As we splashed on through the snow, I began to consider the disadvantages to which the poor emigrant who chooses a land exposed to the rigours of a six months’ winter, must be exposed; and I wondered in myself that the early settlers did not fly, if they had a chance, when they first experienced the effects of bitter cold. But I recollected how much better were soil, climate, and communications than they are in the sunny South, where, for seven months, the heat is far more intolerable than the cold of Canada--where the fever revels, where noxious reptiles and insects vex human life, and the blood is poisoned by malaria, and where wheat refuses to grow, and bread is a foreign product. Even in Illinois the winter is, as a rule, as severe as it is in Canada, the heat as great in summer--water is scarce, roads bad. It is better to be a dweller on the banks of the St. Lawrence than a resident in the Valley of the Mississippi, even if a tithe of its fabled future should ever come to pass. There is no reason why the Canadas should be regarded with less favour than the Western States, although the winters are long enough: in the prairie there is a want of wholesome water in summer, and a scarcity of fuel for cold weather, which tend to restore the balance in favour of the provinces. The country, which I remembered so riant and rich, now was cold and desolate. At the station, near the beautiful Suspension Bridge--which one cannot praise too much, and which I hope may last for ever, though it does not look like it--the houses had closed windows, and half of them seemed empty, but the German proprietors no doubt could have been found in the lagerbeer saloons and billiard-rooms. The toll-takers and revenue officers on the bridge showed the usual apathy of their genus. No novelty moves them. Had the King of Oude appeared with all his court on elephants, they would have merely been puzzled how to assess the animals. They were not in the least disconcerted at a group of travellers visiting the St. Lawrence in winter time.