luxuriant creepers; a hundred other swee
and lovely flowers of unknown name. Harmless
little snakes rustled through the "lush
grasses," bright green frogs chirped musically
By the streams, cicalas sounded their "clip
clip" like fairy seamsters cutting out their
summer garments; field-mice, large, and sleek
and beautifully marked, scudded almost from
beneath your foot; little brown birds made
their nests in the tufts of grass; and clusters
of scarlet strawberries stood up like bunches
of rubies among their spreading leaves. And
then, perhaps, when the summer has nigh
spent itself, and the earth is dry, and the woods
quiver in the hot air, and nature is silent in
the heat, a spark from a homestead, or from the
pipe of a labourer, or the ignition that may
arise from the accidental friction of dry inflammable
matter, sends forth the destroyer, and
miles upon miles of forest and field become
roaring masses of flame, then tracts of black
desolation, without a leaf or blade of greenness.
The prairie soon recovers its verdure
—is, indeed, benefited and fertilised by the
fiery baptism it has undergone—but the
forest! long years fail to restore it, and not any
scenery that I have ever witnessed—and I have
travelled through an Irish turf-bog and desert
sands—can in any way compete in drearines
with one of these devastated tracts. From the
black cindery earth, stand up, as far as the eye
can reach, endless columns of black cindery
ghosts of trees; no bird can find shelter for its
nest, no beast can find food or hiding, no flower
can bloom, no leaf can flutter. The silence of
death, the darkness of desolation, brood over
all; the sun cannot cheer it, the summer rain
cannot freshen it, till the healer, Time, shall

              Reconcile the place with green.

And though he cannot bid the dead bones of the
primeval forest, live, he calls up from the reviving
earth grasses, little plants, mosses that
need small nourishment, to prepare the way for
tender saplings, destined to comfort the place
once more with life and verdure.

Not far from our woodland home was a log-hut
of the roughest build and materials, called
Agnew's Camp. Its builder and sole inhabitant
was a man whose mode of life and history formed
a subject of mysterious comment and conjecture
among all the scattered homesteads of the
settlement. It was generally supposed, I know
not on what grounds, that Agnew was the son
of a gentleman, who, for some unknown
misdemeanor, had fled, or been expelled from, home
and friends. A good deal of romantic interest
was excited about the silent solitary man, who
lived utterly apart from all human companionship
and sympathy. But, unfortunately for the
romance, Agnew turned out to be only a vulgar
thief. A gentleman farmer living some five or
six miles from Agnew's Camp, one morning
missed from the field, a horse and a sheep; ere
long the horse returned alone. It was noticed that
he had but three shoes, hence a clue as to the
direction of his nocturnal expedition. The path
was tracked by means of the unshod hoof, to the
log-hut, and there was discovered the carcase of
the sheep, which Agnew had borrowed the horse
to carry. He was arrested and imprisoned;
whatever became of him on his release, he never
returned to his camp, which soon fell to decay.
Often in the winter, came round parties of
Indian hunters, with wild fowl, skins, and
cariboo meat. They were in general a harmless
race, very grateful to those who treated them
kindly, but with "wild justice," implacable in
having vengeance for injury. But already firewater
had commenced its destructive agency,
and it was no uncommon sight to see in the
streets of the town the once lithe grave dignified
hunter, or the elderly squaw—I never saw a
young Indian woman intoxicated—stupified and
brutalised by the influence of the raw rank new
rum sold at all the public-houses at a trifling
cost.

To-night the wind howls, and there is a sound
among the trees as of waves breaking on a far-
off beach, and the sound carries me to a spot
on the Norman coast, where, in a valley nestling
amid the bare falaises, I have lain o' nights in
a cottage room and heard the wind and the sea
making moan together. Such an out of the
world corner it was, with a little population of
which all the men were fishermen, and all the
women lace-makers, and where both men and
women, not to say children, spoke a barely
intelligible, often a wholly unintelligible, patois,
in a loud high wailing tone, the voices of the
first being generally small and thin, and those
of the second hoarse and deep. At mid-day, or in
the afternoon, came in the fishing-boats, and there
was a crowding to the beach, while the fishermen
in seven-league boots—which, if they fall into
the water, fill and surely drown, them—waded
to and fro with creels of living, leaping, gasping
fish; plies and grosyeux, and soles and lobsters,
and ugly sea eels, and uglier skate, and queer pink
and white soft-looking tish, and hopping shrimps,
"sea fleas," as the Arabs aptly call them.

And then buyers and sellers would chaffer and
chatter, and beat down and cry up, and gesticulate
and wail and scream over the floundering
ware, until the sale was completed and the cargo
carried away in baskets, to be disposed of at
Bayeux, Caen, and other neighbouring towns
and villages.

A small adventure happened to me at this
place. Erom the bedroom I occupied, a flight
of stone stairs led down on the outside of the
house into the little garden where, within the
enclosure of a low dry stone wall, a few hardy
vegetables and flowers braved the sea-breezes;
quitting the garden, you came on the steep
narrow pathway that led, through a breach in
the cliffs, to the sea. One night, while dawdling
to bed, as is my wont, my attention was
called to a slight noise at the door which
opened on this staircase: a sound as though
something touched the lock. I paid little heed
to it, until it was repeated; then I listened, but
as I had turned the key, I felt little uneasiness,
and as there was no repetition of the sound,