“The markets, both of Montreal and Quebec, exhibit several hundred market sleighs daily. They differ from the pleasure or travelling sleigh, in having no sides; that is, they consist merely of a plank bottom, with a kind of railing. Hay and wood seem the staple commodities at this season, both of which are immoderately dear, especially at Quebec; even through the States, the common charge for one horse’s hay for a night was a dollar. Provisions are brought to market frozen, in which state they are preserved during the winter; cod-fish is brought from Boston, a land-carriage of 500 miles, and then sells at a reasonable rate, the American commonly speculating on a cargo of smuggled goods back, to make up his profit; a kind of trade extremely brisk betwixt the frontier and Montreal. “As we approached Quebec, snow lay to the depth of six feet; from the heights of Abraham, the eye rested upon what seemed an immense lake of milk; all smaller irregularities of ground, fences, boundaries, and copse woods, had disappeared; the tops of villages, and scattered farm-houses, with here and there dark lines of pine-wood, and occasionally the mast of some ice-locked schooner, marking the bed of the Charles river, were the only objects peering about it. A range of mountains, sweeping round from west to north, until it meets the St. Lawrence, bounds the horizon; no herald of spring had yet approached this dreary outpost of civilization; we had observed a few blue thrushes in the neighbourhood of Albany, but none had yet reached Canada; two only of the feathered tribe brave the winter of this inclement region—the cosmopolite crow, and the snow-bird, a small white bird, reported to feed upon snow, because it is not very clear what else it can find. “It would be acting unfairly to Quebec, to describe it as I found it on my arrival, choked with ice and snow, which one day flooded the streets with a profusion of dirty kennels, and the next cased them with a sheet of glass. Cloth or carpet boots, galoshes, with spikes to their heels, iron pointed walking sticks, are the defensive weapons perpetually in employ on these occasions. The direction of the streets too, which are most of them built up a precipice, greatly facilitates any inclination one may entertain for tumbling or neck-breaking.