A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.Thoreau, Henry David
History
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.
Thoreau, Henry David
Brown, John, 1800-1859; Québec (Province) -- Description and travel; Slavery -- United States
We left Montreal Wednesday, the 2d of October, late in the afternoon. In
the La Prairie cars the Yankees made themselves merry, imitating the
cries of the charette-drivers to perfection, greatly to the amusement of
some French-Canadian travellers, and they kept it up all the way to
Boston. I saw one person on board the boat at St. John’s, and one or two
more elsewhere in Canada, wearing homespun gray great-coats, or capotes,
with conical and comical hoods, which fell back between their shoulders
like small bags, ready to be turned up over the head when occasion
required, though a hat usurped that place now. They looked as if they
would be convenient and proper enough as long as the coats were new and
tidy, but would soon come to have a beggarly and unsightly look, akin to
rags and dust-holes. We reached Burlington early in the morning, where
the Yankees tried to pass off their Canada coppers, but the news-boys
knew better. Returning through the Green Mountains, I was reminded that
I had not seen in Canada such brilliant autumnal tints as I had
previously seen in Vermont. Perhaps there was not yet so great and
sudden a contrast with the summer heats in the former country as in
these mountain valleys. As we were passing through Ashburnham, by a new
white house which stood at some distance in a field, one passenger
exclaimed, so that all in the car could hear him, “There, there’s not so
good a house as that in all Canada!” I did not much wonder at his
remark, for there is a neatness, as well as evident prosperity, a
certain elastic easiness of circumstances, so to speak, when not rich,
about a New England house, as if the proprietor could at least afford to
make repairs in the spring, which the Canadian houses do not suggest.
Though of stone, they are no better constructed than a stone barn would
be with us; the only building, except the chateau, on which money and
taste are expended, being the church. In Canada an ordinary New England
house would be mistaken for the chateau, and while every village here
contains at least several gentlemen or “squires,” _there_ there is but
one to a seigniory.
I got home this Thursday evening, having spent just one week in Canada
and travelled eleven hundred miles. The whole expense of this journey,
including two guide-books and a map, which cost one dollar twelve and a
half cents, was twelve dollars seventy-five cents. I do not suppose that
I have seen all British America; that could not be done by a cheap
excursion, unless it were a cheap excursion to the Icy Sea, as seen by
Hearne or McKenzie, and then, no doubt, some interesting features would
be omitted. I wished to go a little way behind that word _Canadense_, of
which naturalists make such frequent use; and I should like still right
well to make a longer excursion on foot through the wilder parts of
Canada, which perhaps might be called _Iter Canadense_.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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