“Great as has been the prosperity of America, and of the settlements which mark the magnificent country just described, yet nature has not been wooed in them without trials, nor have her treasures been won without a struggle worthy of their worth. Those who have been in the habit of passing _early clearings_ in Upper Canada must have been struck with the cheerless and lonely, even desolate appearance of the first settler’s little log hut. In the midst of a dense forest, and with a ‘patch of clearing’ scarcely large enough to let the sun shine in upon him, he looks not unlike a person struggling for existence on a single plank in the middle of an ocean. For weeks, often for months, he sees not the face of a stranger. The same still, and wild, and boundless forest every morning rises up to his view; and his only hope against its shutting him in for life rests in the axe upon his shoulder. A few blades of corn, peeping up between stumps whose very roots interlace, they are so close together, are his sole safeguards against want; whilst the few potato plants, in little far-between ‘hills,’ and which struggle for existence against the briar bush and luxuriant underwood, are to form the seeds of his future plenty. Tall pine trees, girdled and blackened by the fires, stand out as grim monuments of the prevailing loneliness, whilst the forest itself, like an immense wall round a fortress, seems to say to the settler,--‘how can poverty ever expect to escape from such a prison house.’ “That little clearing--for I describe a reality--which to others might afford such slender guarantee for bare subsistence, was nevertheless a source of bright and cheering dreams to that lonely settler. He looked at it, and instead of thinking of its littleness, it was the foundation of great hopes of a large farm and rich cornfields to him. And this very dream, or poetry, or what you will, cheered him at his lonely toil, and made him contented with his rude fire-side. The blades of corn, which you might regard as conveying but a tantalising idea of human comforts, were associated by him with large stacks and full granaries; and the very thought nerved his arm, and made him happy.