Ob EFFECTS OF FORESTS ON MARSHES. 



must have been a mill, but wondered at its situation, so far from any 

 road. I have since been informed that it was a saw-mill, and that 

 there was a good road to it, but this road being now overrun with 

 bushes and young trees, escaped our notice. The mill has been disused 

 nearly twenty years. On the borders of the brook I met with seed- 

 vessels of the touch-me-not, impatiens nolli tangere, the handsome 

 sub-conic scarlet fruit of the white and the red death, trillium 

 picium and T. foetidum, the large umbelled bright blue berries 

 of smilacina horecdis, and many others. In pressing through the 

 bush we got our clothes bedaubed with a nasty substance, which 

 we discovered to proceed from thousands of the aphis lanata (?) 

 which we had crushed ; they were so thickly clustered round 

 the branches of the alders as to make a solid mass half-an-inch 

 thick, covered with ragged filaments of white down. We were 

 getting tired of the ruggedness of our path, when we suddenly 

 came upon a new and very good bridge across the brook, made 

 of round, that is, unhewn logs, which connected a good broad 

 path, from which the fallen trees and encumbrances had been cleared 

 away, and which had evidently been used for drawing out mill-logs in 

 winter with sleds. This we followed. The sides of the road were 

 lined with the stumps of large spruces and hemlocks, which had been 

 felled the previous winter ; and the road itself was strewn with the 

 chips of the axe-men. The course lying through a cedar swamp, the 

 ground was mossy, and in some places wet ; here the scarlet stone- 

 berry was abundant, as well as the berries mentioned before. The 

 iovmer, framria canadensis, is a low and pretty plant, having a white 

 flower, resembling that of a strawberry, and four large oval green 

 leaves on the ground ; at present they were crowned with the little 

 cluster of bright red berries, which were ripe, and we ate many — 

 they were farinaceous and agreeable. This plant is common in 

 Newfoundland. We continued to follow this path till it appeared 

 almost interminable, though its tedious uniformity made it seem 

 longer tlian it really was, as I suppose we did not walk more than a 

 mile and a-half on it when I perceived by the increasing light among 

 the trees that we were approaching a large opening. 



" We now pi'essed eagerly on, and found that we had reached the 

 borders of the Bride, which was not a clearing, as I had expected, but 

 was covered with a stunted and ragged gi'owth of moss-grown spruce, 

 from eight to twelve feet in height, exactly resembling the small 

 woods of Newfoundland. On the borders of the large marshes I 

 found also the same plants that inhabit such situations in that 



