canada West, although occasionally a barn or house falls a sacrifice to the devouring element.  Not so, however, in some parts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where extensive conflagrations often devastate the country for miles round.  Of such a character was the great fire at Miramichi, which nearly destroyed Fredericton, and was attended not only with an immense loss of property but with the sad loss of many valuable lives.  I will presently give in his own forcible and feeling language the history of a lumberer who escaped from destruction after being for some time in imminent peril of his life.  He was one of the few persons who had the good fortune of escaping the great conflagration in Miramichi, which broke out in the October after my arrival, and excited so much general sympathy.  Fifteen of his comrades perished in the flames.

The narrative which I introduce here, anticipating by a few months the proper order of narration, was related to me by the man himself with that native eloquence which often surprises, and always interests us in the uneducated.  The class to which he belongs is one peculiar to America.  Rough in manners, and often only half-civilized, the lumberer, as an individual, resembles little the woodsman of other lands.  He is generally a Canadian Frenchman, or a breed between the Irish and the native of the Lower Province.  However, some Yankees may be found among these denizens of the woods and wilds of Canada.  The fearful conflagration to which our poor lumberer nearly fell a victim, has been thus ably described in M’Gregor’s “British America.”  “In October, 1825, about a hundred and forty miles in extent, and a vast breadth of the country on the north, and from sixty to seventy miles on the south side of Miramachi river, became a scene of perhaps the most dreadful conflagration that has occurred in the history of the world.

“In Europe we can scarcely form a conception of the fury and rapidity with which fires rage through the forests of America during a dry hot season, at which period the broken underwood, decayed vegetable substances, fallen branches, bark, and withered trees, are as inflammable as the absence of moisture can make them.  To such irresistible food for combustion we must add the auxiliary afforded by the boundless fir forests, every tree of which in its trunk, bark, branches, and leaves contains vast quantities of inflammable resin.

“When one of these fires is once in motion, or at least when the flames extent over a few miles of the forest, the surrounding air becomes highly rarefied, and the wind consequently increases till it blows a perfect hurricane.  It appears, that the woods had been on both sides of the north-west partially on fire for some days, but not to an alarming extent until the 7th of October, when it came on to blow furiously from the westward, and the inhabitants along the river were suddenly surprised by an extraordinary roaring in the woods, resembling the crashing and detonation of loud and incessant thunder, while at the same instant the atmosphere became thick darkened with smoke.