Norman watched with great interest a race between a little sloop and schooner, round the light-house. The wind was so fresh that the vessels leaned very far over, and seemed in some danger of being capsized.
While the train was coming slowly up from the pier to the station, where the passengers awaited it, a gentleman, with a baby in his arms, was walking on the track. The English clergyman rushed forward before it, waving his umbrella and crying, “Off, man, off the track, or in one moment you will be crushed to atoms.”
Again they were seated in the cars. “What beautiful spikes of purple flowers,” exclaimed Mrs. Lester, “and close by the station. I wish we had seen them.”
“And those brilliant red flowers,” said Norman, “Did you ever see anything prettier?”
“Do you think they are flowers or berries” asked his mother; “we go so fast that I cannot tell which they are.”
At a station where they stopped, a gentleman got out and gathered some of these red berries, handing them to Mrs. Lester through the window.
“Red elderberries,” said Mrs. Lester; “very pretty, but not the gorgeous flowers we thought them; we cannot press these.”
The road lay through timber, and the stations were groups of unpainted houses in the clearings. Felled trees and blackened stumps met the eye in every direction.
At a station near Lake Simcoe the train stopped for two or three minutes, and Norman and his mother rushed to an opening, where they had a lovely view of the pretty sheet of water.
A longer view they had, though not so lovely, when the train went down on a short railroad running to the lake, to take the passengers who had made the circuit of it in the little steamboat. The boat was in sight, but some distance off, so that the passengers seated themselves on the pier, or on the piles of boards that encumbered it. Logs and boards met the eye in every direction, and an immense steam saw-mill was at work, converting the felled trees of the great forest through which they had passed, into the boards with which the settler builds his house.