But to return to the ride. I yet feel it in every bone in my body, as all the time I had to hold on to my seat like grim death. Sometimes the coachman was high above me; sometimes I was at the top and he at the bottom; now we were deep in the mud, the next moment high and dry on a formidable boulder, bigger than a hogshead, and came down with a bang, which sent me quivering all over. Here we were with the water up to the floor; and then we came on a mudbank quite as deep. Not an inch of the ground was level. It was all collar work or the reverse. Fortunately we were shaded by the firs which climb all the mountains out here, or the heat would have been unbearable. As to conversation, that was quite out of the question, though the ‘boy’ who drove me came when a child from Devonshire, and had a strong wish to see the old country again, of whose lanes, yellow with primroses, and cottages bright with roses and honeysuckles, and farmhouses green with ivy, he had a very vivid recollection. He made a lot of money, he said. Indeed, he had more than he knew what to do with. Last winter, for instance, he stopped a month in Winnipeg, and spent there four hundred dollars. ‘How did it all go?’ ‘Oh! in treating the boys!’ was his answer. I rather intimated that was a poor way of using his money. ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘they all do it. That is the way of the boys in this country!’ I was glad to hear him say that he thought of taking a farm soon, and was putting by the money for that purpose. The Rocky Mountains cannot be a bad place for a ‘boy.’ One of them yesterday told me how he had vainly written to his father to come out, who was now in the old country breaking stones on the road. Here, at any rate, he would have been better off. It is a long journey, I know, for the British emigrant. We are more than 1,000 miles from Winnipeg, and the ride is a dreary one till you reach the Rockies. The run to Winnipeg from Toronto by Port Arthur and Owen Sound is a real enjoyment. It took us two days and two nights to reach Port Arthur from Toronto, and the trip from Port Arthur to Winnipeg is accomplished easily in twenty hours. ‘Any bears about here?’ said I to the ‘boy,’ in one of the few minutes allowed for conversation in the course of our rough ride yesterday. ‘Not many. I seed one near where we are passing. He was a black bear, and stood up and looked at me, and then I looked at him. I wished I’d had a gun, and then I would have shot him.’