80 QUEBEC. 



into piles, and burns, when dry, in the spring. In the space 

 thus cleared and burnt he plants potatoes with the hoe, 

 here and there, in little hills amongst the stumps. The 

 following year he sows grass seed and lays it down as 

 pasture. After seven years the hard-wood stumps are 

 rotten and come out easily. The pine, owing to its 

 resinous nature, does not rot so quickly, and gives a little 

 more trouble. The land is now ready for the plough, and 

 in the eighth year he takes a crop of wheat off it and 

 brings it into regular rotation. Say five acres of forest are 

 chopped every year, he will thus have (after the seventh 

 year) ten acres of new land coming in each season, viz. 

 five of burnt land for potatoes, and five to stump and 

 plough for wheat. The virgin soil needs no manure, and 

 yields magnificent crops. When the settler has new 

 land coming in each year, he, from time to time, lays 

 down portions of his longest cleared land in permanent 

 pasture. 



One of the greatest if not the greatest annoyance to 

 the back settlers are the flies. The larger his clearing 

 becomes, the less he is annoyed by these pests, which 

 disappear with the forest. Where his house is near water 

 or swampy land the flies are intolerable. In the valley 

 of the Metapedia I have known families who were put to 

 rout and driven out of the country by the black flies. 

 Where the house is built in a high exposed situation the 

 flies are not so troublesome, but they annoy the back 

 settler more or less for the first eight or ten years, that 

 is to say, until he has made a large hole in the forest. 

 His cattle, too, are terribly annoyed by a large fly called 

 the cariboo fly, whose bite is only a shade less severe 



