Well, to continue, on Saturday we broke up from Montreal, having I think seen very thoroughly all the persons and things best worth seeing in the place. Our host had arranged that we should go and spend Sunday with Mr. Hugh Allan, the head of the family which has established the line of mail steamers to Liverpool and Glasgow. He has been forty years out here, and when he came Montreal had only 17,000 inhabitants, now it has 150,000; there was scarcely water for a 200 ton ship to lie at the wharf, now you can see steamers of 2000 tons and upwards always there. Hugh Allan is evidently a very rich man now. He has a big house on the mountain behind Montreal, and this place where I am now writing from, on Memphremagog Lake, which if you have a good map, you will find half in Canada and half in the New England state of Vermont. It is a lovely inland sea, about thirty-five miles long and varying from one to three miles broad. Mr. Allan’s house, where he entertained Prince Arthur in the spring, stands on the top of a high well-wooded promontory, about half-way up. It is a good, commodious, gentleman’s house, with deep verandahs, thoroughly comfortable, but without pretence or show of any kind. There is a large wooden out-building called the Hermitage, about one hundred yards off, divided entirely into bedrooms, so that there is room for lots of guests besides the family, seven or eight of whom are here. In another building there is an American bowling-alley, and an excellent croquet ground before the house. Mr. Allan keeps a nice steam yacht, which runs about the lake daily with any one who likes to go, and there are half a dozen rowing boats, so time need not hang heavily on the most restless hands. I accepted the invitation, as a few days at Memphremagog is evidently considered the thing to do by all Canadians, and the last twenty miles or so of the railway to Newport (Vermont), the place at the foot of the lake at which you embark, has only just been finished, right through the forest, so that it was a good chance of seeing the beginnings of colonial life in the bush. And I am very glad that I did come, for certainly if the journey (120 miles altogether) had been planned for the purpose, it couldn’t have been more interesting. After leaving Montreal we travelled I should say for from thirty to forty miles through reclaimed country, dotted with French villages and the homesteads of well-to-do farmers. Then we gradually slipped into half-cleared woods, and then into virgin forest. Presently we came across a great block of the forest on fire, but in broad daylight the sight is not the least grand, though unpleasant from the smoke, and melancholy from the waste and mischief which the fires do. I think I told you in my last that the forests about Ottawa, the capital of the Dominion, were on fire last week. The fire became so serious that great fears were entertained for the town, the militia and volunteers were called out, and a special train with fire-engines was sent up from Montreal. Scores of poor settlers were in the streets, having with difficulty escaped with their lives, and last of all several wretched bears trotted out of the burning woods into the town. The fire we passed through was not at all on this scale, and didn’t seem likely to get ahead. There were the marks of fires of former years on all sides in these forests. Tall stems by hundreds, standing up charred and gaunt out of the middle of the bright green maple underwood, which is fast growing up round them, and in a very short time makes the tangle as thick as ever. Before long we came to small clearings of from three to four acres, on each of which was a rough wooden shanty, with half a dozen wild, brown, healthy-looking children rolling and scrambling about it, and standing up in their single garments to cheer the train. On these plots the trees had all been felled about two feet from the ground, and the brushwood cleared away, and there were crops of Indian corn, oats, or buckwheat growing all round the stumps. Then we came to plots which had been occupied longer, where the shanty had grown into a nice-sized cottage, with a good-sized outhouse near. Here all the stumps had been cleared, and the plot divided by fences, and three or four cows would be poking about. Then we came to a fine river and ran along the bank, passing here and there sawmills of huge size, and stopping at one or two large primitive villages, gathered round a manufactory. In short, in the day’s run we saw Canadian life in all its phases, ending with a delicious twelve miles’ run up the lake in Mr. Allan’s steam yacht, with the whole sky flickering with Northern lights, which shot and played about for our special delight. Our railway party were Mr.

Allan; Mr. and Mrs. S———, and Miss B———, their adopted daughter; General Lindsay, whom I knew well in England and like very much; Colonel Eyre, his military secretary, and ourselves. Then there are eight children here. “We had a most luxurious car, with a little sitting-room in which we each had an easy chair, and there were two most enticing-looking little bedrooms, everything as clean and neat as you could have it, and we could walk out on to a platform at either end to look at the view. There was a boy also in attendance in a little sort of spare room where the luggage went, who ministered any amount of iced water to any one who called. This is decidedly the most luxurious travelling I ever had, but then the car was the private one of the manager of the Grand Trunk Railway; and the democratic cars in which every one else went, and in which indeed we had to travel for the last few miles, were very different affairs. Fancy my intense delight on Sunday morning, as I walked from the Hermitage up to the house to breakfast through some flower-beds, to see two humming-birds, poising themselves before flower after flower while probing and trying the blooms with their long bills, and then springing back with a stroke of their lovely little tails, and whisking off to the next bloom. They were green and brown, not so lovely in colour as many you have seen in collections, but exquisite as eye need ask to look at. The humming-birds have been certainly my greatest natural history treat as yet, not excepting the whales. I had seen a whale before, a small one, in the Hebrides, and I had never seen a hummingbird except stuffed; moreover I expected to see whales, but not humming-birds. We saw a fine great bald-headed eagle to-day, too, sailing over the lake, but his flight was not anything like so fine as those we saw soaring over the Iron Gates as we went spinning down the Danube nine years ago. We have a very charming visit here steaming about the lake, driving along the banks, playing croquet and bowls and billiards, and laughing, chaffing, and loafing to any extent. The family are very nice, and I hope he will soon be made a baronet and one of the first grandees of the Dominion. To-morrow morning at five we start for Boston in the steam yacht, which takes us down to Newport at the end of the lake. So by the evening I shall perhaps get a letter from you. How I do thirst for home news after three weeks’ absence.