I fear there is a good deal of villainy in the world, and that it is not confined to America. Travellers are bound to be victimised, and the best thing you can do is to laugh. I own I did so at Liverpool the other day, as I was waiting for the tugboat to take me off to the _Sarnia_. I knew that I had not made a mistake, I knew that the tug was sure to come; yet four big hulking fellows with brazen faces would have made me believe that I was too late for the tug, and that my only chance of getting on board was for me to let them row me out. In that case the attempt was the more rascally, as from a small row-boat I could never have boarded the _Sarnia_ had I tried. Yet there they stood—sullen and expectant—for a quarter of an hour, taking me, possibly, for a bigger fool even than I look. ‘It is a pity,’ said a Canadian lady to me, ‘that Queen Victoria’—for whom all Canada prays that long may she reign over us, happy and glorious—‘fixed upon Ottawa as the site of the Government.’ I am very much inclined to a similar feeling. At Montreal the change of water affected me very disagreeably. At Ottawa I was completely floored. It is a curious fact that almost everyone who goes to Ottawa is taken ill. I was complaining of my first terrible night to Sir Leonard Tilley, the Finance Minister, and he said that when he first came to Ottawa it was the same with him. A lady told me that Lady Tupper, who has just left the Colony for England, where, it is said, her lord and master hopes to find a seat in the Imperial Parliament—a consummation devoutly to be wished, as to my mind it is clear that all our colonies should have representatives in Parliament—made a similar complaint as to the effect of the place on her children, and I have it on the best authority that scarcely a session passes but an M.P. pays the penalty of a residence in Ottawa. In my case I was preserved, as the man in the ‘Arabian Nights’ says, for the greater misfortunes yet to befall me by the use of Dr. Browne’s far-famed ‘Chlorodyne’—an indispensable requisite, I am bound to say, when an emigrant takes his trial trip to Canada. I know not who is the inventor—I believe it is what we call a patent medicine—that is, a medicine not sanctioned by the faculty—but, as has been observed of the Pickwick pen, it is indeed a boon and a blessing to men. I used ‘Chlorodyne,’ and was soon all right. Sir Leonard Tilley told me he did the same, and no one should go to Ottawa without having a small bottle of it in his carpet-bag.