Nowhere in the world can a man so soon exchange the refinements of civilized life for one of hardship and toil as in a new country. Our minute-man must share with the settler all his toils, and yet often forego the settler's hope. The life among frontiersmen is apt to unfit a man for other work. His scanty salary will not allow many new books, and often his papers are out of date. The finding of a home is one of the worst of hardships. Let us start with the missionary to the front; our way lies through a rich valley. The moon is at her full, and we pass fine farms. The scent of the hay floats in at the car windows; fine orchards surround the houses, while great flocks of sheep are seen feeding, and herds resting, comfortably chewing the cud. But morning comes, and we must change cars. We are in a city of 80,000 people, with 498 factories with 15,000 employees, where a few years ago a few log houses only were in sight. As we change cars we change company too. We left the train at a Union Station, with its green lawns and trim garden, to find a station with old oil-barrels around it, the mud all over everything, the train filled with lumbermen, with their red mackinaw shirts and great boots spiked on the bottoms, and a comforter tied around the waist. A few women are on the train, often none at all. Our new road is poorly ballasted, and the train bounces along like a great bumble-bee. The men are all provided with pocket-pistols that are often more deadly than a revolver. At the first station--a little mouse-colored affair, sometimes without a ticket-agent--we notice the change. The stumps are thick in the fields; many of the houses have the building-paper fluttering in the wind; the streets are of sawdust. You can see the flags growing up from the swamp beneath. The saloons are numerous; and as the train is a mixed one in more senses than one, abundant time is given while shunting the freight-cars for the men to reload their pocket-pistols and get gloriously drunk. "Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious." And so on we go again for forty miles, when all leave the train but one solitary man, who lies prostrate in the car, too big for our little conductor to lift, and so he goes to the terminus with us. It is getting late, and the last ten miles are through a wilderness of dead pines, with here and there a winding line of timothy and clover that has sprung up from seeds dropped by the supply teams. But presently we see a pretty stream with bosky glades, and visions of speckled trout come up; then an immense mill, and a village of white houses with green Venetian blinds, and a pert little church. We had expected some good deacon to meet us and take us home to dinner; but, alas! no deacon is waiting, or dinner either for some time. For out of eight hundred people only five church-members can be found, four of them women.