1 64 Field and Forest Rambles. 



ence, which had been manfully met in early life, but cannot 

 now be maintained. 



Day dawned, and still the thaw continued ; moreover, as 

 I gazed across the open there appeared another sleigh and 

 party occupying the place where we had come to grief. 

 We had been the cause of their troubles, inasmuch as having 

 learned at the inn of our departure, they followed our 

 tracks to experience the same disaster and a night's bivouac 

 on the snow. By dint of much hard work we managed to 

 work our way back to the wayside inn, when the wind 

 chopped round to the north, and before the following morn- 

 ing the roads were perfectly passable, and the surface hard 

 and frozen. 



In the above valley flows the Nashwauk, a tributary of the 

 St. John, and once famous for its salmon, as will be further 

 noticed in the sequel. Along this river's banks snow had 

 drifted more than on level tracts, thus forming huge loosely 

 packed mounds. On the morning after our return to the 

 inn, as I strolled on snow shoes over the hard glazed crust, 

 and was ascending one of these mounds, I became somewhat 

 startled at first by the sudden cracking of the surface crust 

 in the form of long rents, extending for several hundred 

 feet, followed by hollow rumbling noises like reports of muffled 

 guns, caused by the fracture of the crisp surface sounding 

 along the loose substratum. Sometimes an enormous mass 

 would rend in two, and sink several inches, conveying a feeling 

 that one was likely to be suddenly engulfed in some internal 

 chasm. 



During the memorable winter of 1867-8 (one of the coldest 

 experienced in New Brunswick for nearly half a century), 

 there was an inordinate number of crossbills, pine bull- 

 finches, pine siskins, and redpolls, common winter birds, 

 but evidently rendered more so on this occasion by additional 

 arrivals from more northern regions, and a general collecting 

 of each species into large flocks. Being very desirous of 



