and usually withdraw about the beginning of October; though some few stragglers may remain on till the first week

in November.

GILBERT WHITE.

TO A WATER-FOWL.

WHITHER, 'midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,

Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink

Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocky billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,-
The desert and illimitable air,—
Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,

At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere;
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end;

Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven

Hath swallowed up thy foam: yet on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who from zone to zone

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone

W. C. BRYANT.

THE WATER SYSTEM OF BRITISH NORTH

AMERICA.

Extract from a Speech delivered at Winnipeg.

FROM its geographical position and its peculiar characteristics, Manitoba may be regarded as the keystone of that mighty arch of sister provinces which spans the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was here that Canada, emerging from her woods and forests, first gazed upon her rolling prairies and unexplored North-West, and learned as by an unexpected revelation, that her historical territories of the Canadas, her eastern sea-boards of New Brunswick, Labrador, and Nova Scotia, her Laurentian lakes and valleys, corn-lands and pastures, though themselves more extensive than half-adozen European kingdoms, were but the vestibules and the ante-chambers to that till then undreamed-of Dominion, whose illimitable dimensions alike confound the arithmetic of the surveyor and the verification of the explorer. It was hence, that counting her past achievements as but the preface and prelude to her future exertions and expanding destinies, she took a fresh departure, received the afflatus of a more imperial inspiration, and felt herself no longer a mere settler along the banks of a single river, but the owner of half a continent, and in the amplitude of her possession, in the wealth of her resources, in the sinews of her material might, the peer of any power on the earth.

Geographical misconceptions are often engendered by the smallness of the maps upon which the figure of the world is depicted. To this is probably to be attributed the inadequate idea, entertained by the best educated persons, of the extent of Her Majesty's North American possessions. Perhaps the best way of connecting such a universal misapprehension would be by a summary of the rivers which flow through them, for we know that as a poor man cannot afford to live in a big house, so a small country cannot support a big river.

Now to an Englishman or a Frenchman the Severn or the Thames, the Seine or the Rhone, would appear considerable streams; but in the Ottawa, a mere affluent of the St. Lawrence, an affluent moreover which reaches the main stream six hundred miles from the sea, we have a river nearly five hundred and fifty miles long, and three or four times as big as any of them. But even after having ascended the St. Lawrence itself to Lake Ontario, and pursued it across Lake Huron and Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, a distance of one thousand five hundred miles, where are we? In the estimation of the person who has made the journey, at the end of all things: but to us, who know better, scarcely at the commencement of the great fluvial system of the Dominion; for from that spot, that is to say from Thunder Bay, we are able at once to ship our astonished traveller on to the Kaministiquia, a river of some hundred miles long. Thence almost in a straight line we launch him on Lake Shebandowan, Rainy Lake and Rainy River—a magnificent stream three hundred yards broad and a couple of hundred miles long-down whose tranquil bosom he floats into the Lake of the Woods, where he finds himself on a sheet of water, which, though diminutive as compared with the inland seas he has left behind him, will probably be found sufficiently extensive to render him fearfully sea-sick during his passage across it. For the last eighty miles of his voyage, however, he will be consoled by sailing through a succession of land-locked channels, the beauty of whose scenery, while it resembles, certainly excels the far-famed Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. From this lacustrine paradise of sylvan beauty we are able at once to transfer our friend to the Winnipeg, a river whose existence in the very heart and centre of the Continent is itself one of Nature's most delightful miracles, so beautiful and varied are its rocky banks, its tufted islands, so broad, so steep, so fervid is the volume of its waters, so vast the extent of their lake-like expansion, and so tremendous the power of its rapids.