Such was my exterior; what was my character? A few words will suffice to explain:--bold, yet cautious; brave, yet tender; constant, yet highly impressible; tenacious of affection, yet quick to kindle into admiration at every new form of beauty; many times smitten, yet surviving the wound; vanquished, yet rescued by that very impressibility of temper--such was the man over whose singular adventures you will shortly be called to smile or to weep. Here is my card: Lieut. Alexander Macrorie 129th Bobtails. And now, my friend, having introduced you to myself, having shown you my photograph, having explained my character, and handed you my card, allow me to lead you to CHAPTER II. MY QUARTERS, WHERE YOU WILL BECOME ACQUAINTED WITH OLD JACK RANDOLPH, MY MOST INTIMATE FRIEND, AND ONE WHO DIVIDES WITH ME THE HONOR OF BEING THE HERO OF MY STORY. I'll never forget the time. It was a day in April. But an April day in Canada is a very different thing from an April day in England. In England all Nature is robed in vivid green, the air is balmy; and all those beauties abound which usually set poets rhapsodizing, and young men sentimentalizing, and young girls tantalizing. Now, in Canada there is nothing of the kind. No Canadian poet, for instance, would ever affirm that in the spring a livelier iris blooms upon the burnished dove; in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. No. For that sort of thing--the thoughts of love I mean--winter is the time of day in Canada. The fact is, the Canadians haven't any spring. The months which Englishmen include under that pleasant name are here partly taken up with prolonging the winter, and partly with the formation of a new and nondescript season. In that period Nature, instead of being darkly, deeply, beautifully green, has rather the shade of a dingy, dirty, melancholy gray. Snow covers the ground--not by any means the glistening white robe of Winter--but a rugged substitute, damp, and discolored. It is snow, but snow far gone into decay and decrepitude-- snow that seems ashamed of itself for lingering so long after wearing out its welcome, and presenting itself in so revolting a dress--snow, in fact, which is like a man sinking into irremediable ruin and changing its former glorious state for that condition which is expressed by the unpleasant word "slush." There is no an object, not a circumstance, in visible Nature which does not heighten the contrast. In England there is the luxuriant foliage, the fragrant blossom, the gay flower; in Canada, black twigs--bare, scraggy, and altogether wretched--thrust their repulsive forms forth into the bleak air--there, the soft rain-shower falls; here, the fierce snow-squall, or maddening sleet!--there, the field is traversed by the cheerful plough; here, it is covered with ice-heaps or thawing snow; there, the rivers run babbling onward under the green trees; here, they groan and chafe under