Human passions and feelings are exhibited with more fidelity, and you see men and women as they really are. And many kind, good, and noble traits are to be found among those classes, whom at home we regard as our inferiors. The lady and gentleman in Canada are as distinctly marked as elsewhere. There is no mistaking the superiority that mental cultivation bestows; and their mingling in public with their less gifted neighbours, rather adds than takes from their claims to hold the first place. I consider the state of society in a more healthy condition than at home; and people, when they go out for pleasure here, seem to enjoy themselves much more.

The harmony that reigns among the members of a Canadian family is truly delightful. They are not a quarrelsome people in their own homes. No contradicting or disputing, or hateful rivalry, is to be seen between Canadian brothers and sisters. They cling together through good and ill report, like the bundle of sticks in the fable; and I have seldom found a real Canadian ashamed of owning a poor relation. This to me is a beautiful feature in the Canadian character. Perhaps the perfect equality on which children stand in a family, the superior claim of eldership, so much upheld at home, never being enforced, is one great cause of this domestic union of kindred hearts.

Most of the pretence, and affected airs of importance, occasionally met with in Canada, are not the genuine produce of the soil, but importations from the mother country; and, as sure as you hear anyone boasting of the rank and consequence they possessed at home, you may be certain that it was quite the reverse. An old Dutch lady, after listening very attentively to a young Irishwoman’s account of the grandeur of her father’s family at home, said rather drily to the self-exalted damsel, –

“Goodness me, child! if you were so well off, what brought you to a poor country like this? I am sure you had been much wiser had you staid to hum –”

“Yes. But my papa heard such fine commendations of the country, that he sold his estate to come out.”

“To pay his debts, perhaps,” said the provoking old woman.

“Ah, no, ma’am,” she replied, very innocently, “he never paid them. He was told that it was a very fine climate, and he came for the good of our health.”

“Why, my dear, you look as if you never had had a day’s sickness in your life.”

“No more I have,” she replied, putting on a very languid air, “but I am very delicate.”

This term delicate, be it known to my readers is a favourite one with young ladies here, but its general application would lead you to imagine it another term for laziness. It is quite fashionable to be delicate, but horribly vulgar to be considered capable of enjoying such a useless blessing as good health. I knew a lady, when I first came to the colony, who had her children daily washed in water almost hot enough to scald a pig. On being asked why she did so, as it was not only an unhealthy practice, but would rob the little girls of their fine colour, she exclaimed, –

“Oh, that is just what I do it for. I want them to look delicate. They have such red faces, and are as coarse and healthy as country girls.”

The rosy face of the British emigrant is regarded as no beauty here. The Canadian women, like their neighbours the Americans, have small regular features, but are mostly pale, or their faces are only slightly suffused with a faint flush. During the season of youth this delicate tinting is very beautiful, but a few years deprive them of it, and leave a sickly, sallow pallor in its place. The loss of their teeth, too, is a great drawback to their personal charms, but these can be so well supplied by the dentist that it is not so much felt; the thing is so universal, that it is hardly thought detrimental to an otherwise pretty face.

But, to return to the mere pretenders in society, of which, of course, there are not a few here, as elsewhere. I once met two very stylishly-dressed women at a place of public entertainment. The father of these ladies had followed the lucrative but un-aristocratic trade of a tailor in London. One of them began complaining to me of the mixed state of society in Canada, which she considered a dreadful calamity to persons like her and her sister; and ended her lamentations by exclaiming, –

“What would my pa have thought could he have seen us here to-night? Is it not terrible for ladies to have to dance in the same room with storekeepers and their clerks?”

Another lady of the same stamp, the daughter of a tavern-keeper, was indignant at being introduced to a gentleman, whose father had followed the same calling.

Such persons seem to forget, that as long as people retain their natural manners, and remain true to the dignity of their humanity, they cannot with any justice be called vulgar; for vulgarity consists in presumptuously affecting to be what we are not, and in claiming distinctions which we do not deserve, and which no one else would admit.

The farmer, in his homespun, may possess the real essentials which make the gentleman – good feeling, and respect for the feelings of others. The homely dress, weather-beaten face, and hard hands, could not deprive him of the honest independence and genial benevolence he derived from nature. No real gentleman would treat such a man, however humble his circumstances, with insolence or contempt. But place the same man out of his class, dress him in the height of fashion, and let him attempt to imitate the manners of the great, and the whole world would laugh at the counterfeit.

Uneducated, ignorant people often rise by their industry to great wealth in the colony; to such the preference shown to the educated man always seems a puzzle. Their ideas of gentility consist in being the owners of fine clothes, fine houses, splendid furniture, expensive equipages, and plenty of money. They have all these, yet even the most ignorant feel that something else is required. They cannot comprehend the mysterious ascendancy of mind over mere animal enjoyments; yet they have sense enough, by bestowing a liberal education on their children, to endeavour, at least in their case, to remedy the evil.

The affectation of wishing people to think that you had been better off in the mother country than in Canada, is not confined to the higher class of emigrants.