How true this was! Who can wonder that women prize beauty, and are intoxicated by their own fascinations, when these fragile gifts are yet strong enough to outlast all the memories of statesmanship and war? Next to the immortality of genius is that which genius may confer upon the object of its love. Laura, while she lived, was simply one of a hundred or a thousand beautiful and gracious Italian women; she had her little loves and aversions, joys and griefs; she cared dutifully for her household, and embroidered the veil which Petrarch loved; her memory appeared as fleeting and unsubstantial as that woven tissue. After five centuries we find that no armor of that iron age was so enduring. The kings whom she honored, the popes whom she revered, are dust, and their memory is dust, while literature is still fragrant with her name. An impression which has endured so long is ineffaceable; it is an earthly immortality. "Time is the chariot of all ages to carry men away, and beauty cannot bribe this charioteer." Thus wrote Petrarch in his Latin essays; but his love had access to a treasury more potent, and for Laura the chariot stayed. CANADIAN WOODS AND WATERS. The monotony so characteristic generally of the woodlands of Upper Canada is mitigated, to a great extent, by the pleasant waters with which many of the tracts of that country are intersected. Away back from the great lakes, chains of smaller lakes glisten in the bosom of the immense forest. Rivers take their course from these, narrow at first, but noisy, rushing along by sparse settlements and lonely Indian camps to their junction with the big lakes, where mills, and factories, and ships, and human dross in general, soon pollute with unclean contact their fair waters. Many of the early settlers of these regions were of a stamp far different from that of the rough pioneers by whom new settlements have generally been opened in the United States and their territories. Here and there throughout Upper Canada there are communities--some of them progressive, if not actually flourishing, others yet in a backward state--which were founded by men whose early lives had been passed amid the highest refinements of Old World civilization. Among these, retired officers of the army and navy were very frequently to be met with. They were generally married men, with incomes wretchedly inadequate to the support of themselves and their families on the "European plan." Land in Canada was to be acquired in fee for a mere song, and it was something for the cadet of a landed family to become the squire of a thousand acres upon some remote Canadian lake or river, even although six hundred of his acres might be nothing but cedar swamp. The native British keenness for the pursuit of wild creatures had much to do with the choice of locality by the adventurers, who generally set up their log-houses in districts where game and fish were to be had in abundance. Communication by road, until