THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 1 69 



Both the child and the father were well known to me, and I 

 was told of the circumstance at the time of its occurrence. 



V. 



In the early part of the month of June last I had the pleasure 

 of a jaunt through a district of Ontario entirely new to me, that is, 

 from Elora through Fergus and on north-east to Bellwood, thence 

 through Garafraxa, Eramosa and Erin townships. The weather 

 was superb, and the fields and woods in the exuberance of summer 

 garniture. After leaving the Grand River valley the topography is 

 in marked contrast to the slightly undulating surface of Burford and 

 adjoining townships. In Garafraxa and Erin vast irregularly shaped 

 mounds of sand or fine gravel are of frequent occurrence, and in 

 some hollows large groups of erratic surface boulders attract the 

 notice of every passer by. There are but few swamps, and when 

 such occur a growth of cedar instead of the black ash, elm, and 

 swamp maple of other districts is here a well marked feature. The 

 country is well cultivated and improved, stock keeping and root 

 culture being a prominent line of farming. 



A very marked feature of the district was the paucity of bird 

 life. We had just left a region where the woods resounded with the 

 music of the scarlet tanager and the hermit thrush, as well as that of 

 innumerable small warblers, and where the meadows were musical 

 with the notes of the bobolink, oriole, song-sparrow and meadow- 

 lark ; yet, in these townships of East Wellington, during two days' 

 travel, we only saw about half a dozen individual birds ! one being a 

 shore lark, one swallow, one pewee flycatcher, one grackle and a 

 crow or two 1 1 The diminution in the number of birds became 

 obvious after leaving the vicinity of Elora, as about that place there 

 are many deciduous trees among the cedars and other conifers that 

 are still found growing in and south of that locality. We were in- 

 duced to surmise that the absence of the black ash, soft maple, and 

 swamp elm trees, in the lowlands of these parts of Wellington 

 county, might account for the paucity of the birds which are found 

 in such profusion among that kind of vegetation elsewhere. As is 

 well known, the hosts of summer warblers find sustenance on the 

 insect larvae that prey upon the foliage of the above-mentioned trees, 

 the leaves of which are much disfigured and corroded every summer 

 by the ravages of caterpillars ; hence the warblers and insectivorous 



