15 



moisture, creative of rivers and streams. It might have been kept in forest, but replant- 

 ing is scarce possible in many places there. 



' ' All the king's horses and all the king's men 

 Couldn't put Humpty together again." 



However, in the softer soils, fire will not reach the rock, but it will surely run fast 

 and far, and burn deeply and most injuriously into the life of thg land (the vegetable 

 humus on which in such a soil, the only hope of the agriculturist lies). And yet here is 

 the region, the very region which, above all, we should endeavour to keep wooded, green, 

 and flourishing. 



Here we are near the height of land, the great water-shed which crosses the east of 

 Ontario, on this side of which our streams flow into the lakes, while on the other they 

 run into the Ottawa River. This height of land stretches from north-west to north-east, 

 from near Nipissing till it strikes the St. Lawrence near Kingston. If you look at the 

 surveyor's details of townships surveyed, you will find all this to be described much as 

 land is pictured in the Nipissing and Muskoka districts. It is at present emphatically a 

 land of moisture and of streams. There are numerous and beautiful lakes, there are 

 rivers and water-powers right and left which would delight the heart of a manufacturer.; 

 there is the water, the very water he wants to aid the production of woollen and cotton 

 goods — the water free of lime. The housewife may there boil her tea-kettle for years, no 

 rock will form inside. 



The great slope leading to this watershed, and stretching to and past the Ottawa, 

 bordering the north-east of the settled portion of Ontario, is, so far as fire has yet spared 

 them, clothed with woods. Partly the lumberman has here and there taken out timber, 

 partly they are untouched by his axe-blade. While in forest they are for all Ontario 

 east of Toronto our reservoir of moisture, our mother of waters, our feeder of streams, the 

 streams which flow from this water-shed across our Province. But civilization is reaching 

 them in its most destructive mood, and all along the southern border of this mass of 

 forest the sturdy agriculturist frets its edge with fire and steel. He pierces it with roads, 

 he clears his isolated farms deep within its solitude, the forest falls before his axe, it dries 

 and shrivels beneath the hoofs of his cattle ; and still, as clearing operations penetrate 

 farther and farther from its outward trees, this great forest becomes drier and yet mofe 

 dry. It is not a rich and deep-rooted forest such as existed in former days near 



" Wild Ontario's boundless lake.'' 



It is a forest, the outer edge of which, dried by clearing operations, may be relied 

 upon to burn in dry summers, and not unlikely to burn terribly and devastatingly, and 

 for many miles. My readers may remember the fires three years ago, in the Muskoka 

 district, where it may be said, we had just commenced to attack the corner of the great 

 wood clothed watershed slope of which I speak. If they had travelled, as I happened to, 

 forty miles by stage through that district then, the clouds of smoke obscuring all around 

 us, the glare of the fires visible right and left in many directions along the darkened 

 horizon, the snapping and crackling of the giant trunks continually sounding in our ears, 

 and occasionally passing near some great roadside tree, clothed in a mass of fire, threaten- 

 ing to precipitate itself in destruction on coach, horses and passengers below, they would 



