The preceding sketches of Canadian life, as the reader may well suppose, are necessarily tinctured with somewhat somber hues, imparted by the difficulties and privations with which, for so many years the writer had to struggle; but we should be sorry should these truthful pictures of scenes and characters, observed fifteen or twenty years ago, have the effect of conveying erroneous impressions of the present state of a country, which is manifestly destined, at no remote period, to be one of the most prosperous in the world.  Had we merely desired to please the imagination of our readers, it would have been easy to have painted the country and the people rather as we could have wished them to be, than as they actually were, at the period to which our description refers; and, probably, what is thus lost in truthfulness, it would have gained in popularity with that class of readers who peruse books more for amusement than instruction.

When I say that Canada is destined to be one of the most prosperous countries in the world, let it not be supposed that I am influenced by any unreasonable partiality for the land of my adoption.  Canada may not possess mines of gold or silver, but she possesses all those advantages of climate, geological structure, and position, which are essential to greatness and prosperity.  Her long and severe winter, so disheartening to her first settlers, lays up, amidst the forests of the West, inexhaustible supplies of fertilising moisture for the summer, while it affords the farmer the very best of natural roads to enable him to carry his wheat and other produce to market.  It is a remarkable fact, that hardly a lot of land containing two hundred acres, in British America, can be found without an abundant supply of water at all seasons of the year; and a very small proportion of the land itself is naturally unfit for cultivation.  To crown the whole, where can a country be pointed out which possesses such an extent of internal navigation?  A chain of river navigation and navigable inland seas, which, with the canals recently constructed, gives to the countries bordering on them all the advantages of an extended sea-coast, with a greatly diminished risk of loss from shipwreck!

Little did the modern discoverers of America dream, when they called this country “Canada,” from the exclamation of one of the exploring party, “Aca nada,”—­“there is nothing here,” as the story goes, that Canada would far outstrip those lands of gold and silver, in which their imaginations revelled, in that real wealth of which gold and silver are but the portable representatives.  The interminable forests—­that most gloomy and forbidding feature in its scenery to the European stranger, should have been regarded as the most certain proof of its fertility.