A song
Oh Canada! thy gloomy woods
Will never cheer the heart;
The murmur of thy mighty floods
But cause fresh tears to start
From those whose fondest wishes rest
Beyond the distant main;
Who, 'mid the forests of the West,
Sigh for their homes again.
I, too, have felt the chilling blight
Their shadows cast on me,
My thought by day—my dream by night—
Was of my own country.
But independent souls will brave
All hardships to be free;
No more I weep to cross the wave,
My native land to see.
But ever as a thought most bless'd,
Her distant shores will rise,
In all their spring-tide beauty dress'd.
To cheer my mental eyes.
And treasured in my inmost heart,
The friends I left behind;
But reason's voice, that bade us part,
Now bids me be resign'd.
I see my children round me play,
My husband's smiles approve;
I dash regretful tears away,
And lift my thoughts above:
In humble gratitude to bless
The Almighty hand that spread
Our table in the wilderness,
And gave my infants bread.
CHAPTER VI — OLD SATAN AND TOM WILSON'S NOSE
“A nose, kind sir! Sure mother Nature,
With all her freaks, ne'er formed this feature.
If such were mine, I'd try and trade it,
And swear the gods had never made it.”
After reducing the log cabin into some sort of order, we contrived, with the aid of a few boards, to make a bed-closet for poor Tom Wilson, who continued to shake every day with the pitiless ague. There was no way of admitting light and air into this domicile, which opened into the general apartment, but through a square hole cut in one of the planks, just wide enough to admit a man's head through the aperture. Here we made Tom a comfortable bed on the floor, and did the best we could to nurse him through his sickness. His long, thin face, emaciated with disease, and surrounded by huge black whiskers, and a beard of a week's growth, looked perfectly unearthly. He had only to stare at the baby to frighten her almost out of her wits.
“How fond that young one is of me,” he would say; “she cries for joy at the sight of me.”
Among his curiosities, and he had many, he held in great esteem a huge nose, made hollow to fit his face, which his father, a being almost as eccentric as himself, had carved out of boxwood. When he slipped this nose over his own (which was no beautiful classical specimen of a nasal organ), it made a most perfect and hideous disguise. The mother who bore him never would have recognised her accomplished son.
Numberless were the tricks he played off with this nose. Once he walked through the streets of ——, with this proboscis attached to his face. “What a nose! Look at the man with the nose!” cried all the boys in the street. A party of Irish emigrants passed at the moment. The men, with the courtesy natural to their nation, forbore to laugh in the gentleman's face; but after they had passed, Tom looked back, and saw them bent half double in convulsions of mirth. Tom made the party a low bow, gravely took off his nose, and put it in his pocket.