Mr Ballantyne visits and describes Red River settlement, the only colony in the extensive district traded over by the Hudson's Bay Company. It contained in 1843 about five thousand souls--French Canadians, Scotchmen, and Indians--and since then the population has rapidly increased. In the time of the North-West Company, since amalgamated, with that of Hudson's Bay, it was the scene of a smart skirmish or two between the rival fur-traders, in one of which Mr Semple, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, lost his life, and a number of his men were killed and wounded. We find some curious particulars of the stratagems and manœuvres employed by the two associations to outwit each other, and get the earliest deal with the Indian hunters. But to this we can only thus cursorily refer; whilst to many other chapters of equal novelty and interest we cannot even do that. We are obliged to refuse ourselves the pleasure of a piscatorical page, in which we would have shown the brethren of the angle, roaming by loch and stream on trout and salmon intent, how in the land of Hendrik Hudson silver fish are caught whose eyes are living gold. All we can do, before laying down the pen, is to commend Mr Ballantyne's book, which does him great credit. It is unaffected and to the purpose, written in an honest, straightforward style, and is full of real interest and amusement, without the unnecessary wordiness and impertinent gossip with which books of this description are too often swollen. We are glad to learn, whilst concluding this paper, that the public will soon be enabled, by a second edition of the volume, to form a better idea of its merits than it has been possible for us to give by these few brief extracts. THE BUDGET. The budget has just been produced, and the country has heard the lamentable exposure which the prime minister of the United Kingdom has been forced to submit to parliament. Such is the state of our financial affairs and future prospects, under the operation of the free-trade mania: and it is matter of congratulation that the mischievous and anti-national doctrines of the Manchester school should have been refuted at so early a period of their practice, and that the results of democratic rule are already made apparent even to the dullest understanding. Since warning has failed--or rather, let us say, since deep and deliberate treachery has combined with ambition and selfishness to alter the system through which Britain obtained and maintained its greatness, it is well that the hard but wholesome admonitions of experience should be felt. Better, surely, now than hereafter; before we have become familiarised to the annual tale of a declining revenue, and before we have lost heart and courage to meet the danger with a front of defiance!