presented a dreary aspect of swamp and uncleared pine forest; but amid these his sagacious eye saw in anticipation the city rise, which already numbers upwards of 60,000 inhabitants; and rejecting the old Indian name, since restored, he gave to his embryo capital that of York. Colonel Bouchette, Surveyor-General of Lower Canada, was selected to lay out the projected city and harbour; and he thus describes the locality as it then existed: “I still distinctly recollect the untamed aspect which the country exhibited when first I entered the beautiful basin. Dense and trackless forests lined the margin of the lake, and reflected their inverted images in its glassy surface. The wandering savage had constructed his ephemeral habitation beneath their luxuriant foliage, the group then consisting of two families of Mississagas; and the bay and neighbouring marshes were the hitherto uninvaded haunts of immense coveys of wild-fowl; indeed, they were so abundant as in some measure to annoy us during the night.”[6] The vicissitudes attending the progress of the Canadian city have been minutely chronicled by local historians, who record how many dwellings of round logs, squared timber, or more ambitious frame-houses exceeding a single story, were in existence at various dates. The first vessel which belonged to the town, and turned its harbour to account; the first brick house, the earliest stone one; and even the first gig of an ambitious citizen, subsequent to 1812, are all duly chronicled. Could we learn with equal truthfulness of the first years of the city built by Romulus on the Palatine Hill, its annals would tell no less homely truths, even now dimly hinted at in the legend of the scornful Remus leaping over its infant ramparts. Tiber’s hill was once the site only of the solitary herdsman’s hut; and an old citizen has described to me his youthful recollections of Toronto as consisting of a few log-huts in the clearing, and an Indian village of birch-bark wigwams, near the Don, with a mere trail through the woods to the old French fort, on the line where now upwards of two miles of costly stores, hotels, and public buildings mark the principal street of the busy city.