The only road on which it is possible to take a drive with comfort is Yonge Street, which is macadamised for the first twelve miles. This road leads from Toronto northwards to Lake Simcoe, through a well-settled and fertile country. There are some commodious, and even elegant houses in this neighbourhood. Dundas Street, leading west to the London district and Lake Huron, is a very rough road for a carriage, but a most delightful ride. On this side of Toronto you are immediately in the pine forest, which extends with little interruption (except a new settlement rising here and there) for about fifty miles to Hamilton, which is the next important town. The wooded shores of the lake are very beautiful, and abounding in game. In short, a reasonable person might make himself very happy here, if it were not for some few things, among which, those Egyptian plagues, the flies and frogs in summer, and the relentless iron winter, are not the most intolerable; add, perhaps, the prevalence of sickness at certain seasons. At present many families are flying off to Niagara, for two or three days together, for change of air; and I am meditating a flight myself, of such serious extent, that some of my friends here laugh outright; others look kindly alarmed, and others civilly incredulous. Bad roads, bad inns--or rather _no_ roads, no inns;--wild Indians, and white men more savage far than they;--dangers and difficulties of every kind are threatened and prognosticated, enough to make one's hair stand on end. To undertake such a journey _alone_ is rash perhaps--yet alone it must be achieved, I find, or not at all; I shall have neither companion nor man-servant, nor _femme de chambre_, nor even a "little foot-page" to give notice of my fate, should I be swamped in a bog, or eaten up by a bear, or scalped, or disposed of in some strange way; but shall I leave this fine country without seeing anything of its great characteristic features?--and, above all, of its aboriginal inhabitants? The French have a proverb which does honour to their gallantry, and to which, from experience, I am inclined to give full credence--"_Ce que femme veut, Dieu veut_." We shall see. * * * * * MADAME DE MAINTENON. How admirable what Sir James Mackintosh says of Madame de Maintenon!--that "she was as virtuous as the fear of hell and the fear of shame could make her." The same might be said of the virtue of many women I know, and of these, I believe, that more are virtuous from the fear of shame than the fear of hell.--Shame is the woman's hell.