hours later brought us again to Sault St. Marie, where we took in Wood and proceeded on our way. Nothing worthy of note occurred all day, and at 11 p.m. I turned in for the night, after playing euchre for an hour with the captain. We stopped at Bruce Mines during the night, and at half-past seven on the following evening made our last stoppage, and took in sufficient wood for our final run to Collingwood, a distance of 132 miles, across Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay. The following morning at 8 o'clock we could distinguish Collingwood in the distance, and precisely at half-past ten we ran alongside the quay, thus completing the tour, which occupied nine days and eleven nights, including stoppages, and having travelled over 1550 miles of water. I took the cars from Collingwood, and arrived once more in Toronto at 4 p.m.

In concluding this short and necessarily imperfect sketch, I would strongly advise any one who may happen to be in Canada and have 10 days to spare, to pack his portmanteau, take his gun, and make the round; but if he has the opportunity of choosing his time for it, by all means go either in June, July, or August: after this the weather up so far north becomes broken, and is always cold; and if later than August he will in all probability have to contend with as stormy weather as I had when I made my tour round Lakes Huron and Superior.

✡

THE

TRUE FATE OF EDWARD PENDLEBURY. AT a time when a large portion of the soil of Ireland was cut up into numberless small holdings, yearly becoming less and less in area, owing to the multiplication of those who claimed a right to divide them, and year by year producing smaller and poorer crops, through the inability of the owners to sufficiently manure and properly till the ground, a state of affairs, by-the-bye, which the great, enlightened, and philanthropic statesmen, Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone, wish to see restored, -the twelve poorest and worst cultivated acres in the County Down were owned by a man named Thomas Pendlebury, the lineal descendant of one of Crom. well's Ironsides, who, on the pacification of Ireland by the Protector's army, had chosen to settle on the land which had been granted to him by Oliver, out of the confiscated estates of Shamus O'Neil, to whose family all that part of the country had from time immemorial belonged.

Shamus had been killed, fighting for King Charles, at the siege of Drogheda, and died without male heirs. He had one daughter, however, whom tradition has painted beautiful as Aphrodite and chaste as Diana, and who at the time of her father's death was about sixteen years of age, and motherless.

How it came to pass that the last survivor of a proud and noble race consented to marry the usurper of her lands, tradition sayeth not; but that she became his wife is positive, as is likewise the fact that in doing so she forsook the religion of her forefathers, and adopted that of her husband, to whom the same authority pronounces her to have been a good and faithful wife, and by whom she became the mother of twin sons.

As to how long the last of the O'Neils lived after her marriage and whether or not she survived her husband, tradition is again silent; but it is probable that the tough old Ironside outlived his gentle partner, for there is a rumour extant, unsupported, however, by documentary evidence, of a second Mrs. Pendlebury, who also had two sons.

If this be really so, these younger children must have been disinherited, or have died in their childhood-have predeceased their father, at any rate; for at the Colonel's death the estate of Carnalbanagh was divided into two about equal portions, thenceforward known by the names of Carnalbanagh East and Carnalbanagh West, and occupied by the twin descendants of Shumas O'Neil.

A very fair and equitable arrangement, it may be said, far

preferable to the iniquitous customs of primogeniture and entail— no doubt, if subdivision of property could be kept within certain limits. Both the twins, however, married, and had numerous sons and daughters; and amongst these, at the death of their respective fathers, the property was again partitioned. This disintegrating process was repeated by each succeeding generation, until, in process of time, the Pendlebury estates were cut up into a multitude of tiny holdings, the owners whereof grew poorer and poorer with each division of the land, until at last the descendants of the Ironside Colonel and the daughter of the O'Neils were merged into the ranks of the surrounding peasantry.

In the year 1826, the last living descendants of old Thomas Pendlebury, in the male line at least, was the Thomas already mentioned as being owner of the twelve poorest and worst culti vated acres in that part of Ireland, and his two sons, then approach. ing to man's estate, Thomas junior, and Edward, two rawboned lads, merely peasants, utterly uneducated, ignorant even of their descent, and altogether without ambition of any sort,

save one.

And a miserable ambition it was: to wit, that of becoming each sole owner of the impoverished twelve acres upon which stood the miserable cabin in which they had been born. Both brothers, however, kept their thoughts to themselves, and by attention and great deference to the father each sought to influence him, and procure a will in his own favour to the exclusion of the other.

Whether Thomas senior saw through their design is uncertain, but he firmly refused to make a will; thinking probably that were he to do so, he must make an enemy of the son whom he disinherited, and lessen his own importance in their eyes, which, at that time, was considerable.

A widower, almost from the birth of his sons, Thomas Pendlebury had brought them up alone, or rather with the only assistance of a motherly goat, and never suffered a woman to put foot inside his cabin, or even to trespass on his twelve acres. For the same reason-intense dislike to female society-he never suffered the boys to go to school, or church, but permitted them to grow up like beasts of the field, without education, or religion, or anything but the very slightest intercourse with their neighbours.

The twelve acres, impoverished as they were, produced potatoes enough to feed them all throughout the year, and a small plot of ground was devoted to cabbages and other table vegetables. A couple of pigs, a goat (not the boys' foster-mother), a donkey, and a few fowls, completed the stock of the farm.

The donkey was employed on the land, but chiefly to carry home turf from the Montiaghs Bog, where it was plentiful, and to be had for the cutting.

Now and then a pig was sold at the fair, or to a neighbour, and the money safely stowed away by the old man in a convenient hole in the thatched roof of the cabin.

The rector sometimes called at the door, but was never permitted to enter the wretched hovel, where the goat, donkey, and fowls took their rest with their owners. The pigs were kept in scarcely a worse shed outside.

The family fare, especially when the boys had begun to grow up, was often improved by the addition of a hare or pheasant, trapped on the domains of the adjacent landowners; who, though strangely suspecting, never succeeded in taking the Pendleburys' flagrante delicto, poaching.

A season of trial and affliction was in store for the poor Irish, and especially for the Irish poor. In the autumn of 1846, the potatoe crop was a general failure; famine ensued, and was followed by fever, to which, after enduring unheard-of privations with the fortitude of a Spartan or a stoic, the elder Pendlebury succumbed without having made a will.

The sons were aware that their father had money stowed away somewhere, and after a long and diligent search succeeded in discovering the hoard, concealed in a hole in the thatch. The find was the means of saving their lives: they were fond of money, but fonder of existence; so they divided the silver equally between them, and sparingly used it for the purchase of the simplest food, until the famine ceased, and the potato once more flourished, if it could be said ever to have done so, on the exhausted soil of their patrimony.

The goat, pigs, and fowl had disappeared, but were, in time, replaced by others; the donkey, however, survived the "dark days," and yearly dragged his loads of turf from the Montiaghs.

With returning prosperity, or what passed with them for such, the brothers took heart, and the youngest even spoke of taking a wife, and commenced to court Anne Jane Lavery, the daughter of a neighbouring cottier, who had not much to recommend her, morally or physically, except a "fortune" of five pounds, left to her by an uncle, and which her father had expended in the improvement of his farm, promising that she hould have it back whenever she was married, a contingency which the worthy parent deemed most unlikely.

Although, like his father, he professed an aversion to the sex, Thomas no sooner heard of his brother's intention of marrying than he, too, resolved to take a wife; and attracted, probably, by

the bait of her "fortune," laid siege to the heart of the fair Anne Jane, which, though she was pledged to Edward, he very soon succeeded in winning for himself.

The two brothers had until then, from the time of the death of their father, lived amicably together, jointly working the farm, and dividing equally the products of any portion of the crops or live stock they had disposed of, as not being required for their own use: but as soon as Edward discovered his brother's treachery, and the fair Anne Jane's inconstancy, he immediately demanded a division of the property; and on Thomas resisting his claim, went to law, and won his case; the elder brother was condemned in the costs of the proceedings, in order to pay which he was obliged to mortgage his six acres: but he took his disappointment more quietly than was expected, and seemed to bear no grudge against his brother.

There was a slight dispute about the donkey: the poor old beast could not be divided, and Edward refused to agree to a proposal that they should have the use of the animal in turn: it was accordingly twice driven to a fair at two adjoining towns, but was brought back, each time, without having found a purchaser. At last, just as Edward was about making a second appeal to the law, the poor old donkey died, and saved the brothers the expense of further litigation.

Living so near to each other as they did-under the same roof, in fact-it was scarcely to be expected that the brothers would altogether escape having now and then a skirmish, which could not, however, be dignified with the name of quarrel. Still, bickerings were of frequent occurrence about trifles, and one day Edward remarked to a neighbour, with whom, contrary to his custom, he got into conversation over the hedge that divided his property from the road, that he had made up his mind to sell his farm and emigrate to America.

The neighbour was surprised, and was about to put more questions, when a sudden irruption of Thomas's pigs into Edward's cabbage plot, caused the latter to start off in all haste to the rescue of his vegetables, and the conversation, thus abruptly broken off, was never resumed. From that day no one ever remembered having seen Edward Pendlebury.

It was taken for granted, on the testimony of the neighbour, that the absentee had really carried out his intention and emigrated to the United States, so no inquiries were made; and if his farm was to be sold, who so likely to buy it as Thomas ? In fact, so little was known about the Pendleburys that no one took much interest in the matter. They had always been reserved and silent, and were rather generally disliked than otherwise.

After the lapse of some months from the time when the