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Updated: May 10, 2025
The fearful conflagration to which our poor lumberer nearly fell a victim, has been thus ably described in M'Gregor's "British America."
It sounds like the old chanson my father used to sing;" and Louis, raising his voice, began to sing the words of an old French Canadian song, which we will give in the English as we heard it sung by an old lumberer. "Down by those banks where the pleasant waters flow, Through the wild woods we'll wander, and we'll chase the buffalo. And we'll chase the buffalo."
Here you are in the lumberer's winter home I cannot call him woodman, it would disgrace the ancient and ballad-sung craft; for the lumberer is not a gentle woodman, and you need not sing sweetly to him to "spare that tree." The larger dwelling is the hall, the common hall, and the pig-sties the sleeping-places.
Some changes had taken place during that short period: the widow Perron was dead; Pierre, the gay, lively-hearted Pierre, was married to the daughter of a lumberer; and Catharine, who had no relatives in Quebec, had gone up the country with her brother and his wife, and was living in some little settlement above Montreal with them.
The lumberer's life is truly an unhappy one, for, when he reaches the end of the raft's voyage, whatever money he may have made goes to the fiddle, the female, or the fire-water; and he starts again as poor as at first, living perhaps by a rare chance to the advanced age, for a lumberer, of forty years.
Of such a character was the great fire at Miramichi, which nearly destroyed Fredericton, and was attended not only with an immense loss of property but with the sad loss of many valuable lives. I will presently give in his own forcible and feeling language the history of a lumberer who escaped from destruction after being for some time in imminent peril of his life.
And now behold our two backwoodsmen fairly commencing their arduous life: it was nothing, after all, to Pierre, by previous occupation a hardy lumberer, or the Scottish soldier, accustomed to brave all sorts of hardships in a wild country, himself a mountaineer, inured to a stormy climate and scanty fare from his earliest youth.
The season which the residents of cities think an obstruction is in the country an extension of intercourse: it opens every forest from here to Labrador, free of entrance; the most tangled thicket, the most treacherous marsh becomes passable; and the lumberer or moose-hunter, mounted on his snow-shoes, has the world before him.
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