Water is almost powerless to corrupt it; but
variable atmospheres rapidly destroy it. After
forty years' immersion in water it has been
found as sound as when it was felled. The
finest specimens of this timber are to be found
in Prince Edward Island. Timid ramblers
learn with some concern that the bears resort
to the beech forests to satisfy their partiality
for beech nuts.

Here and there you come across a specimen
of the iron-wood tree. It is a stunted
plant, not often exceeding seventeen feet in
height. The fine grain and weight of its
timber, however, gives it a particular value.
Near the brilliant yellow birch the ash will
generally be found. The white ash is tougher
and stronger than oak; but is principally
esteemed for its remarkable elasticity. In
swampy ground the black ash thrives. Its
wood is yet more elastic, though weaker than
that of the white ash—it is, however rich in
alkali.

You will also, in the course of the shortest
forest ramble in New Brunswick, come up with
lofty specimens of white and red elm. These
trees, remarkable for their beauty wherever
they are found, are in the forests of New
Brunswick magnificent plants, reaching
sometimes one hundred feet in height. The
toughness of elm timber forms its chief value. It
perishes rapidly when exposed alternately to
wet and dry atmospheres, but under water it
lasts in a sound condition for centuries. Red
elm timber resists variable weather better
than the white elm, but its grain is coarse.
Another gigantic tree to be found in the loose,
deep soils of New Brunswick forests, is
basswood, or the American lime. It is a handsome
tree, but of little more value than the
gorgeous beech.

The speculative man cannot walk ten paces
in any part of the vast forests of New Brunswick,
without pausing to inquire how it is
that the wealth he sees about him lies there
unproductive. In the noble trees, the heads
of which are lost in the clouds, the utilitarian,
whom it is the fashion to deride, sees so many
incipient arm-chairs and sofas. He notes how
the handsome knotty branch of yonder elm
might be fashioned into a garden-chair. If
this current of reflection be indulged at the
expense of a little poetry; if a man, with a
hatchet and a foot-rule, be a less poetic visitor
of the forest than the verse maker who muses
in its mighty labyrinths, at least the prosaic
leveller of arboricultural monarchs does good
service to his kind. Our forest ramble is open
to the charge of utilitarianism; we have not used
pre-Raphaelite colours; but while pleading
guilty to a practical tendency in our inquiries,
we shall, perhaps, be permitted to gather unto
ourselves a consolation, in the hope that some
of the wood, the useful properties of which
we have noticed, may in due time be fashioned
into easels for some seraphic painter of very
angular virgins, draped in a costume of most
painful stiffness. Grateful as all men must
be, that Nature presents to them pictures as
grand as those of the American solitudes, they
cannot, if they look at the question in its
human light, be sorry to learn that there is a
faint hope of one day beholding the solitudes
which the poet loves peopled by happy families.
There is poetry in the practical, as well
as in the purely imaginative. The man who
first stayed the mountain's stream to turn a
mill-wheel, was, in all probability, as poetic a
being as the author of the finest lines on its
pellucid waters, the music of its flow, and the
verdure of its banks. In this view, let our
practical view of the untrodden wildernesses
be regarded; if we have not written poetry
on their beauty and their grandeur, we have
endeavoured to show the resources they
contain for the profitable exercise of that honest
labour which fails to find its due reward in
our teeming island. Thus the muse may
forgive us for taking our forest ramble
with a note-book in one hand and a foot-
rule in the other.

THE MAGIC CRYSTAL.

IT is the fashion—especially among people
of fashion—to point with pity to a tale of
modern witchcraft, to an advertisement of a
child's caul, or to the bonâ fide certificates of
cases from the takers of quack medicines,
and to deplore the ignorance of their inferiors.
Delusions, however, of the grossest kind are
not confined to the illiterate. A cloud of
dupes have ever floated about in the higher
regions of society; while it is quite a mistake
to suppose that the refinements and
discoveries of the nineteenth century have
dispersed them. The reign of Queen Victoria, like
that of Elizabeth and of Anne, has its Dr.
Dees, and Lillys, and Partridges, who are as
successful as their precursors in gaining
proselytes who can pay handsomely. Damsel
of high degree, fresh from boarding-school,
with her head more full of sympathy for the
heroes and heroines of fashionable novels, and
ideas more fixed upon love affairs than on any
legitimate studies, can easily find out, through
mysteriously worded advertisements in the
Sunday papers, or through the ready agency
of friends who have already become victims
to the "science'' of astrology and magic, the
whereabouts of these awful and wonderful
beings. There are a number of styles and
classes of them, all varying in appearance and
mode of operations. There are the old
women, who, consoled by the glories of their
art, repine not at inhabiting comfortless
garrets in the purlieus of the New Cut,
Lambeth; and hiding their vocation under the
mask of having staylaces or infallible corn-
plaisters to sell, receive more visitors from the
fashionable cream  of Belgravia than from the
dross of Bermondsey. Disguises are
sometimes resorted to, and parties of titled ladies
have been known to meet, and put on the