It is a fact worthy of observation, that among emigrants possessing the qualities of industry and perseverance so essential to success in all countries, those who possess the smallest share of original talent and imagination, and the least of a speculative turn of mind, are usually the most successful.  They follow the beaten track and prosper.  However humbling this reflection may be to human vanity, it should operate as a salutary check on presumption and hasty conclusions.  After a residence of sixteen years in Canada, during which my young and helpless family have been exposed to many privations, while we toiled incessantly and continued to hope even against hope, these reflections naturally occur to our minds, not only as the common-sense view of the subject, but as the fruit of long and daily-bought experience.

After all this long probation in the backwoods of Canada, I find myself brought back in circumstances nearly to the point from whence I started, and am compelled to admit that had I only followed my own unassisted judgment, when I arrived with my wife and child in Canada, and quietly settled down on the cleared farm I had purchased, in a well-settled neighbourhood, and with the aid of the means I then possessed, I should now in all probability have been in easy if not in affluent circumstances.

Native Canadians, like Yankees, will make money where people from the old country would almost starve.  Their intimate knowledge of the country, and of the circumstances of the inhabitants, enables them to turn their money to great advantage; and I must add, that few people from the old country, however avaricious, can bring themselves to stoop to the unscrupulous means of acquiring property which are too commonly resorted to in this country.  These reflections are a rather serious commencement of a sketch which was intended to be of a more lively description; one of my chief objects in writing this chapter being to afford a connecting link between my wife’s sketches, and to account for some circumstances connected with our situation, which otherwise would be unintelligible to the reader.  Before emigrating to Canada, I had been settled as a bachelor in South Africa for about twelve years.  I use the word settled, for want of a better term—­for a bachelor can never, properly, be said to be settled.  He has no object in life—­no aim.  He is like a knife without a blade, or a gun without a barrel.  He is always in the way, and nobody cares for him.  If he work on a farm, as I did, for I never could look on while others were working without lending a hand, he works merely for the sake of work.  He benefits nobody by his exertions, not even himself; for he is restless and anxious, has a hundred indescribable ailments, which no one but himself can understand; and for want of the legitimate cares and anxieties connected with a family, he is full of cares and anxieties of his own creating.  In short, he is in a false position, as every man must be who presumes to live alone when he can do better.