government had not to be petitioned, as it has now, for leave to
purchase land, and when, in place of the now many-worded grant, with its
broad seals and official signatures, people made out their own right of
possession by raising their log-house, and placing the sign manual of
their axe in whatever trees they chose; when moose and caraboo were
plentiful as sheep and oxen are now; when salmon filled each stream, and
the wood-sheltered clearings ripened the Indian corn without failing.

In this land, young as it is, there are those who mourn for the times
gone by, and consider the increasing settlement of the country as their
worst evil; wilfully closing their eyes against improvement, they see
not the wide fields, waving fair with grass and wheat, but think it was
better when the dense forest shut out the breeze and reflected the
sunbeams down with greater strength on the corn, so dearly loved by the
American. They hear not the sound of the busy mill when they mourn for
the fish-deserted brooks, and forget that when moose meat was more
plentiful than now bread stuffs were ground in the wearying hand-mill.
One of this respectable class of grumblers was our present
acquaintance, and here he sat in his porch, with aspect grave as the
stoics--his tall form, although in ruins now, was stately in decay as
the old forest's pines. His head was such as a phrenologist would have
loved to look upon; the true platonic breadth of brow, and lofty
elevation of the scalp silvered over, told of a mind fitting in its
magnitude to spring from that gigantic continent whose streams are
mighty rivers and whose lakes are seas; but, valueless as these, when
embosomed in their native woods, were the treasures of the old man's
mind, unawakened as they were by education, and unpolished even by
contact with the open world, yet still, amid the crust contracted in the
life he had led, rays of the inward diamond glittered forth. The
wilderness had always been his dwelling--in the land he had left, his