course, by those who have money enough to start a farm and have
sufficient experience to start it upon, there is always a
comfortable living to be made, so long as there is a good export
market for grain; but there is as much difficulty with the
experience question as with the financial, for the ordinary run of
emigrants, owing to the difficulty of getting on to a farm. These
difficulties, I believe, will continue until there is a cry in the
opposite direction, and Canada is voted a hoax. When people cease to
flock out here, because they are told they can earn $40 a month,
with their board, and when those who have already arrived get shaken
down into their places which will be opened for them by the natural
increase in the number of farms every year, the country will soon
revive, and with it the demand. When the people in England and
elsewhere having got Canada off the brain, it will not be overflowed
with people who come out to make fortunes, and at the end of six
months only wish they could make tracks.

I have not written all this by way of complaint, or because I think
our own prospects look black, for they don't; thanks to some
powerful friends and good introductions. I think we are both pretty
sure of profitable work for the winter, which, of course, means also
after the winter; but, because my first impressions of the country
are different from what I expected them to be, and I wished for the
sake of afterwards comparing them with later experiences to put them
on record, and I put them in the form of a letter to you, because,
being a thinker on such Subjects, you may like to grin and note how
my surprises are what you would have expected. I don't know what the
people at home thought of my first letter; it must have dispelled
some illusions concerning the voyage out, which they seemed to have
thought we should like immensely, but we didn't, except at the