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The settlers are afraid of the lumberers; and thus all the finest land, near rivers, creeks, or transport of any kind, is swept of the timber to such an extent that you must go now far, far back from the Lakes, the St. Lawrence, or the Ottawa, before you can see the forest in its primeval grandeur.
The French Canadians are not addicted to the vice of drinking ardent spirits as a people, although the lumberers and voyageurs shorten their lives very considerably by the use of whiskey. The lumberers, who are the cutters and conveyers of timber, pass a short and excited existence.
He lived all alone in a little log-house, and spent his time in fishing and trapping and hunting; and he was very dull, for he had no wife, and no little child like me to talk to. The only people whom he used to see were some French lumberers; and now and then the Indians would come in their canoes and fish on his lake, and make their wigwams on the lake-shore, and hunt deer in the wood.
The fire they fed from a stack of drift and wreck wood piled to the right of the door, and fuel for the fetching strewed the frozen beach outside whole trees notched into lengths by lumberers' axes and washed thither from they knew not what continent. But the wreck-wood came from their own ship, the J. R. MacNeill, which had brought them from Dundee.
A very motley group of lumberers, navvies, and speculators assembled for breakfast at five o'clock a.m. at Tom's table, and although I cannot quite confirm the favourable opinion of my friend the express agent as to the quality of the viands which graced it, I can at least testify to the vigour with which the "guests" disposed of the pork and beans, the molasses and dried apples which Tom, with foul fingers, had set before them.
"I have often heard my father tell of the privations of the lumberers, when they have fallen short of provisions, and of the contrivances of himself and old Jacob Morelle when they were lost for several days, nay, weeks I believe it was.
"Log-houses of the roughest possible kind, such as are built in the woods for the gangs of lumberers; that is, you know, the men who cut down the trees and prepare them for shipping." "But Mrs. Bayne said something about shanties near here." "Yes. Beyond their house, there lies, along the river, a swamp of no great extent, which ought to have been drained long ago.
And on the other hand, we have known a black-bearded backwoodsman, whose mere voice and presence would quell any riot among the lumberers, yet this man, nicknamed by his employees "the black devil," confessed himself to be in secret the most timid of lambs.
Something is being done, but much more may be done; and not only is there work to be done among Indians, but among the out-settlers, and especially among the lumberers on the Ottawa. Never mind whether they are Romanists or not. They never hear the Gospel of free grace preached from one end of the year to the other.
'I wonder it escaped the lumberers when they were here; they have generally pretty well weeded the forests along this chain of lakes of such fine timber as this spruce. I suppose it's at least a hundred feet high: I've seen some a hundred and forty. 'And you think lumberers have been chopping in these woods? I saw no signs of them, said Robert.
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