That whole range of townships was set
off under a provision admirable in its character, that
the first settled minister in each town should receive
one hundred acres of land as the "minister's grant,"
and the first settled schoolmaster eighty. To No. 9,
therefore, I came. I constituted a little Sandemanian
church. Auchmuty and Delafield came up and installed me,
and with these hands I built the cabin in which, with
Polly and the little ones, I have since spent many happy
nights and days. This is not the place for me to publish
a map, which I have by me, of No. 9, nor an account of
its many advantages for settlers. Should I ever print my
papers called "Stay-at-home Robinsons," it will be easy
with them to explain its topography and geography.
Suffice it now to say, that, with Alice and Bertha and
Polly, I took tramps up and down through the lumbermen's
roads, and soon knew the general features of the lay of
the land. Nor was it long, of course, before we came out
one day upon the curious land-slides, which have more
than once averted the flow of the Little Carrotook River,
where it has washed the rocks away so far as to let down
one section more of the overlying yielding yellow clay.
Think how my eyes flashed, and my wife's, as,
struggling though a wilderness of moosewood, we came out
one afternoon on this front of yellow clay! Yellow clay
of course, when properly treated by fire, is brick! Here
we were surrounded by forests, only waiting to be burned;
yonder was clay, only waiting to be baked.
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