Drummond spent part of his boyhood among the woods and rivers of Eastern Canada. His own record of these early days was graphic. He said: “I lived in a typical mixed-up village—Bord à Plouffe—composed of French and English-speaking raftsmen, or ‘voyageurs,’ as we call them—the class of men who went with Wolseley to the Red River, and later accompanied the same general up the Nile—men with rings in their ears, dare-devils, Indians, half-breeds, French-Canadians, Scotch and Irish-Canadians—a motley crew, but great ‘river men’ who ran the rapids, sang their quaint old songs—‘En Roulant,’ ‘Par Derrière chez ma Tante,’ and ‘Dans le prison de Nantes,’ songs forgotten in France, but preserved in French Canada. Running the rapids with these men, I learned to love them and their rough ways.” At the poet’s funeral a poor countrywoman of Drummond—he was an Irishman by birth—was heard to say: “Shure, he was the doctor that come into yer sickroom like an archangel.” The amount of French still spoken in Canada is surprising to a stranger. One hardly expects to find French policemen on English soil, or the law courts conducted in the French tongue. Some of the old French title-deeds in Canada are very amusing. A friend wanted to buy a small piece of property a few years ago, adjoining some he already possessed on the shores of the St. Lawrence. Apart from acquiring the land itself, there were “certain obligations which formed a charge upon the property,” and these were so wonderful they are worth repeating. “EXTRACT FROM DEED OF CESSION BETWEEN CERTAIN PARTIES. “To pay, furnish, and deliver to the said transferor during his life an annual rent and donation for life as follows: Six quintals of good fine flour at All Saints, one fat pig of three hundred pounds in December, thirty pounds of good butcher’s meat in December, twenty pounds of sugar, one pound of coffee, two pounds of good green teas on demand, twelve pounds of candles, fifteen pounds of soap, four pounds of rice on demand, twenty bushels of good fine potatoes on St. Michael’s Day, one bushel of cooking peas in December, one measure of good rum at Christmas, four dozen eggs as required. “These articles every year, and the sum of thirty dollars in money (about £7), payable half at St. Michael’s Day and half in April, during his life, commencing on next St. Michael’s Day. “And, further, they oblige themselves to furnish annually to the transferor during his life a milch cow, to be fed, pastured, and wintered by the transferees with their own, and renewed in case of death, infirmity, or age; and the profits or increase shall belong to the transferor; this cow to be delivered on the 15th of May and retaken in the autumn when she ceases to give milk.