Throughout all New Brunswick, the wood fellers, or “lumberers,” as they are there termed, bear a very indifferent reputation, being generally, and I fear with too much justice, regarded as men of dissolute and extravagant habits, and whose moral character, with few exceptions, is dishonest and worthless. The curious manner in which these people associate themselves for the purpose of cutting timber is so well described by a modern writer, that I cannot do better than transcribe his account of it. “Several men,” he says, “form what is called a lumbering party, composed of persons who are either hired by a master labourer, who pays them wages, and finds them in provisions; or of individuals, who enter into an understanding with each other to have a joint interest in the proceeds of their labour: the necessary supplies of provisions, clothing &c., are generally obtained from the merchants on credit, in consideration of receiving the timber which the lumberers are to bring down the rivers the following summer. The stock deemed requisite for a lumbering party consists of axes, a cross-cut saw, cooking utensils, a cask of rum, tobacco and pipes, a sufficient quantity of biscuit, pork, beef, and fish; pease and pearl barley for soup, with a cask of molasses to sweeten a decoction usually made of shrubs, as of the tops of the hemlock tree. Two or three yokes of oxen, with sufficient hay to feed them, are also required to haul the timber out of the woods. When thus prepared, these people proceed up the rivers with the provisions to the place fixed on for their winter establishment, which is selected as near a stream of water, and in the midst of as much pine timber, as possible. They commence by clearing away a few of the surrounding trees, and building a camp of round logs, the walls of which are seldom more than four or five feet high; the roof is covered with birch bark or boards. A pit is dug under the camp, to preserve any thing liable to injury from the frost. The fire is either in the middle or at one end; the smoke goes out through the roof; hay, straw, or fir branches are spread across, or along the whole length of the habitation, on which they all lie down together at night to sleep, with their feet next the fire. When the fire gets low, he who first awakes or feels cold springs up, and throws on five or six billets; and in this way they manage to have a large fire all night. One person is hired as cook, whose duty it is to have breakfast prepared before daylight; at which time all the party rise, when each takes his “_morning_,” the indispensable dram of raw rum, immediately before breakfast. This meal consists of bread, or occasionally potatoes, with boiled beef, pork, or fish, and _tea_ sweetened with molasses. Dinner is usually the same, with pease soup instead of tea; and the supper resembles the breakfast. These men are enormous eaters; and they also drink great quantities of rum, which they scarcely ever dilute.