Our halt at Hamilton was brief, and soon we were on our way eastwards once more, skirting the shores of the lake, fenced in by a monotonous line of snow-laden fir trees and palings. The people who got in and out at the stations were of a different race from the Americans--stouter and ruddier of hue, and many of them spoke with a Scotch or Irish accent, the former predominating. They did not talk much about anything but the weather, and did not give themselves concern about anything except the winter and its prospects, having made up their minds long ago that there was to be no fight between England and the United States. Just as it became dusk we reached Toronto, having accomplished the thirty-eight miles in two hours, but late as it was we could make out the picturesque outlines of a large city. Close to the station a line of sleighs, and a mass of well-dressed people drawn up by the margin of a sheet of ice, on which a skated crowd were whirling about, gave an air of gaiety to the place. A sharp smart sleigh drive, and we were at the comfortable hotel, called Rossin House, where an invitation from the officers of Her Majesty’s 30th to dinner was awaiting us. They were quartered in a substantial old-fashioned barrack on the shore of lake Ontario, some distance outside the city. The barracks are surrounded by an earthen parapet, provided with traverses and embrasures, and there is a very quaint and fantastic earthen redoubt on the beach, but any ordinary vessel of war could lay the whole establishment in ruins with perfect impunity in half-an-hour. The mess table was surrounded by an unusual number of old Crimean officers, and I was glad to find the fears I had entertained that the inducements offered by the Americans to soldiers to desert, had not as yet given any considerable increase to the tendency in that direction, which causes such anxiety to regimental officers stationed near the frontier. Whilst I remained at Toronto, I dined daily at the same hospitable board. A snapping fierce wind, laden with icy arrows, set in the day after our arrival. In the afternoon, however, I sleighed out and visited the bishop, one of the most lively, agreeable men conceivable, of the age of ninety or thereabouts; Mr. Brown, who is one of the powers of the State, and the editor and owner of the ablest paper in West Canada; the mayor, and other Torontians of eminence.