All men’s employments, all trades and professions, in some of their aspects are attractive. Hence the boy I knew, having sucked cider at a minister’s cider-mill, resolved to be a minister and make cider, not thinking, boy as he was, how little fun there was in being a minister, willing to purchase that pleasure at any price. When I saw the carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard’s Bridge, their bench on the new planking they had laid over the water in the sun and air, with no railing yet to obstruct the view, I was almost ready to resolve that I would be a carpenter and work on bridges, to secure a pleasant place to work. One of the men had a fish-line cast round a sleeper, which he looked at from time to time. John Potter told me that those root fences on the Corner road were at least sixty or seventy years old.[285] I see a solitary goldfinch now and then. _Hieracium Marianum_ or _scabrum_; _H. Kalmii_ or _Canadense_; Marlborough road. _Leontodon autumnale_ passim. _Aug. 18._ It plainly makes men sad to think. Hence _pensiveness_ is akin to sadness. Some dogs, I have noticed, have a propensity to worry cows. They go off by themselves to distant pastures, and ever and anon, like four-legged devils, they worry the cows,—literally full of the devil. They are so full of the devil they know not what to do. I come to interfere between the cows and their tormentors. Ah, I grieve to see the devils escape so easily by their swift limbs, imps of mischief! They are the dog state of those boys who pull down hand-bills in the streets. Their next migration perchance will be into such dogs as these, ignoble fate! The dog, whose office it should be to guard the herd, turned its tormentor. Some courageous cow endeavoring in vain to toss the nimble devil. Those soldiers in the Champ de Mars[286] at Montreal convinced me that I had arrived in a foreign country under a different government, where many are under the control of one. Such perfect drill could never be in a republic. Yet it had the effect on us as when the keeper shows his animals’ claws. It was the English leopard showing his claws. The royal something or other.[287] I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled, as a class, are peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The men were dressed above their condition; had the bearing of gentlemen without a corresponding intellectual culture.[288] The Irish was a familiar element, but the Scotch a novel one. The St. Andrew’s Church was prominent, and sometimes I was reminded of Edinburgh,—indeed, much more than of London. Warburton remarked, soon after landing at Quebec, that everything was cheap in that country but men. My thought, when observing how the wooden pavements were sawed by hand in the streets, instead of by machinery, because labor was cheap, how cheap men are here![289]