Canada are but superficially known. An intimate acquaintance with its rich
vegetable and animal productions is most effectually made under the high
pressure of difficulty and necessity. Our writer has striven to interest
children, or rather young people approaching the age of adolescence, in the
natural history of this country, simply by showing them how it is possible
for children to make the best of it when thrown into a state of destitution
as forlorn as the wanderers on the Rice Lake Plains. Perhaps those who
would not care for the berry, the root, and the grain, as delineated and
classified technically in books of science, might remember their uses
and properties when thus brought practically before their notice as the
aliments of the famishing fellow-creature, with whom their instinctive
feelings must perforce sympathies. When parents who have left home comforts
and all the ties of gentle kindred for the dear sakes of their rising
families, in order to place them in a more independent position, it is well
if those young minds are prepared with some knowledge of what they are to
find in the adopted country; the animals, the flowers, the fruits, and even
the minuter blessings which a bountiful Creator has poured forth over that
wide land.

The previous work of my sister, Mrs. Traill, "The Backwoods of Canada, by
the Wife of an Emigrant Officer," published some years since by Mr. C.
Knight, in his Library of Useful Knowledge, has passed through many
editions, and enjoyed, (anonymous though it was,) too wide a popularity as
a standard work for me to need to dwell on it, further than to say that
the present is written in the same _naive_, charming style, with the
same modesty and uncomplaining spirit, although much has the sweet and
gentle--author endured, as every English lady must expect to do who
ventures to encounter the lot of a colonist. She has now devoted her
further years of experience as a settler to the information of the
younger class of colonists, to open their minds and interest them in the