The ’barrens '.

The ’burnt woods ’.

Forest fires.

The great fire in the north-east.

The appearance of the burnt woods.

Succession after fire.

proper descent from these swamps, a quagmire is sometimes formed, in which the cattle, in their weak state, are in great danger of getting mired and lost. The next thing I shall notice is the barrens. These have few or no trees upon them, but are covered with a kind of shrub, they call myrtle, which overruns the surface like heath, but resembles galls that grow in the mosses in Scotland. This land is very dry and sandy, and in its present state well deserves the name it obtains. It would be easily cleared, but would require much dung or good soil to make it productive. But excepting in the neighbourhood of St. Peters, there is little of this upon the Island.

I may next turn your attention to the burnt woods, which are occasioned by the fire running away from where the people are burning timber to clear the land. When the fire gets hold of woods much mixed with soft wood, it runs sometimes several miles, and forms in its progress, I am told (and l partly saw it) one of the most awful scenes in nature; flying when the wind is high with amazing rapidity, making a noise like thunder, and involving the neighbourhood in a dense cloud of smoke. It sometimes kills cattle and wild beasts in the woods, and alarms new settlers who have small clearances round their houses, and who have to stand with water ready to quench the first spark that may alight upon them, or fly with their children, not knowing where to find safety. More than sixty years ago, a great fire was kindled upon the northern side of the Island, it is said by a spark from the pipe of an lndian, which overran the greater part of the northern shore. The ground it overran is still discoverable, being all sprung up of spruce, var, and white birch, of apparently from forty to fifty years growth. But burnt woods are to be seen in the neighbourhood of almost every settlement, some of them of considerable magnitude. But how to represent to your imagination a correct picture of these burnt woods, baffles my skill. They form, in reality, a scene the most ruinous, confused, and disgusting, the eye can possibly look upon. If it is an agreeable object for one who admires the beauties of Nature, to behold a tree, or a number of trees, exhibiting all the symptoms of vegetable life and health firmly rooted in the ground, rising to a dignified height, with the bark full of sap, the branches luxuriant, and well covered with foliage, it must prove the very reverse to see many acres, nay, many square miles, of standing trees, all dead, leafless, scorched, and going fast to ruin. If soft wood, and recently burnt, its green foliage is all consumed, its bark half burnt, and covered with a sooty blackness; if hard wood, and viewed at a distance, one would think it did not know that summer was come. But more narrowly examined, the trunks are found rotting, the bark partly peeled off, the leafless branches falling down, and the whole verging fast to decay. But if a few years more have elapsed since the fatal flame passed through it, a scene more revolting remains yet to be described. Some of the trees are overturned by the roots, with great mounds of earth attached; others broken at different heights, where most weakened by the fire. These all lying upon the ground, in the most confused manner possible, several courses deep, like dead men’s bodies after a sanguinary battle, form a confused mass impassable for either man or beast, but with the greatest difficulty. This is a faint representation of what is lying on the ground, but when the eye is turned to what is still standing, we behold trunks of trees, of various heights, having lost their tops as if they had been cut with chain shot, and here and there a huge pine or hemlock, a great unsightly object, with a trunk thicker than a corn sack, barkless and weather-beaten, raising its top, perhaps a hundred feet high, into the air, and reaching out a few half wasted branches, as if to implore the mercy of the raging winds, every blast of which threatened its final overthrow.

If these feeble representations have conveyed any correct idea of the appearance of the burnt woods, I must next turn your attention to the bad effects of the burning. If the land is not directly cleared and cultivated, which cannot possibly be the case, a weed they call fire-weed, springs up as rank and strong as hemp, which entirely impoverishes the land. This is followed with fern or rasp bushes on some ground, and

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