There were several companies of H.M.’s 63rd Regiment in the train, also going up to Montreal. It did not escape me that at the station pickets were looking sharply out for intending deserters, who might have cut away in the darkness; and I was told, and felt inclined to believe it might be worth their while, that there were Yankee crimps lying in wait at all the stations to help the deserters across the frontier, if they could induce them to leave their colours. The anxiety and annoyance caused by desertion, and by the chance of it, add to the dissatisfaction which is now expressed in our army in Canada; but I must say I cannot quite sympathise with the violence and exaggeration in which that dislike finds vent. Captains of companies suffer losses, but in many instances they have only themselves to blame. The men, seduced by high pay, either in the States or as farm-labourers in Canada, are seized with an irresistible desire to quit the service abruptly, “without leave,” and resort to ingenious artifices to escape. Sometimes a whole guard will march off bodily, non-commissioned officers and all; occasionally one of the number will submit to be handcuffed, and will be marched by his comrades through the post as a deserter, or a man will put on a sergeant’s jacket or sew chevrons on his coat sleeve, and march off his party as if they were going out on picket or patrol duty. Such artifices cannot always be successfully encountered, but they are to be met to some extent by increased vigilance. I need not say that it was with satisfaction I exchanged my railway van for a comfortable room in the house of Mr. Rose at Montreal. The news of an immediate advance of the army of the Potomac which had been received from New York turned out to be untrue; no immediate hurry was there need for to go down to the seat of war. I dined at the club, where we had a very agreeable party, enlivened by the fervent conversation of some Southern gentlemen of the little colony of refugees which finds shelter in Montreal under the British flag. There is some work of Nemesis in the condition of these gentlemen. Here are Charleston people, who claimed the right to imprison British subjects because they had dark skins, now taking refuge under the British flag, from the exercise of the very power which enabled them to maintain their claim, and apologising to Englishmen for the peculiar institution on the ground that they treated their niggers better than the Yankees do.