The settlers are afraid of the lumberers; and thus all the finest land, near rivers, creeks, or transport of any kind, is swept of the timber to such an extent that you must go now far, far back from the Lakes, the St. Lawrence, or the Ottawa, before you can see the forest in its primeval grandeur. This robbery has been carried on in so barefaced and extensive a manner, that the chief adventurer, usually a merchant or trader, who supplies the axe and canoemen with pay in his shop goods, cent. per cent. above their value, becomes enriched. The lumberer's life is truly an unhappy one, for, when he reaches the end of the raft's voyage, whatever money he may have made goes to the fiddle, the female, or the fire-water; and he starts again as poor as at first, living perhaps by a rare chance to the advanced age, for a lumberer, of forty years. And a curious sight is a raft, joined together not with ropes but with the limbs and thews of the swamp or blue beech, which is the natural cordage of Canada and is used for scaffolding and packing. A raft a quarter of a mile long--I hope I do not exaggerate, for it may be half a mile, never having measured one but by the eye--with its little huts of boards, its apologies for flags and streamers, its numerous little masts and sails, its cooking caboose, and its contrivances for anchoring and catching the wind by slanting boards, with the men who appear on its surface as if they were walking on the lake, is curious enough; but to see it in _drams_, or detached portions, sent down foaming and darting along the timber slides of the Ottawa or the restless and rapid Trent, is still more so; and fearful it is to observe its _conducteur_, who looks in the rapid by no means so much at his ease as the functionary of that name to whom the Paris diligence is entrusted. Numberless accidents happen; the drams are torn to pieces by the violence of the stream; the rafts are broken by storm and tempest; the men get drunk and fall over; and altogether it appears extraordinary that a raft put together at the Trent village for its final voyage to Quebec should ever reach its destination, the transport being at least four hundred and fifty miles, and many go much farther, through an open and ever agitated fresh water sea, and amongst the intricate channels of The Thousand Islands, and down the tremendous rapids of the Longue Sault, the Gallope, the Cedars, the Cascades, &c. But a new trade, has lately commenced on Lake Ontario, which will break up some of the hardships of the rafting. Old steamboats of very large size, when no longer serviceable in their vocation, are now cut down, and perhaps lengthened, masted, and rigged as barques or ships, and treated in every respect like the Atlantic timber-vessels. Into these three-masters, these Leviathans of Lake Ontario, the timber, boards, staves, handspikes, &c., from the interior are now shipped, and the timber carried to the head of the St. Lawrence navigation.