_Sunday, 15th._--We awoke from our repose in the train at a siding near Prescott in the early morning--looked out, and, lo, there was Lake Ontario clouded in the rain-sweep and all the landscape shrouded with mist. Presently, at 7.30, the steamer comes up, glistening with wet, and waddles to the wharf. It had been arranged that we were to go from Prescott to Kingston by the Lake and then take the train on to Toronto, and we went aboard accordingly, and found places reserved and every preparation made for us; but the fog was thickening, and as it was possible that the steamer might not start, or if she started at all that she might be brought up all standing in the Lake by reason of the weather, we resolved to go on by train. At 9.30 A.M. the special started, and ran all day without any incident worthy of notice. Stay, ungrateful that I am! Is it possible to forget the surprise at the Coburg Station, where the Grand Trunk Railway Company, to break our journey, had prepared a banquet, set forth with flowers and served by the nicest people possible? Somehow or other our day was a _coup manqué_, and we hustled through the country in a vacuous way, with an outlook of scraggy pine woods and ragged clearings with black fang-like stumps in the midst, and towns innominate. The rain never ceased, and at 6 o'clock, when we arrived at Toronto and took shelter in the Queen's Hotel, where Captain Geddes, aide-de-camp to the Lieutenant-Governor, the Mayor, Mr. McMurrich, and Alderman Walker saw the Duke and made arrangements for the morrow, it was falling in torrents; but Toronto seen under the most disadvantageous circumstances was voted to be very surprising, for my friends had heard so much of the immobility if not backsliding of Canada, that they were not prepared for such very fine buildings and such a great array of wharves and quays on the lake, and the great fleet of craft alongside them. The hotel, too, was in very good keeping with all the surroundings. Still we were not happy. Those Montreal people had disturbed the minds of some of my companions with statistics bearing on the price of wheat, and the Auditor and others were busy working away turning cents into halfpence and pounds into bushels, and calculating whether wheat could ever be sold at Liverpool for 32_s._ 6_d._ a quarter. We were all pretty fresh after a good night's rest, when we were summoned to breakfast, and after that I had a visit from a soldier whom I parted with on the plateau of Sebastopol, where he fought and bled, and, wounded as he was, remained to the end, till his regiment (the 30th) left, now a pensioner, and not in very good case in Toronto. It is strange enough that there is no race, so far as I know, in the world which is held in the least by the ties of fosterage but one--the Irish--and even with them the relations of that sort are relaxing rapidly.