In 1853, I removed to the village of Carlton West, on the gravel road to Weston, and distant seven miles north-west of the city. My house stood on a gravel ridge which stretches from the Carlton station of the Northern Railway to the River Humber, and which must have formed the beach of the antediluvian northern ocean, one hundred and eighty feet above the present lake, and four hundred and thirty above the sea. This gravel ridge plainly marks the Toronto Harbour at the mouth of the Humber, as it existed in those ancient days, before the Niagara River and the Falls had any place on our world's surface. East of Carlton station, a high bluff of clay continues the old-line of coast, like the modern, to Scarboro' Heights, showing frequent depressions caused by the ice of the glacial period. In corroboration of this theory, I remember that for the first house built on the Avenue Road, north of Davenport Road, the excavations for a cellar laid bare great boulders of granite, limestone, and other rock, evidently deposited there by icebergs, which had crossed the clay bluff by channels of their own dredging, and melted away in the warmer waters to the south. I think it was Professor Chapman, of Toronto University, who pointed this out to me, and mentioned a still more remarkable case of glacial action which occurred in the Township of Albion, where a limestone quarry which had been worked profitably for several years, turned out to the great disappointment of its owner to be neither more nor less than a vast glacial boulder, which had been transported from its natural site at a distance of at least eighty miles. This locomotive rock is said to have been seventy feet in thickness and as much in breadth.

While speaking of the Carlton gravel ridge, it is worth while to note that, in taking gravel from its southern face, at a depth of twenty feet, I found an Indian flint arrow-head; also a stone implement similar to what is called by painters a muller, used for grinding paint. Several massive bones, and the horns of some large species of deer, were also found in the same gravel pit, and carried or given away by the workmen. The two articles first named are still in my possession. Being at the very bottom of the gravel deposit, they must have lain there when no such beach existed, or ever since the Oak Ridges ceased to be an ocean beach.

My house on the Davenport Road was a very pleasant residence, with a fine lawn ornamented with trees chiefly planted by my own hands, and was supplied with all the necessaries for modest competence. It is worth recording, that some of the saplings--silver poplars (abeles) planted by me, grew in twelve years to be eighteen inches thick at the butt, and sixty feet in spread of branches; while maples and other hardwoods did not attain more than half that size. Thus it would seem, that our North-West prairies might be all re-clothed with full-grown ash-leaved maples--their natural timber--in twenty-five years, or with balm of Gilead and abele poplars in half that time. Would it not be wise to enact laws at once, having that object in view?

I have been an amateur gardener since early childhood; and at Carlton indulged my taste to the full by collecting all kinds of flowers cultivated and wild. I still envy the man who, settling in the new lands, say in the milder climates of Vancouver's Island or British Columbia, may utilize to the full his abundant opportunities of gathering into one group the endless floral riches of the Canadian wilderness. We find exquisite lobelias, scarlet, blue and lilac; orchises with pellucid stems and fairy elegance of blossom; lovely prairie roses; cacti of infinite delicacy and the richest hues. Then as to shrubs--the papaw, the xeranthemum of many varieties, the Indian pear (or saskatoon of the North-West), spiræa prunifolia of several kinds, shrubby St. John's-wort, oenothera grandiflora, cum multis aliis.

Now that the taste for wild-flower gardens has become the fashion in Great Britain, it will doubtless soon spread to this Continent. No English park is considered complete without its special garden for wild flowers, carefully tended and kept as free from stray weeds as the more formal parterre of the front lawn. Our wealthier Canadian families cannot do better than follow the example of the Old Country in this respect, and assuredly they will be abundantly repaid for the little trouble and expenditure required.