The land was beautiful to look upon--Ontario scenery, marred little by the works of man in that autumn of 1820, when His Most Gracious Majesty George IV. was king. And the log-cabin and its clearing were picturesque enough to the eye of an artist, though speaking of all lack of skill and thrift and industry to the eye of a farmer. Even the garden in front of the cabin was being slowly and surely swallowed up into the wilderness again. The sunflowers flourished and bloomed and seeded, forming food-stores for multitudes of birds; and the squirrels would flicker down the tree-trunks and feast upon the seeds which the birds dropped, spitting the hard shells deftly to right and left through their whiskers. But the wild asters and the long convolvulus vines were choking the blossomless pinks and the sweet-williams and the few shy English flowers that were left. There were only very few of these fading alien plants for the healthy native growth to smother and kill, most of them having been taken away to set upon the grave of the woman who had cherished them. In the centre of this neglected garden grew a clump of sumach trees, heavy with their clumsy crimson cones; and beneath these, in a little hollow lined with all the dead drift of the October woods, a boy was lying. He was about sixteen, burnt brown as any young savage of the forests, but with sun-bleached fair hair and blue eyes to proclaim his English birth. His clothes were of very coarse homespun, and he wore a pair of old moccasins and a deerskin belt, brightened with gaudy Indian-work of beads and dyed grasses. The whole clearing was crying out for some skilled hand to tend and reclaim it once more from the encroaching wilderness; but this sturdy lad lay there with all the busy idleness of a savage, very deftly making a tiny canoe of birch-bark. He seemed a fit occupant for the tangled garden and the half-cultivated fields.