Life on board the _Algoma_ is as agreeable as can well be imagined. We have three good meals a day. I am writing in a magnificent saloon, nearly three hundred feet long, and if the nights are cold, as they always are on the lakes, I have a cabin all to myself, and by heaping the bed-clothes for two berths on my bed, and throwing a heavy great-coat over them, I manage to keep myself warm for the night. The scenery by day is magnificent, as we sail in and out among a thousand isles, all richly wooded to the water’s edge, with here and there a little village, or small settlement, where the woodmen ply their calling—the results of which may be seen now in a raft being towed by a tug, to be shipped lower down to Liverpool or Glasgow, or in stacks of planks along the shore. Further behind is the mainland, with rock and wood in endless succession. At Sault St. Marie, the river is celebrated for its fish, and as you pass through the canal, you have plenty of Indian canoes paddling about, with a man at the stern to seize the fish by a hand-net: the white fish of Lake Superior is held to be a great delicacy. After a day and night, we get into the open lake, out of sight of land, and then we land at Port Arthur, whence we take the train to Winnipeg, where I hope to hear a scrap of English news. I have but one complaint to make, and that is, on the Sunday we had no service of any kind. I am not, nor ever was, a stickler for forms; but there are times, especially as many now on board may be planted far away from any religious observance, when it seems to me a simple service might be the means of strengthening old impressions, and perhaps planting new ones. One thinks of that fine old hymn of Andrew Marvel’s: ‘What can we do but sing His praise, Who guides us through the watery maze?’ And an hour or so thus spent, surely may be quite as helpful to the higher life we all dream of, at any rate, as the favourite occupation of the majority—smoking and spitting, or the study of the maps of the district to which we are all rapidly approaching. I had a queer chat this morning with an old Canadian farmer who landed at Le Sault. He was pleased to hear that I had been at Yarmouth in Norfolk. His mother was a Clarke of Yarmouth. Did I know any of the Clarkes of Yarmouth? I replied that I had not that pleasure, but that I knew many of the Clarkes, and that they were a highly-respectable family indeed. Well, I have now done with Ontario, and you ask me what I think of it? I reply that it is a beautiful country, and that it has room for any amount of farm labourers and servant girls. I have been talking with a gentleman this morning, who tells me that he pays his groom about £6 a month, and that he boards him as well. He tells me of a Scotch labourer who came out without £1 in his pocket, and who has just died worth £12,000.