The region of Canada in which I now find myself, is called the London
District; you will see its situation at once by a glance on the map. It
lies between the Gore District and the Western District, having to the
south a large extent of the coast of Lake Erie; and on the north the
Indian territories, and part of the southern shore of Lake Huron. It is
watered by rivers flowing into both lakes, but chiefly by the river
Thames, which is here (about one hundred miles from its mouth) a small
but most beautiful stream, winding like the Isis at Oxford. Woodstock,
the nearest _village_, as I suppose I must in modesty call it, is fast
rising into an important town, and the whole district is, for its
scenery, fertility, and advantages of every kind, perhaps the finest in
Upper Canada.[9]
The society in this immediate neighbourhood is particularly good;
several gentlemen of family, superior education, and large capital,
(among whom is the brother of an English and the son of an Irish peer, a
colonel and a major in the army,) have made very extensive purchases of
land, and their estates are in flourishing progress.
One day we drove over to the settlement of one of these magnificos,
Admiral Vansittart, who has already expended upwards of twenty thousand
pounds in purchases and improvements. His house is really a curiosity,
and at the first glance reminded me of an African village--a sort of
Timbuctoo set down in the woods; it is two or three miles from the high
road, in the midst of the forest, and looked as if a number of log-huts
had jostled against each other by accident, and there stuck fast.
The admiral had begun, I imagine, by erecting, as is usual, a log-house,
while the woods were clearing; then, being in want of space, he added
another, then another and another, and so on, all of different shapes
and sizes, and full of a seaman's contrivances--odd galleries, passages,
porticos, corridors, saloons, cabins and cupboards; so that if the
outside reminded me of an African village, the interior was no less like
that of a man-of-war.
The drawing-room, which occupies an entire building, is really a noble
room, with a chimney in which they pile twenty oak logs at once. Around
this room runs a gallery, well lighted with windows from without,
through which there is a constant circulation of air, keeping the room
warm in winter and cool in summer. The admiral has, besides, so many
ingenious and inexplicable contrivances for warming and airing his
house, that no insurance office will insure him upon any terms.
Altogether it was the most strangely picturesque sort of dwelling I ever
beheld. The admiral's sister, an accomplished woman of independent
fortune, has lately arrived from Europe, to take up her residence in the
wilds. Having recently spent some years in Italy, she has brought out
with her all those pretty objects of _virtu_, with which English
travellers load themselves in that country. Here, ranged round the room,
I found views of Rome and Naples; tazzi, and marbles, and sculpture in
lava, or alabaster; miniature copies of the eternal Sibyl and Cenci,
Raphael's Vatican, &c.--things not wonderful nor rare in themselves--the
wonder was to see them here.
The woods are yet close up to the house; but there is a fine
well-cultivated garden, and the process of clearing and log-burning
proceeds all around with great animation.
On Sunday we attended the pretty little church at Woodstock, which was
filled by the neighbouring settlers of all classes: the service was well
read, and the hymns were sung by the ladies of the congregation. The
sermon, which treated of some abstract and speculative point of
theology, seemed to me not well adapted to the sort of congregation
assembled. The situation of those who had here met together to seek a
new existence in a new world, might have afforded topics of instruction,
praise, and gratitude, far more practical, more congenial, more
intelligible, than a mere controversial essay on a disputed text, which
elicited no remark nor sympathy that I could perceive. After the
service, the congregation remained some time assembled before the
church-door, in various and interesting groups--the well-dressed
families of settlers who had come from many miles' distance in vehicles
well suited to the roads--that is to say, carts, or as they call them
here teams or wagons; the belles and the beaux of "the Bush," in Sunday
trim--and innumerable children. Many were the greetings and inquiries;
the news and gossip of all the neighbourhood had to be exchanged. The
conversation among the ladies was of marriages and births--lamentations
on the want of servants, and the state of the roads--the last arrival of
letters from England--and speculations upon the character of a new
neighbour come to settle in the Bush: Among the gentlemen, it was of
crops and clearings, lumber, price of wheat, road-mending,
deer-shooting, log-burning, and so forth--subjects in which I felt a
lively interest and curiosity; and if I could not take a very brilliant
and prominent part in the discourse, I could at least listen, like the
Irish corn-field, "with all my ears."
I think it was this day at dinner that a gentleman described to me a
family of Mohawk Indians, consisting of seven individuals, who had
encamped upon some of his uncleared land in two wigwams. They had made
their first appearance in the early spring, and had since subsisted by
hunting, selling their venison for whisky or tobacco; their appearance
and situation were, he said, most wretched, and their indolence extreme.
Within three months, five out of the seven were dead of consumption; two
only were left--languid, squalid, helpless, hopeless, heartless.
[Footnote 9: The average produce of an acre of land is greater
throughout Canada than in England. In these western districts greater
than in the rest of Canada.]
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