"I sketch from Nature, and the draught is true.
Whate'er the picture, whether grave or gay,
Painful experience in a distant land
Made it mine own."
TOJOHN WEDDERBURN DUNBAR MOODIE, ESQ. SHERRIFF OF THE COUNTY OF HASTINGS, UPPER CANADA, THIS WORK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED, BY HIS ATTACHED FRIEND AND WIFE, SUSANNA MOODIE
"Dear foster-mother, on whose ample breast
The hungry still find food, the weary rest;
The child of want that treads thy happy shore,
Shall feel the grasp of poverty no more;
His honest toil meet recompense can claim,
And Freedom bless him with a freeman's name!"
S.M.
In our work of "Roughing it in the Bush," I endeavoured to draw apicture of Canadian life, as I found it twenty years ago, in theBackwoods. My motive in giving such a melancholy narrative to theBritish public, was prompted by the hope of deterring well-educatedpeople, about to settle in this colony, from entering upon a life forwhich they were totally unfitted by their previous pursuits and habits.
To persons unaccustomed to hard labour, and used to the comforts andluxuries deemed indispensable to those moving in the middle classes athome, a settlement in the bush can offer few advantages. It has provedthe ruin of hundreds and thousands who have ventured their all in thishazardous experiment; nor can I recollect a single family of the higherclass, that have come under my own personal knowledge, that everrealised an independence, or bettered their condition, by taking up wildlands in remote localities; while volumes might be filled with failures,even more disastrous than our own, to prove the truth of my formerstatements.
But while I have endeavoured to point out the error of gentlemenbringing delicate women and helpless children to toil in the woods, andby so doing excluding them from all social intercourse with persons intheir own rank, and depriving the younger branches of the family of theadvantages of education, which, in the vicinity of towns and villages,can be enjoyed by the children of the poorest emigrant, I have neversaid anything against the REAL benefits to be derived from a judiciouschoice of settlement in this great and rising country.
God forbid that any representations of mine should deter one of mycountrymen from making this noble and prosperous colony his future home.But let him leave to the hardy labourer the place assigned to him byProvidence, nor undertake, upon limited means, the task of pioneer inthe great wilderness. Men of independen