In most parts of Upper Canada, near the shores of the great lakes, you can build a house either of stone or brick, as it suits your fancy, for both these materials are plentiful, particularly clay; but at Toronto there is no suitable building-stone; plenty of clay, however, is found, for there you may build your house out of the very excavations for your cellars; and I confess that I prefer a brick house in Canada to one of limestone, for the latter material imbibes moisture; and if a brick house has a good projecting roof, it lasts very long, and is always warm.
It is surprising to observe the effects of the climate on buildings in this country. A good stone house, not ten years old, carefully built, and pointed between the joints of the masonry with the best cement, requires a total repair after that period, and often before. The window-sills and lintels of limestone break and crack, and the chimneys soon become disjointed and unsafe. Although it may seem paradoxical, yet it is true that the woodwork of a house lasts good much longer than the stone, or rather the cement, which joins the stone; but wood decays also very rapidly. A bridge becomes rotten in ten years, and a shingled roof lasts only fifteen; but then wood is never seasoned in America; it would not pay.
CHAPTER VII.
Toronto and the Transit—The ice and its innovations—Siege and storm of a Fortalice by the Ice-king—Newark, or Niagara—Flags, big and little—Views of American and of English institutions—Blacklegs and Races—Colonial high life—Youth very young.
Behold us again in Toronto at Macdonald's Hotel; and, as we shall have to visit this rising city frequently, we shall say very little more about it at present, but embark as speedily as possible on board the Transit, and steam over to Niagara.
The Transit, a celebrated packet, now getting old, and commanded by a son of its well-known owner, Captain Richardson, starts always in summer at eight a.m. punctually, and makes her voyage by half-past eleven, at which hour, on the 5th day of July, we once more touched the shore of Newark, or Niagara Town, at the Dock Company's wharf, which we found had been greatly damaged in the spring of the year by a most extraordinary ice phenomenon.
At the breaking-up of the frost, the ice in the river Niagara, which came down the river, packed near its mouth, and dammed it up so high at Queenston, seven miles above and close to the narrows, that the upper surface of the fields of ice was thirty feet above the level of the river, there a quarter of a mile broad or more. The consequence was, that every wharf and every building under this level was destroyed and crushed. Every edifice on the banks, and among others a strong stone barrack, full of soldiers, was stormed by the frost-king, during the darkness of an awful night, and the front wall fairly breached and borne down by the advancing masses of ice. The soldiers had barely time to escape from the crashing and rending walls; and their cooking-house, a detached building, some yards from the barrack and higher up the bank, was turned over, as if it had been a small boat.
In the memory of man, such a scene had never occurred before, and probably never will again; and I have been told, by those who beheld it, that a more solemn display of natural power and irresistible might has seldom been witnessed than that of the gradual grinding, heaving passage of one great floe, or field, of thick-ribbed ice over the other, until that summit was gained which could not be exceeded.
Then came the disruption, the roar, the rush, the fury, the foam, the groaning thunder, and the river flood; the plunge and the struggle between the solid and the liquid waters.