Down the long, meandering highway my eye rests, and my soul is pained by most irregular, unsightly, great bare poles on either side of it. A beneficent Government has given some grasping fellows the power to put these up and stretch wires upon them, and wrench my soul daily by their ugliness. Europe would not for a moment tolerate such hideous marring of the landscape, but long-suffering Canadians, most law-abiding and complaisant, suffer the nuisance to remain. Not content with the great warty poles, there are huge braces or props leaning to them at every bend in the highway, and I, as the individual, must suffer the sacrilege in silence. A long-suffering people may yet arise in their might and tear these gaunt, denuded forest trees from the face of the earth. There is a forest-covered hill, mainly of second-growth timber, before my eye, and it gloriously crowns what would otherwise be a most unsightly, bald, round eminence. But it is beautiful, dense, green and grand, and a wealthy man, viewing daily this hill upon his horizon, bought the land and keeps the forest that it may please him, and others as well, for their entire lives. Five per cents, or any given per cents, are not to be mentioned in comparison with this good citizen duly honoring his Maker and helping his fellows by his generous act. A forest primeval is before my eye as I turn my glance to the opposite side of the horizon, and it stands high and strong before me. Our native maple has never yet been surpassed for beauty and cleanliness, and here it is our emblem and our pride. Mainly this forest has always been in my mind as the spot where countless myriads of pigeons used to alight in the days gone by. Another forest farther away, and almost out from my horizon, but not entirely gone from it, formed the next nearest roosting-place for this extinct migratory bird, strings of which would fall to my boyhood gun, but now, alas! gone to South America, where food is more abundant and more easily obtained by them. Lesser objects on the horizon do not strike me so forcibly, but as I look more remotely and away over the busy town and its forges, looms and benches, the ridges are clearly marked upon the sky. Geologists have told us these hills were once the shores of a broader Lake Ontario. Evidences of the rocks and pebbles go far to establish that fact, but to us moderns they are very palpable and valuable by keeping off the cold of the north during the inclement season, that we may grow the succulent peach beneath their shelter. “Companies are bodies, indeed, without souls,” for here, with us, the railway company, which exacts its three and a half cents per mile in contravention to its charter, has erected great, unsightly sheds, and stained them a dull red, that their ugliness may be unparalleled. No eye for the beautiful and harmonious can ever be reconciled to the gaunt poles along our highways, wire-bestridden, or to the red architectural sheds of our railway.