So, en avant! I am going to relate the incidents of a journey last summer to the Westward, and to give all the substance of my observations on men and things made therein.
I left Kingston on the 26th of June, in the Princess Royal mail steamer, at 8 p.m., the usual hour of starting being seven, for Toronto; the weather unusually cold.
This fine boat constitutes, with two others, the City of Toronto and the Sovereign, the royal mail line between Kingston and Toronto. All are built nearly alike, are first class seaboats, and low pressure; they combine, with the Highlander, the Canada, and the Gildersleave, also splendid vessels, to form a mail route to Montreal—the latter boats taking the mail as far as Coteau du Lac, forty-five miles from Montreal, on which route a smaller vessel, the Chieftain, plies, wherein you sleep, at anchor, or rather moored, till daylight, if going down, or going upwards, on board the mail boat.
Passengers go from Montreal to Kingston by the mail route in twenty-four hours, a distance of 180 miles; a small portion, between the Cascades Rapids and the Coteau being traversed in a coach, on a planked road as smooth as a billiard-table.
From Kingston to Toronto, or nearly the whole length of Lake Ontario, takes sixteen hours, the boat leaving at seven, and arriving about or before noon next day; performing the passage at the rate of eleven miles an hour, exclusively of stoppages.
The transit between Montreal and Kingston is at the rate, including stoppage for daylight, the river being dangerous, of eight miles an hour; thus, in forty hours, the passenger passes from the seat of government to the largest city of Western Canada most comfortably, a journey which twenty years ago it always took a fortnight, and often a month, to accomplish, in the most precarious and uncomfortable manner—on board small, roasting steamers, crowded like a cattle-pen—in lumbering leathern conveniences, miscalled coaches, over roads which enter not into the dreams of Britons—by canoes—by bateaux, (a sort of coal barges,)—by schooners, where the cabin could never permit you to display either your length, your breadth, or your thickness, and thus reducing you to a point in creation, according to Euclid and his commentators.
Your compagnons de voyage, on board a bateau or Durham boat, which was a monstre bateau, were French Canadian voyageurs, always drunk and always gay, who poled you along up the rapids, or rushed down them with what will be will be.
These happy people had a knack of examining your goods and chattels, which they were conveying in the most admirable manner, and with the utmost sang-froid; but still they were above stealing—they only tapped the rum cask or the whiskey barrel, and appropriated any cordage wherewith you bound your chests and packages. I never had a chest, box, or bale sent up by bateau or Durham boat that escaped this rope mail.
By the by, the Durham boat, a long decked barge, square ahead, and square astern, has vanished; Ericson's screw-propellers have crushed it. It was neither invented by nor named after Lord Durham, but was as ancient as Lambton House itself.
The way the conductors of these boats found out vinous liquors was, as brother Jonathan so playfully observes, a caution.