Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red men

Nobody reads prefaces on a Railway journey. The leaves are turned over for something to arrest attention, or to dissipate weariness, or to fleet the time, which even at railway speed moves slowly compared to the march of ideas. It is, however, necessary to state in few words that these pages are a reprint of the most amusing and interesting chapters of the Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, —first published in 1838, in three octavo volumes, favourably received at the time and now out of print. The Authoress in the original preface to the work represents herself as thrown into scenes and regions hitherto undescribed by any traveller (for the northern shores of Lake Huron are almost new ground), and into relations with the Indian tribes such as few European women of refined and civilised habits have ever risked, and none have recorded; and the adventures and sketches of character and scenery among the Red-skins, still retain that freshness which belongs only to what is genuine. All that was of a merely transient or merely personal nature, or obsolete in politics or criticism, has been omitted.
The rest, the book must say for itself.
December 20.
Toronto—such is now the sonorous name of this our sublime capital—was, thirty years ago, a wilderness, the haunt of the bear and deer, with a little, ugly, inefficient fort, which, however, could not be more ugly or inefficient than the present one. Ten years ago Toronto was a village, with one brick house and four or five hundred inhabitants; five years ago it became a city, containing about five thousand inhabitants, and then bore the name of Little York: now it is Toronto, with an increasing trade, and a population of ten thousand people. So far I write as per book.
What Toronto may be in summer, I cannot tell; they say it is a pretty place. At present its appearance to me, a stranger, is most strangely mean and melancholy. A little ill-built town, on low land, at the bottom of a frozen bay, with one very ugly church, without tower or steeple; some government offices, built of staring red brick, in the most tasteless, vulgar style imaginable; three feet of snow all around; and the grey, sullen, wintry lake, and the dark gloom of the pine forest bounding the prospect: such seems Toronto to me now. I did not expect much; but for this I was not prepared.