I do not think that we of this generation can quite realise the life which was led in Upper Canada eighty years ago, when forest and swamp and bush foretold nothing of the great farms and cities and thriving towns which now replace them to such a great extent. Those first settlers did not foresee the heights of prosperity and hope to which the land would rise in the time of their children. They looked upon it rather as some unfriendly place from which they might wrest a living, than as a goodly country given them that they and their children and their children's children might labour in it and love it and enjoy it--and fight and die for it if need were. All their love and remembrance they gave to those little Isles across the sea; but, willy-nilly, they were obliged to give their wit and muscle to Canada. They fought against hardships and privations that were almost incredible, chiefly in the hope that they might win enough from the New World to take them back in comfort to the Old. They thought chiefly of making provision for present needs, not foreseeing that their toil went to the making of a nation, the building of an Empire. They wrought indeed better than they knew. No prophetic vision of the mighty future came to Dick Underwood as he lay beneath the sumachs that golden October day, nearly ninety years ago. He gave all the sentiment of which his boyish heart was capable to his fading memories of his English home, even as his father did--laying these recollections aside, as it were, in a sacred place. But here the likeness to his father ceased; for he looked forward in vast, ignorant, splendid dreams to the possibilities of the land of his adoption--not the possibilities of trade and agriculture, which seldom attract youth--but to the more alluring chances of those great Unknown Lands, to the wonder and mystery of the Indian-haunted North. He did not put this feeling into words. Indeed, he did not know how to describe it, or what it was. But it is written in the history books that in Talon's time the welfare of the French colony was endangered by the number of young men who took to the woods, obeying the "call of the wild." It was this that moved Dick Underwood. It moved him then as he lay lazily in the sweet, new-fallen leaves, so deftly shaping that little canoe of birch bark; and he wished, with a half smile at himself, that it might turn out to be a fairy canoe, suddenly growing to full size, and bearing him away on some new risen fairy river, into the land of his dreams. "But if I had fifty rivers and fifty canoes," he said to himself with a sigh, "I could not leave Stephanie." [Illustration: "'IF I HAD FIFTY RIVERS AND FIFTY CANOES, I COULD NOT LEAVE STEPHANIE.'"]