There are few of my readers who have not heard of the city of Montreal, in the Province of Lower Canada, and fewer still who know much of its peculiarities, social, political or architectural, on which it is my design hereafter, supposing that I can keep on good terms with Mr. White, to enlighten them--but not at present. Well, it was my happiness, at an early period of my life, to reside in the good city of Montreal. What carried me there, is my own affair, and I shall merely say that I was neither a trader who cheated the poor Indians out of their pelteries, a smuggler of teas and silks across the frontier, a tin pedlar, nor a bank-note counterfeiter, all of which classes often find it convenient to take up a temporary residence in Canada. I was a wild ungovernable lad, with no parent or guardian to direct me, left entirely to my own impulses, and unfortunately enjoying the pecuniary means of assisting those impulses to bring me into all manner of scrapes, from which it required much ingenuity to extricate myself. The long winters in Canada may convey to a southern reader an idea of dreariness and discomfort, locked up as the people are in enduring frosts--buried for months in continual snows--with one unvaried monotony of dazzling white pervading the face of nature--the streams fast sealed with "thick ribbed ice"--and a thermometer at from twenty to thirty degrees below zero for weeks together. In short, a southern fancy paints Old Winter, ruling with despotic sway, unrestrained by the checks and balances which limit his authority in our more moderate climate--usurping a portion of the nominal domains of autumn and spring--and inflicting through his prime minister, Jack Frost, the most rigorous exactions of a government of force, on the unresisting people--penetrating into their dwellings at all hours, interfering even in the mode of their dress, attending all their movements in town or in country, and invariably assailing the lonely traveller on the extended prairie or in the dreary forest. Such is undoubtedly the picture which a southern imagination draws of a Canadian winter. But social life can modify the worst extremes of nature's inclemency, and find in the very evils of our condition sources of delight and enjoyment. So far from suffering during the winters I spent in Canada, I recall those joyous periods, when I was engaged in the constant pursuit of gaiety and pleasure, and when care had no control over my spirits as the brightest spots on the far off waste of memory.