much earlier than the one just mentioned. It is a fact not generally
remembered, however well known it may be, that there are isolated spots, along
the line of the great lakes, that date, as settlements, as far back as many of
the oldest American towns, and which were the seats of a species of
civilization, long before the greater portion of even the original states was
rescued from the wilderness.
    Ontario, in our own times, has been the scene of important naval evolutions.
Fleets have manoeuvred on those waters, which, half a century since, were desert
wastes; and the day is not distant, when the whole of that vast range of lakes
will become the seat of empire, and fraught with all the interests of human
society. A passing glimpse, even though it be in a work of fiction, of what that
vast region so lately was, may help to make up the sum of knowledge by which
alone a just appreciation can be formed of the wonderful means by which
Providence is clearing the way for the advancement of civilization across the
whole American continent.
 

                                   Chapter I

 »The turf shall be my fragrant shrine;
 My temple, Lord! that arch of thine;
 My censer's breath the mountain airs,
 And silent thoughts my only prayers.«
                                                    Moore, »The Turf Shall Be My
                                                      Fragrant Shrine,« ll. 1-4.
 
The sublimity connected with vastness, is familiar to every eye. The most
abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet's
thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the
illimitable void; the expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice, with
indifference, and the mind, even in the obscurity of night, finds a parallel to
that grandeur, which seems inseparable from images that the senses cannot
compass. With feelings akin to this admiration and awe, the offspring of
sublimity, were the different characters with which the action of this tale must
open, gazing on the scene before them. Four persons in all, two of each sex,
they had managed to ascend a pile of trees, that had been uptorn by a tempest,
to catch a view of the objects that surrounded them. It is still the practice of
the country to call these spots wind-rows. By letting in the light of heaven
upon the dark and damp recesses of the woods, they form a sort of oases in the
solemn obscurity of the virgin forests of America. The particular wind-row of
which we are writing lay on the brow of a gentle