within the last twenty years or so, was so imperfect in many of these tracts, that but little intercourse existed between one settlement and another. On this account agricultural operations were very limited, being confined, generally, to the raising of sufficient grain for family use. In these communities somebody was always found to build a mill; and as the gentleman settlers themselves were not above doing carpenter and blacksmith work, no matter how bunglingly, things were made to look shapely enough in the course of time, and thus were founded villages, some of which have since expanded into towns of considerable size and local importance. Strangely grotesque, with their half-civilization, were these places in their earlier days. Characters which would not have been out of place at a _bal masqué_ were frequently to be met with in all of them. Blanket coats in winter, adorned with beaded epaulets, scarlet woollen stockings pulled up over the legs to fend off the snow, and Indian moccasons, were considered quite the proper thing. Once, as I was travelling by sleigh in a comparatively settled part of the country, a young man, who was driving rapidly in the opposite direction, pulled up to greet my companion, with whom he was acquainted. He was coming to the town, from his residence in the heart of the woods, thirty or forty miles from where we met him, and certainly I was astonished--being then newly arrived in the country--at the extreme slenderness of the outfit of one who was bound to do the "man about town" for a few days, and that in midwinter too. He was in his shirt-sleeves, having no coat with him whatever. His black velvet waistcoat, now foxy and threadbare with much use, might once have been a _chef-d'oevre_ from the hand of some London tailor whose gossip was of Guardsmen and their measurement. The rest of his costume consisted of a pair of buckskin breeches fastened at the knee with pearl buttons, heavy woollen stockings, and pegged boots,--the latter indebted for their lustre more to the rind of pork than to the blacking-brush. Singularly incongruous with this get-up was the kid-gloved hand with which he removed the black pipe from his mouth; nor was his straw hat exactly the sort of head-dress that one might have expected to meet with during a Canadian sleigh-ride. But it was only when he rose to his feet on the little rough sleigh, three feet by two, on which he had been sitting, that the full splendor of his wardrobe became revealed to us; for then he threw around his shoulders a magnificent cloak, made, I think, of some kind of Siberian fur, and which, folded up, had served him for a cushion on his journey. I frequently afterwards met this exquisite of the backwoods, wrapped in that showy mantle, walking in the streets of the little wooden town, where his appearance, so strange to me, did not seem to excite any particular comment. In those parts, men would often come into the towns,