TABOGGINNING.

BY your leave, readers, I'll transport you in imagination to a place which differs in many respects from this; where the winters are long but pleasant, and the summers are short and hot; where they say the man lived who remarked, "We have very good weather up our way, except that the sleighing is rather poor for a couple of months in the year."

I suppose most of you have an idea that Canada is such a place, and that you would be as willing to live at the North Pole as there. Let me drive this notion out of your head, that is, if you are men enough to acknowledge you are in the wrong. When we have winter there we have it in earnest, and there is usually plenty of snow, ice, ay, and cold; we don't very often have any of your Boston half-and-half winters, where it is so cold that you cannot keep warm when there is not a "mite" of snow on the ground. Are you not ashamed of yourselves when you see these moonlight nights - in January, let me remind you - going by without the enjoyment of a single sleigh-ride, or anything else which winter should bring in the way of fun?

But to return to where I started from. It is a crisp January day in a beautiful but too little known city of Canada; the thermometer says ten below zero; the snow is two feet deep and as dry as tinder; the scene is the side of a hill, steeper than any sensible being on a "Yankee" sled would dare to go down.

On all parts of the hill are scattered in little groups gentlemen and ladies, boys and girls, - of all ages, from fifteen to thirty, - married and single, engaged, and still to have that pleasure. Instead of sleds they are dragging up the hill "taboggins," which is the Indian sled, and which finds a mate in the bark canoe. They are made of thin pieces of cedar-wood, which have been planed perfectly smooth; these pieces are bent up at the front so as to form a sort of runner, but the boards themselves lie flat on the snow, being fastened together above, so that the bottom is smooth. They are made of all sizes, averaging about five feet by two, and can accommodate any number of people. They are so thin and limber that they bend over any obstruction which may be in the road, so that they are not stopped even by large pieces of ice. They may be used to go down the steepest hills, where no sled could stand the strain. And here all the fun comes in, since the danger is necessarily very great. Often a load will upset, and girls and boys will be flung together into a huge drift; then of course the screaming and laughing is immense, except when one has a leg or arm broken, and then the laugh is more likely to appear on the other side.

If we could have just one grand tabogginning party in Cambridge, I should consider it enough to persuade all Harvard men that Canada is worth something, for of course I could n't get much of a confession from free-born Americans; and for that matter I myself stick up for New England, as my "own native land," though Canada seems to me to be but little behindhand.

P.