After undergoing a year of obloquy, ill-looks, slander, and popular disfavour in a great country, it was very pleasant to meet with such marks of good-will and kindness from one’s countrymen and fellow-subjects on the same continent; and it was quite as gratifying to know that such feelings were entertained by them, as it would have been to receive the outward token of their existence, which alone would have contented my friends. The evening on which I left Toronto was intensely cold. Never for a moment had the snow and frost relented, and a wind of piercing keenness swept up the frozen dust in thick clouds, which penetrated every chink. The railway officials did their best for us, and the stove in the carriage was poked up to excessive energy; but the heat of these calorifiers is worse than cold itself. Our way lay through a snow-field bordered by snow-hills, or by the stiff cones of snow-covered firs. Our fellow-passengers were big men in fur-coats and thick boots, who were given to silence and sleep. Slowly the train creaked through the soft barrier which so gently yet stiffly, opposed the tramp of the iron horse. The landscape was simply nothing to see. It looked as if one were going for ever through a vast array of newly-washed sheets spread over the whole country. Darkness fell suddenly out of the skies on the whiteness, but still could not darken it. The whiteness shone through the depths of night, and flashed out in streaks of dazzling light, as the flare of the engine-fires and of the lamps shot out over the surface. And so it came to pass that at last we went to sleep, gathering up rug and greatcoat and wrapper into vast mounds, from which issued many a _spiritus asper_ and susurrous sounds for the livelong night. On waking up it seemed as though day had just dawned, but the watch said it was nearly eight o’clock. A cold white light, filled with rime, battled through the frost on the windows of the carriage, which was spread over the glass like beautiful damascened white tablecloths. Scraping away a lovely trellis pattern with my nail, I opened a space of clear transparent ocean in the ice-sea, and was rewarded for my pains by a view of a cloud of snow which had been falling all night, and now rested deep on the ground, and turned the pines and firs bounding the line of rail into ragged white tumuli.