What a luxury to have your own land, two hundred acres!--to live without the chandler, the butcher, the baker, the huxter, and the grocer! Tea, a little sugar and coffee, these are your real luxuries. Soap you make out of the ley of your own potash; fat you get from your pigs or your sheep, which supply you with candles and food; and by and by the good ox and the fatted calf, the turkey, the goose, and the chicken, give your frugal board an air of gourmandism; whilst in this climate all the English garden vegetables and common fruits require only a little care to bring them to perfection. Indian corn and buckwheat make excellent cakes and hominy; and you take your own wheat to be ground at the nearest mill, where the miller requires no money, but only grist. In like manner, the boards for your house are to be had at the sawmill for logs, for potash, for wheat, for oats. Keep a few choice books for an evening, and provide yourself with stout boots and shoes, a good coat, and etceteras, besides your smock-frock and shooting-jacket of fustian, and its continuations, and let the rest follow; for you will at last take to wear country homespun, when occasions of state do not require it otherwise, such as church and tea-parties of more than ordinary interest. People talk about life in the Bush as they do about life in London, without knowing very much about either. Backwoods and backwoodsmen are novelties which amuse for the moment. A backwoodsman, who never worked at a farm, although he may be much in the habit of seeing farmers, has not always just conceptions. He must not live in a village newly made, but actually reside in a log-hut, just erecting, to know what life in the Bush is. Gentlemen and lady travellers are the worst judges possible, because, even if they go and visit their friends, the best foot is always put foremost to receive them, and vanity or love induces every sacrifice to make them comfortable. They see nothing of the labours of the seven months' winter, of the aguish wet autumn, of the uncertain spring, of the tropical summer, of ice, of frost, of musquitoes and black flies, of mud and mire, of swamp and rock, of all the innumerable drawbacks with which the spirit of the settler has to contend, or the very coarse and scanty fare to solace him after his toils of the day. See a young pair of brothers, sons of an officer of high rank, whose father dying left them but partially provided for, with a mother and several grown-up daughters.