THOMAS CONANT.

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Life
in
Canada

by
Thomas Conant,
Author of “Upper Canada Sketches.”

Toronto
William Briggs
1903

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Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand nine hundred and three, by Thomas Conant, at the Department of Agriculture.

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Preface.

In the following pages will be found some contributions towards the history of Canada and of the manners and customs of its inhabitants during the hundred years beginning October 5th, 1792. On that date my ancestor, Roger Conant, a graduate of Yale University, and a Massachusetts landowner, set foot on Canadian soil as a United Empire Loyalist. From him and from his descendants—handed down from father to son—there have come to me certain historical particulars which I regard as a trust and which I herewith give to the public. I am of the opinion that it is in such plain and unvarnished statements that future historians of our country will find their best materials, and I therefore feel constrained to do my share towards the task of supplying them.

The population of Canada is but five and one-third millions, but who can tell what it will be in a few decades? We may be sure that when our population rivals that of the United States to-day, and when our{vi} numerous seats of learning have duly leavened the mass of our people, any reliable particulars as to the early history of our country will be most eagerly sought for.

As a native resident of the premier Province of Ontario, where my ancestors from Roger Conant onwards also spent their lives, I have naturally dealt chiefly with affairs and happenings in what has hitherto been the most important province of the Dominion, and which possesses at least half of the inhabitants of the entire country. But I have not the slightest desire to detract from the merits and historical interest of the other provinces.

Thomas Conant.

Oshawa, January, 1903.{vii}

Contents.

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Illustrations.

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LIFE IN CANADA.

CHAPTER I.

The author’s great-grandfather, Roger Conant, was born at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, on June 22nd, 1748. He was a direct descendant (sixth generation) from Roger Conant the Pilgrim, and founder of the Conant family in America, who came to Salem, Massachusetts, in the second ship, the Ann—the Mayflower being the first—in 1623, and became the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony under the British Crown. He was graduated in Arts and law at Yale University in 1765. At the time of the outbreak of the Revolution in 1776 he was twenty-eight years old. His capacity and business ability may be judged from the facts that he owned no fewer than 13,000 acres of land in New England, and that when he came to Canada he brought with him £5,000{14} in British gold. He appears to have been a man of keen judgment, of quiet manners, not given to random talking, of great personal strength, and highly acceptable to his neighbors. In after days, when he had to do his share toward subduing the Canadian forest, they tell of him sinking his axe up to the eye at every stroke in the beech or maple. The record is that he could chop, split and pile a full cord of wood in an hour.

Although he became a United Empire Loyalist and ultimately came to Canada, leaving his 13,000 acres behind him in Massachusetts, for which neither he nor his descendants ever received a cent, Roger Conant’s decision to emigrate was not taken at once. The Revolution broke out in 1776, but he did not remove from his home until 1778. Even then he does not appear to have been subjected to the annoyances and persecution which some have attributed to the disaffected colonists. What the author has to say on this point comes from Roger Conant’s own lips, and has been handed down from father to son. He has, therefore, no choice in a work of this kind but to give it as it came to him. It has been the rule among many persons who claim New England origin to paint very dark pictures of the treatment their forefathers received at the hands of those who joined the colonists in revolt from the British Crown. For instance, words like the following were used soon after the thirteen colonies were accorded their independence and became the United States:

ROGER CONANT.

Born at Bridgewater, Mass., June 22, 1748.
Graduated at Yale University in Arts and law, 1765.
Came to Darlington, Upper Canada, a U. E. L., 1792.
Died in Darlington, June 21, 1821.

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Roger Conant, however, during the two years he remained at Bridgewater after the breaking out of the Revolution, was free from these disagreeable experiences. He frequently reiterated that such instances as those of Foster and Williams were very rare, and maintained that those who were subject to harsh treatment were those who made themselves particularly obnoxious to their neighbors who were in favor of the Revolution. Persons who were blatant and offensive in their words, continually boasting their British citizenship and that nobody dare molest them—in a word, as we say, a century and a quarter after the struggle, forever carrying a chip on the shoulder and daring anybody to knock it off—naturally rendered themselves objects of dislike. It must be borne in mind that, right or wrong, the entire community were almost a unit in their contention for separation from Great Britain. Yet Roger Conant, who did not take up arms with the patriots, was not molested. His{16} oft-repeated testimony was that no one in New England need have been molested on account of his political opinions.

As a matter of fact, he frequently averred that he made a mistake when he left New England and came to the wilds of Canada. To the latest day of his life he regretted the change, and said that he should have remained and joined the patriots; that the New Englanders who were accused of such savage actions towards loyalists were not bad people, but that on the contrary they were the very best America then had—kind, cultivated and considerate. Nor was he alone in this conviction. He was fond of comparing notes with other United Empire Loyalists with whom from time to time he met. He was always glad to meet those who had come to Canada from the revolted colonies. And he again and again averred that their opinion tallied with his own, viz., that they were mistaken and foolish in coming away. He entertained no feelings of animosity against the new government who appropriated his 13,000 acres. Neither does the author. Such feelings were and are reserved for Lord North, whose short-sightedness and obstinacy were the immediate cause of the war. A man who could say that “he would whip the colonists into subjection” deserves the universal contempt of mankind, especially when it is remembered that at the very moment of his outbreak of ungoverned and arbitrary temper the colonists were only waiting for an opportunity to consummate an entente cordiale with the Mother Country, and to return to former good feeling and peace.{17}

On the other hand, Roger Conant had that to tell regarding some of the British forces which does not form pleasant reading, but which the author feels impelled to set down in order to present a faithful picture of Great Britain’s stupendous folly, viz., her war with the American colonies in 1776. The first body of irregular troops of any sort that he saw who were fighting for the King were Butler’s Rangers, which body, to his astonishment, he found in northern New York State when wending his way to Upper Canada. For some time he tarried in the district where this force was carrying on its operations. It would seem as if the very spirit of the evil one had taken possession of these men. Acts of arson by which the unfortunate settler lost his log cabin, the only shelter for his wife and little ones from the inclemency of a northern winter, were too common to remark. Murder and rapine were acts of everyday occurrence. Manifestly these atrocious guerillas could not remain in the neighborhood that witnessed their crimes. They found their way in various directions to places where they hoped to evade the tale of their villany. In after years one of these very men wandered to Upper Canada, and, as it happened, hired himself to Roger Conant to work about the latter’s homestead at Darlington. An occasion came when this man, who was very reticent, had partaken too freely of liquor, so that his tongue was loosed, and in an unbroken flow of words he unfolded a boastful narrative of the horrid deeds of himself and his companions of{18} Butler’s Rangers. One day, he said, they entered a log-house in the forest in New York State, and quickly murdered the mother and her two children. They were about applying the torch to the dwelling, when he discovered an infant asleep, covered with an old coverlet, in the corner of an adjoining bedroom. He drew the baby forth, when one of the Rangers, not quite lost to all sense of humanity, begged him to spare the child, “because,” as he said, “it can do no harm.” With a drunken, leering boast he declared he would not, “for,” said he, as he dashed its head against the stone jamb of the open fireplace, “Nits make lice, and I won’t save it.”

It is no wonder that Roger Conant said that many times his heart failed him when these terrible acts of Butler’s Rangers were being perpetrated, and that he felt sorry even then, when in New York State and on his way to Upper Canada, that he had not remained in Massachusetts and joined the patriots. It is to be remembered that these persons were burnt out, murdered, and their women outraged, simply because they thought Britain bore too heavily on them, and that reforms were needed in the colonies. Nor could these acts in even the smallest degree assist the cause of Britain from a military point of view.

On October 5th, 1792, Roger Conant crossed the Niagara River on a flat-bottomed scow ferry, and landed at Newark, then the capital of Upper Canada. Governor Simcoe, who had only been sworn in as Governor a few days previously, came to the wharfside

GOVERNOR SIMCOE.

(From the tomb in Exeter Cathedral, England.)

(By permission from the J. Ross Robertson collection.)

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to meet the incoming emigrant, who, with his wife and children, his waggons and his household stuff, had come to make his future home in Upper Canada.

“Where do you wish to go?” said the Governor.

“I think of following the north shore of the lake eastward till I find a suitable place to settle in, sir.”

“But the land up there is not surveyed yet. Should you not prefer to go up to Lake Simcoe? That is where I would like to see you take up your abode.”

But Roger Conant shook his head. He had made up his mind to go to the north shore of the lake, eastward, and there he ultimately went. When Governor Simcoe found that he was determined, he told him that when he had fixed on a location he was to blaze the limits of the farm on the lake shore he would like to have. When the survey was completed, he, the Governor, would see that he got his patents for the area so blazed. And in justice to the Governor, the author is pleased here to set down that he faithfully kept his word. The patents for the land blazed by Roger were duly and faithfully made out. But the author must express strong disapproval of his ancestor’s ultra modesty in not blazing at least a township in Durham County to compensate him and his heirs for the 13,000 acres which he had lost in Massachusetts.

Roger blazed but some 800 acres. For one thing, blazing involved a large amount of very heavy work. The intervening trees of the unbroken forest had to{20} be cut away. A straight line must be made out from blaze to blaze. Besides, the emigrant to those silent and pathless forests appears to have had small thought of any future value of the land thus acquired, and as he would have said, colloquially, he was not disposed to bother with blazing over eight hundred acres.

Realizing the difficulty the incomer would have in getting across the fords at the head of Lake Ontario, between Niagara and Hamilton, Governor Simcoe sent his aide-de-camp to pilot the cavalcade. No waggon road had been constructed along the shore. But the sand was the only obstruction, and after several days’ travel he arrived at Darlington, where was the unbroken forest, diversified only by the many streams and rivers of undulating central Canada. It was a fine landscape that lay around the emigrant, with the divine impress still upon it. The red man had not changed its original features. He had contented himself with the results of the chase among the sombre shades of the forest, or, floating upon the pure blue waters in his birch-bark canoe, he took of the myriads upon myriads of the finny tribe from the cool depths below.

The whites had only just begun to obtain a livelihood in the broad land. Not more than 12,000 persons of European descent then dwelt in all Upper Canada, now forming the peerless Province of Ontario, with its 3,000,000 of inhabitants. Roger Conant had chosen a beautiful location, and here with a valiant heart he started to hew out a home for himself and his family. Although he had brought to this prov{21}ince from Massachusetts £5,000 in British gold, he was unable at the first to make any use of it, simply because there were no neighbors to do business with, and manifestly no trade requirements.[A] But we find him, about the year 1798, becoming a fur trader with the Indians. He invested some of his money in the Durham boats of that day, which were used to ascend the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, being pulled up the rapids of that mighty river by ropes in the hands of men on shore. Canals, as we have them now around the rapids, were not then even thought of. Nor was the Rideau Canal, making the long detour by Ottawa, which did so much afterwards to develop the western part of the province. With capital, and possessing the basis of all wealth robust health, Roger Conant pursued the fur trade with the Indians to its utmost possibility. Disposing of the goods he brought from Montreal in his Durham boats, he accumulated, by barter, large quantities of furs. To Montreal in turn he took his bundles of furs, and gold came to him in abundance, so that he rapidly accumulated a considerable fortune. While doing so, and pursuing his trading with the red men, his home life was not neglected. Rude though his log-house beside the salmon stream at Darlington was, it was spacious and comfortable, and in its day might even be termed a hall. It had the charm of a fine situation, and it had Lake Ontario for its adjacent prospect. Conant had brought a few books from his Massachusetts home{22} at Bridgewater, and while he conned these ever so faithfully over and over again, the great book of nature was always spread before him in the surpassingly beautiful landscape that included the shimmering waters of the lake, the grass lands upon the beaver meadow at the mouth of the salmon stream, and the golden grain in the small clearings which he had so far been able to wrest from the dark, tall, prolific forest of beech, maple and birch, with an occasional large pine, that extended right down to the shingle of the beach. Of his sons it may be said that, although capable men, they were handicapped in the race with the incoming tide of settlers so soon to come to the neighborhood of that rude home at Darlington, in the county of Durham, Upper Canada. They were at a grievous disadvantage because of their lack of education. Education could not be obtained in Ontario in the early days of the nineteenth century. There were no schools, and had there been schools there would have been no pupils. Consequently we find Roger’s sons possessing grand physical health, and pursuing the vigorous life of that day, with but little education. They felled the forest, and obtained from the soil the crops that in its virginity it is always ready to give. Eliphalet, who was only a very small boy when his father brought him from Massachusetts, attended to the business affairs of the family as his father got older, and we find him making, after Roger Conant’s death, a declaration as to his father’s will, in which he states that he is especially cognizant that the will should be so and so. That instrument was{23} admitted as a will by the court of that day, 1821, the date of Roger’s death. To us such proceedings seem crude, particularly as the document referred to conveyed an estate of great value.

With regard to this will a singular circumstance must be noted. Roger died a very large real estate owner. This part of his possessions is duly scheduled. But of his hoard of gold no mention is made. The author’s paternal uncle, David Annis, who lived with the family till his death in 1861, frequently said in the author’s hearing—it was a statement made many times—that Roger Conant had gold and buried it. Why he did so is a mystery. It is also certain that no one has yet unearthed that gold. On the farm at Darlington on which he resided, a few days before his death he took a large family iron bake-kettle, and after placing therein his gold he buried it on the bank of the salmon stream of which mention has already been made. The bake-kettle was missed from its accustomed position by the open fireplace, but search failed to reveal its whereabouts. Thereafter, and many times since, persons with various amalgams and with divining rods and sticks have searched for this buried treasure, but always in vain.

Of Eliphalet, the son, who did the business of the family, being the elder son, all trace is lost, and there is no one known to-day who claims descent from him.

Abel, another son, had an immense tract of land in Scarborough, on the Danforth Road, near the Presbyterian Centennial Church of that township. His son, Roger, left a most respectable and interesting{24} family in Michigan, of whom the best known and most intelligent is Mrs. Elizabeth West, of Port Huron, in that State. It does not appear that Abel Conant ever disposed of his Scarborough estate by deed or by will, but simply lost it, so lightly in those days did the inhabitants value accumulated properties.

Barnabas, another son of Roger, disappeared, and all trace of him is lost. Jeremiah—still another son—died about 1854 in Michigan. Of him, also, nothing is known. Lastly Thomas, the youngest son—grandfather of the author—as will be seen later in this volume, was assassinated when a young man during the Canadian Revolution of 1837-8.

Roger Conant’s daughter, Rhoda, became the wife of Levi Annis. From this union sprang a numerous and most progressive family, who are to-day, with their descendants, among the foremost of our land.

Polly, another daughter, married John Pickel and left a small family, descendants of which still reside in Darlington in the vicinity of the ancestral home.

It will be noted as a singular fact that even the most ordinary emigrants from Great Britain, seeking a home here in those early days, were in some respects better equipped than the sons of Roger Conant, with their prospect of becoming heirs of large property. For, coming from Great Britain, the land of schools, the poor emigrant generally possessed a fair education, which the young Conants did not. Also, they had, besides, the prime idea of gaining a home in the new land and keeping it. Not so the Conant sons, who so easily secured an abundance from the ple{25}thoric returns of the virgin soil of that day. Books were denied them. Of the diversions of society, the theatre or the lecture room, they knew nothing. Consequently they found their own crude diversions as they could. “Little” or “Muddy” York, the nucleus of Toronto, began to become a settlement, and to that hamlet they easily wended their way to find relief from the humdrum life among the forests at home. It is told that frequently, when they were short of cash, they would drive a bunch of cattle from their father’s herd to York and sell them, spending the proceeds in riding and driving about the town. That in itself is not very much to remark, seeing that they were the sons of a rich man, and their doings were no more than compatible with their conceded station in life. And so far as is known in an age when everybody consumed more or less spirituous liquors in Upper Canada, the Conant sons were not particularly remarkable either for their partaking or their abstemiousness. Their loss of properties cannot be attributed to their convivial habits, but rather to a want of appreciation of their possessions.

Daniel Conant, the author’s father, unmistakably inherited the vim and push of his grandfather, Roger. Thus we find him as a young man owning fleets of ships on the Great Lakes, as well as being a lumber producer and dealer in that commodity second to none of his day.[B] It may be observed, in passing, that Roger Conant during the whole of his life never seemed to care for office. Offices were many times{26} offered to him by the British Government, but he steadily refused, and died without ever having tasted their sweets. His own business was far sweeter to him, and he was far more successful in it than he could have been in office. His grandson, Daniel, had this family trait. He did not spend an hour in seeking preferments, and office to him had no allurements. His education was meagre. It was, however, sufficient to enable him to do an enormous business. He not only amassed wealth, but by his efforts in moving his ships and pursuing his business generally, he did much for the good of his native province, and for his neighbors. While his lumber commanded a ready sale in the United States markets, it was also used very largely in building homes for the settlers in his locality. The poor came to him as to a friend, and never came in vain. At his burial in 1879 hundreds of poor men, as well as their more fortunate neighbors, followed his bier to the grave. Perhaps no more striking token of the regard in which he was held by the poor can be cited, and the author glories in this tribute to his memory by the meek and lowly.

COLONEL TALBOT.

(By permission from the J. Ross Robertson collection.)

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CHAPTER II.

Thomas Talbot, to whom the Government gave—presumably for settlement—518,000 acres near London, Ont., began to reside on the tract soon after the emigrant whose fortunes we are following arrived in Upper Canada, in 1792. Talbot had previously been Secretary to Governor Simcoe, and was consequently stationed at Newark, the capital, where the settlers were seen as they came into the country from the United States. Why so great a grant was made to him is inexplicable. But it was nevertheless made, and the author proposes to tell how he repaid it. He appeared all the time he was alive, and living in Upper Canada, to thoroughly despise us. Among the other utterances which he sent from Canada to Great Britain was that concerning the origin of Canadians, and although his words are calumniatory, we must have them, for he incorporated them in his book about Canada. Thus he speaks of us: “Most Canadians are descended from private soldiers or{28} settlers, or the illegitimate offspring of some gentlemen or their servants.” He penned these words somewhere about the year 1800. They cannot refer to persons of United States origin—the incomers from the thirteen revolted colonies, which were now independent—because these were not born in Canada. He must therefore have referred to those Canadians and their descendants who were living in Canada in 1792, when he was the Secretary of Governor Simcoe. It is not within the province of the author to defend from Talbot’s calumnies that portion of our fellow-Canadian subjects. His calumny is foul, mean, untrue, and very unjust. Of New England origin himself, the author leaves this insult to be avenged by the pen of some fellow-Canadian who claims descent from old Canadians who were in the country when the war of the Revolution was about closing. So foul an aspersion should never have been passed over in silence.

COLONEL TALBOT’S ARMCHAIR.

From the J. Ross Robertson collection.

The foregoing is, however, by the way. We are pursuing the fortunes of Roger Conant, and we find him from 1792 to 1812 struggling among the forest{29} trees to gain a livelihood, or his labors on land occasionally diversified by his work on the lake, the waters of which, perhaps, yielded the most easily obtainable food. Mention has been made of the beaver meadow, and at this date the settler would often come across the traces of this industrious animal. The beaver is the typical unit or emblem of the furs of Canada. All other values of furs were made by comparison with the value of a beaver skin. In intelligence the beaver surpasses any of the fur-bearing animals. In the quality of his workmanship he is the mechanic of the animal tribe, and easily and far-away outstrips all his fellow-brutes, domestic or wild. He can fell a tree in any desired direction, and within half a foot of the spot on which he requires it to fall. One beaver is always on guard and vigilant while the others work. A single blow of the tail of the watching beaver upon the water will cause every other of his fellows to plump into the water and disappear. To carry earth to their dam they place it upon their broad, flat tails and draw it to the spot. While his home is always in close proximity of water he is sometimes caught on land, while proceeding from one body of water to another. Should you meet him thus at disadvantage upon the land, he does not even attempt to run away, nor to defend himself, for he well knows that both attempts would be utterly useless. Another defence is his; he appeals to one’s sympathy by crying—crying indeed so very naturally, while big tears roll from his eyes, with so close an imitation of the human, that it startles even the hunter himself. Many a beaver has been{30} magnanimously given his life out of pure sympathy for the poor defenceless brute when caught at an unfair advantage away from his habitable element of water.

Salt-water salmon, too, swarmed at that date in our Canadian streams in countless myriads. In the month of November of each year they ascended the streams for spawning, after which they were seen no more until the summer of the following year. While we have no positive evidence that they return to the salt water, we know they must do so, because they are so very different from land-locked salmon or ouananiche. They were never caught in Lake Ontario after spawning in the streams in November, until June of the next year. Nor were they found above Niagara Falls, being unable to ascend that mighty cataract. Roger Conant said that his first food in Upper Canada came from the salmon taken in the creek beside his hastily built log-house. To help to realize how plentiful these fish were at the annual spawning time, we may adduce Roger Conant’s endeavor to paddle his canoe across the stream in Port Oshawa in 1805, when the salmon partly raised his boat out of the water, and were so close together that it was difficult for him to get his paddle below the surface. A farm of 150 acres on the Lake Ontario shore, that he acquired just previous to the War of 1812, he paid for by sending salmon in barrels to the United States ports, where they brought a fair cash price. Increasing population, no close seasons by law, nor any restrictions whatever, have been the causes which have resulted in almost destroying

SHOAL OF SALMON, NEAR OSHAWA, 1792.

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these kings of fish that once came in uncountable swarms.

It will be gathered that up to the War of 1812, the settler, homely clad, axe in hand, subdued the forest, and spent happy, even if wearisome, days, with his dog generally as his only companion. It was during these years that he exhibited that skill in wielding the axe of which mention has been made. To-day, our few remaining woods being more open, and the timber being smaller, such feats would be impossible.

The first beginnings of public utilities were being made. Roads were being cut out of the forest. Some of these grew into forest again so little were they used.

In the last chapter it was noted that Roger Conant lost all his lands in New England by expropriation after the war of 1776. On arriving in Upper Canada he felt the great necessity of bestirring himself to make a fortune again here. Side by side with his clearing operations he carried on his fur-trading, and soon his desires in regard to wealth were gratified, but he never reconciled himself to being so far from his Alma Mater, Yale University (New Haven, Conn.), from which he had been graduated (in Arts and Law) in 1765.

Notwithstanding all the sacrifices made by the United Empire Loyalists to maintain British connections, many of them were asked to take the oath of allegiance on reaching their respective localities when they sought to make their home in Canada. Annexed is a photographic document of evidence,{32} being a copy of the certificate of the oath of allegiance taken by one of the author’s relatives before the famed Robert Baldwin. One of the very earliest court summonses of Upper Canada is also reproduced (page 35) and it will be found very interesting. The reader will notice the absence of all printing on this document.

Obviously the title to all lands in Canada, after the conquest of 1759, and not previously granted by the king of France, was vested in the British Crown. There were a few lots of land so granted by the king of France in Upper Canada, but only a few. In Quebec, or Lower Canada, much of the land had already been so granted along the St. Lawrence River. These grants had, as a matter of course, to be respected by Great Britain. The French grants in Upper Canada were only a few along the Detroit River and at the extreme western boundary of the province. The easy accessibility of the lands by water will no doubt account for these grants having been located so remote from all neighbors, the nearest being those in Lower Canada from whence these grants came. Certain lands were also set apart for the Protestant clergy, viz., one-seventh of all lands granted. After a time, instead of taking the one-seventh of each lot granted, they were all added together and formed a whole lot—the “Clergy Reserve” lands, which became afterwards such a bone of contention. In these deeds gold and silver is reserved for the Crown. All white pine trees, too, are reserved, because naval officers had passed along the shore of{33}

FAC-SIMILE OF CERTIFICATE OF OATH OF ALLEGIANCE.

I CERTIFY that [signature] has taken and subscrbed the Oath of Allegiance as required by Law, before me, this 15 day of Jan___ in the year of our Lord 1801 [signature]]

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Lake Ontario, about the time of the war of the Revolution, and saw the magnificent white pines. These officers were all searching for suitable trees to make masts for the Royal navy, and here they found them; hence the reservation of these trees in all Crown deeds. All deeds of realty to-day in Upper Canada make the same reservations, viz., “Subject nevertheless to the reservations, limitations and provisions expressed in the original grant thereof from the Crown.”

In Australia and New Zealand the governments make reservations so very binding that they can resume possession of lands at any time, as the author found when travelling there in 1898. Our antipodes have not deeds in fee simple as we have. No instance has ever been known in the locality of middle Ontario, in which the author’s home is, and that of his forefathers since 1792, of the Crown ever exercising its right to make use of the reservations.

Time-honored big wax seals were attached to all Crown grants. These seals were quite four inches in diameter, one-third of an inch thick, and secured to the parchment by a ribbon, while the Royal coat-of-arms was impressed on either side of the seal. To the honor and respect of the Crown, be it said, its treatment of the struggling settler was always generous and fair.

The Clergy Reserve lands, which, we have seen, were set apart, soon began to command purchasers, being mainly along the waters of Lake Ontario, as were the other patented lands. In the Act creating{35}

FAC-SIMILE OF COURT SUMMONS, 1803.

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the Clergy Reserve Trust, gold and silver were reserved, but not white pine, because there simply was none there to reserve.

The University of Toronto received odd lots here and there in Upper Canada for its support. This created another source from which tithes came. There were no reservations in the University deeds of 1866. They cited the Act which gave the University these lands.

Lastly came the Canada Company, the last remaining source of tithes. While the Crown, the Clergy Reserves and the University of Toronto were always fair and considerate to the settler, this company always demanded its full “pound of flesh,” and got it, too. It may be observed that the arrangements with regard to these deeds were made by the Imperial Government at home wholly. We were not consulted. By virtue of the Canada Company’s grant, thousands and thousands of acres of lands in Upper Canada were withheld from settlement for many years. To-day the grievance has passed, because they have next to no lands remaining. Perhaps, as Upper Canada has nearly three millions of population now (from 12,000 in 1792), we ought not to grieve. It did us harm, it is true, but it was no doubt unthinkingly originated in London, in 1826, and without sufficient consideration.{37}

CHAPTER III.

In twenty years from the time Governor Simcoe established his capital at Newark, on the Niagara River, after being sworn in as Governor of western Canada (his incumbency being the real commencement of the settlement of Upper Canada), began the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States. Our peaceably disposed and struggling Canadians, trying to subdue the forest and to procure a livelihood, were horrified to have a war on their hands. They could ill afford to leave their small clearings in the forest, where they garnered their small crops, to go and fight. Not one of them, however, for a single moment thought of aiding the United States or of remaining neutral. Canada was their home, and Canada they would defend. From 12,000 in 1792 in Upper Canada, 40,000 were now within its{38} boundaries, endeavoring to make homes for themselves. We have the fact plainly told that, although at least one-third of all the inhabitants in 1812 were born in the United States, or were descendants of those who were born there, not one of them swerved in his loyalty to Canada, his adopted country. This is saying a very great deal, for it was in no sense Canada’s quarrel with the United States. If Great Britain chose to overhaul United States merchantmen for deserting from the Royal navy, it is certain that Canada could not be held responsible for any such high-handed act. Canadians generally at the breaking out of the war, whether of United States origin or from the British Isles direct, felt that Great Britain had been very assertive towards the United States, and had also been rather inclined to be exacting. Such was the feeling generally. No one, however, for a moment wavered. All were loyal and all obeyed the summons to join the militia and begin active service. Britain’s quarrel with the United States, in obedience to the mandate of some Cabinet Ministers safely ensconced in their sumptuous offices in London, worked incalculable hardships to the struggling settlers in the depths of our Canadian forests.

To vividly realize how very intolerant of any discussion of public matters of that day the Family Compact was, a personal narrative will be found interesting. Roger Conant, one day in the autumn, went from his home in Darlington to York. He had been requisitioned by the British officers just out from England (and whom he respected) to take an ox-cart{39}

NEWARK (NIAGARA), 1813.

(From the J. Ross Robertson collection.)

{40}

load of war material along the Lake Ontario shore to York. Now at home, his neighbors being very sparse, he had but few opportunities to converse and compare opinions about the war. Once at York the desired opportunity came. When sitting at a hotel fire, with a number of civilians about, opinions were quite freely expressed by those present. Roger Conant remarked that he was sorry for the war, and that although he would fight for Britain and Canada, he felt that Britain should arrange the differences with the United States and not drag Canada into a war in which she had not the least interest. He further remarked to the assembled civilians about the fire, that he thought Britain, too, very arbitrary in searching vessels of the United States indiscriminately and taking seamen from them without knowing them to be deserters from the British navy. Some one of the assembly quickly reported that remark to the commandant of the fort at York. Roger was arrested in an almost incredibly short time, brought before a court-martial next morning and fined eighty pounds (Halifax), being about $320 of our money. Hard as this was, he paid the fine, held his peace, and went off home, until called to serve in the ranks, which he did duly and faithfully. Family Compact rule was answerable for such treatment, as it certainly was for the responsibility for the Revolution which followed in 1837. To the honor of Roger Conant be it always said, however, that he turned out, donning his best suit, and made for the nearest commanding officer. No settler ever refused to turn out, although when

BRITISH MILITARY UNIFORMS, 1812.

AN OLD SPINNING-WHEEL.

CIVILIAN COSTUMES, UPPER CANADA, 1812.

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once turned out, they seemed so ludicrously weak that they felt themselves only a handful. There were a few British soldiers in red coats, but the defenders that made their way to York along the shores of Lake Ontario were a motley throng. There was no pretence at uniforms, nor was there indeed during the war, or very little of it. Let us realize if we can that these poor fellows had to walk along the lake shore. Here and there only were roads to be found cut out of the dense dark forest and back from the lake shore. Very few were fortunate enough to possess boats or canoes in which to row or paddle to York. Some, however, were able to adopt this mode of transit, and thereby hangs a tale. On one occasion a party of militiamen, accompanied by one or two soldiers—among them a drummer—were to be seen with their boats ashore, one of their craft being turned bottom upwards, and having the carcase of a fine porker “spread-eagled,” as sailors say, on either side of the keel. It appears that on their way to York the party had “commandeered” a pig they had come across, and being sharply pursued by its owner, they had taken this means of concealing their booty. No one thought of pulling the boat out of the water and turning it up to find the pig. At the same time they had requisitioned a fine fat goose, wrung its neck, and were carrying it away. In this case, with the pursuers at heel, the task of hiding the loot had fallen to the drummer. He speedily arranged matters by unheading his drum and placing the coveted bird inside, and the story goes that on the favorable oppor{42}tunity arriving, both pig and goose formed the basis of an excellent feast on the lake shore, in which, if tradition is to be believed, one officer, at least, joined with considerable readiness.

Roger joined the rank and file of the militia, but afterwards, having blooded and fleet saddle-horses in his stables on Lake Ontario shore in Darlington, the commanding officers employed him as a despatch bearer. In turn in the militia and then as despatch bearer, when nothing seemed doing, his time was fully occupied at the business of war. He was then sixty-two years of age, but so pressed were the authorities for men, that age did not debar from service, but physical inability only.

Having accumulated wealth both in lands and specie, Roger’s first thought, on the breaking out of war, was for the safety of his specie. Mounting his best saddle-horse he rode some thirty miles west from his home in Darlington to Levi Annis’s, his brother-in-law, in Scarborough, in order that this relative might become his banker, for in those days there were no banks, and people had to hide their money. Entering his brother-in-law’s log-house, he removed a large pine knot from one of the logs forming the house wall. He placed his gold and silver within the cavity, and the knot was again inserted and all made smooth. Levi Annis gave no sign, and no one that came to the inn ever suspected the presence of this hoard of wealth. But when the war was over, Roger Conant again visited Levi Annis in Scarborough. Three years had passed away since, in his presence,{43}

ROGER CONANT HIDING HIS TREASURE.

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the treasure had been inserted in the wall. In his presence also the pine knot was now removed, and the bullion—about $16,000 in value—was drawn forth intact.

Among the records that have come down to the author from Roger Conant, and along with fragmentary papers left by him, by Levi Annis, David Annis, and Moode Farewell, various scraps of songs of the time 1812 to 1815 are garnered. Perhaps the song of the greatest merit and widest celebrity was “The Noble Lads of Canada,” the beginning of which was:

It is just as well for the present generation to know this jingle, absurd as it may be. There were many verses in it, but all much to the same tenor, and while they pleased Canadians who sang the song, they were certainly harmless, and to-day we can afford to laugh at them. It is so very ridiculous to think of our handful of men going over to the United States and “pulling their dwellings down.” Our defence at home was quite another matter, but we are proud of it nevertheless. Human nature is much the same here as elsewhere, and was also in 1812-15. Thus{45} would the author illustrate how he applies the inference; there were over a half of the inhabitants who came directly from the British Isles, or were descended from those who came. The greater part of the settlers were poor. Generally the U. E. Loyalists and their descendants were fairly well-to-do. If not well-to-do they were far better off than the others. Consequently some mean-spirited among the settlers from Britain or their descendants, who were so poor, would depreciate the U. E. Loyalists if possible. Roger Conant said that one envious neighbor set the Indians upon him, during a lull in the war, while he was at home, by telling them he was a Yankee, and that they might rob him if they chose. For the object of plunder, they came upon him because he had an abundance of stock, the best in the land, as well as goods of various sorts for Indian fur trading, while his money, as we have seen, was safely banked in a pine log in Scarborough. One night there came to his home in Darlington, in the year 1812, a single Indian who asked to rest before the open fire for the night. Permission was given, and he squatted before the blazing wood fire of logs. On watching him closely, a knife was seen to be up his sleeve of buckskin, but not a word was spoken of the discovery. Shortly another Indian came in and squatted beside the first on the floor, and in utter silence. Now came a third Indian, who, in his turn, crouched with the two former ones.

No doubt now remained in Roger Conant’s mind as to their purpose, and he roused himself to the{46} occasion. They meant robbery, and murder, if necessary, to accomplish it. An axe at hand being always ready, he seized it, and drew back to the rifle hanging upon the wall, never absent therefrom unless in actual use. His family he sent out to the nearest neighbors, a mile away, along the lake shore.

“None of you stir. If you do, I’ll kill the first one who gets up. Stay just where you are until daylight.”

And now a squaw came in and sat beside the three crouching bucks, and cried softly. Very generally Indian squaws’ voices are soft, and naturally their crying would be soft, as was this squaw’s. Entreating with her crying, she began to beg for the release of the Indians, assuring the vigilant custodian “that they no longer meditated injury, nor theft, but would go away if they could be released.”

In this manner, with their nerves at high tension, the night passed, and not until the light of the next day did the guard dare to release his Indian prisoners. Then, one by one only, he allowed them to walk out of doors. It is very probable that this was an extreme case, but it occurred just as narrated. Not again during the war was Roger Conant molested by the Indians.

Not yet had the first year of the war (1812) dragged its slow length along. About the Niagara River the fighting had been most active at all points. Rumors of the clash of arms came from the West to those in central Upper Canada. General Hull thought himself secure at Detroit with a broad and deep river rolling between him and his opponents in Canada. Neither

FAREWELL’S TAVERN, NEAR OSHAWA, AS IT APPEARS TO-DAY.

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depth of river nor width, however, kept our men away from Detroit. No Canadian can contemplate this exploit of our arms without a swelling of pride. Detroit became ours on the 15th of August, 1812, when General Hull surrendered the whole command of 2,500 men, without terms, and Michigan was our lawful conquest. Immediately on the surrender of so many men to us, it became a serious question what to do with so many prisoners of war. We possessed no place in Upper Canada where they could be securely kept, and at old Quebec only could we depend upon them being safely retained. Consequently to Quebec they were sent. They were sent thither in boats and canoes in which they assisted in rowing and paddling. In this manner they went to Quebec, and were apparently well content with their lot. So very meagre, however, were our resources that we could not furnish boats for all of them, and many were compelled to walk along the lake shore. They were fed at various places along the route, among others at Farewell’s tavern, near Oshawa, an engraving of which as it stands now is given on opposite page. From the author’s tales of his forbears he gets the story of these prisoners coming to their home to be fed. Guards, indeed, they had, but they outnumbered them ten to one, and even more, simply because we had not the men to guard them. From what can be learned, however, none ran away.

Coming to the Conant family homestead to be fed, without warning, a big pot of potatoes was quickly boiled. A churning of butter fortunately had been{48} done that day, just previous to their coming, and a ham, it so happened, had been boiled the day preceding. All was set before them, and copious draughts of buttermilk were supplied. Guards and prisoners fared alike. There were no evidences of ill-feeling or rancor, but good nature and good humor prevailed, even if some shielded ministers in far-away London at that day forced the combat upon them.

Perhaps the most curious and picturesque instance of the fighting in and about this part of Canada was the taking of General Scott a prisoner at Queenston, and the occurrences subsequent to his capture. It seems that General Scott had been particularly active all day during the engagement of October 13th, 1812. Being a large man, and dressed in a showy blue uniform, although not then so high in rank as he afterwards became, he gained the attention of the Indians in our army. Nothing came of that immediately, but near evening his part of the United States forces were surrounded, and Colonel Scott (as he then was) was compelled to surrender. On the final conclusion of the day’s engagement, General Brock having been killed early in the day, he was invited to dine with General Sheaffe, then commanding our forces. Our prisoner, Colonel Scott, had given his parole not to attempt to escape, until regularly exchanged, so it was quite in order for him to accept the general’s invitation to dine. Just as they were in the act of sitting down at the table an orderly came to the diningroom, and said some Indian chiefs were at the door{49} and wished to see Colonel Scott. Excusing himself, the Colonel went to the door, and in the narrow front hall met three Indians, fully armed and in all proper Indian war-paint and feathers. One Indian then asked Colonel Scott where he was wounded. When Scott replied that he had not been wounded, the questioning Indian said he had fired at him twelve times in succession, and with good aim, and that he never missed. Presuming on Colonel Scott’s good-nature, he took hold of his shoulder, as if to turn him around for the purpose of finding the wounds. “Hands off,” Scott said, “you shoot like a squaw.” Without more ado or warning the three Indians drew their tomahawks and knives, and essayed to attack the Colonel, although then a prisoner of war. As they were in the narrow hall, the plucky United States prisoner could not effectually use his sword arm for his defence, and his life was consequently in danger. But he backed them by quick thrusts of the sword out of the door, where he had more room for the play of his weapon, and then stood at bay. It was indeed a fight to the death, and even so good a swordsman as Colonel Scott must have succumbed, had not the guard of our army, seeing at a glance what was up, rushed to Scott’s rescue and helped him to drive the Indians off.

Not many days after this unseemly encounter, Colonel Scott was brought to York in one of the small gunboats which we had then on Lake Ontario for the defence of the lake ports. These boats, it is true, were not very elegant in their lines, nor were they formid{50}ably armed. All haste had been made to construct them; only a few weeks before the timber of which they were constructed was growing in the parent trees. Green timber and lumber, as any one will know, must make a very indifferent boat, and not a lasting one. It is a fact, nevertheless, that the single swivel gun which each boat carried did good service when called upon and was no mean antagonist. Be that as it may, we should not look in contempt on these mean gunboats, or compare them with the monster fighting ships of this day. These were the ships our fathers used, and the people of the United States also, and well they served their day. An engraving of York at this early day will be found on the opposite page, the little town which has become imperial and palatial Toronto, with more than a fifth of a million of people, and the change has been wrought in eighty-nine years.

Following, however, the fortunes of Colonel Scott until he came to Quebec, we shall find him a prisoner in the cabin of a large ship lying at anchor at the foot of the cliff on which that ancient city stands. Not among a lot of other prisoners from the United States do we find the Colonel on this ship—for there were many of them on board—but aft in the cabin with the officers. One day his quick ear heard the prisoners being interrogated on deck. With a few eager strides he ascends the cabin steps and is on deck. He finds many of the United States prisoners drawn up in line and an officer questioning them. Those who showed by the burr on their tongues to be unmistakably of Irish or Scotch origin were{51}

VIEW OF YORK. FROM THE OLDEST EXTANT ENGRAVING.

(By permission from the J. Ross Robertson collection.)

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called out and sent away to an adjoining man-of-war, there to serve in the Royal Navy, although protesting they were American citizens.

Five of those in the line Colonel Scott heard called, and saw them sent away.

“Silence!” he cried. “Men, not another word out of you. Don’t let them catch you by the tongue”; and every man’s mouth closed like a trap.

It was Britain’s old contention, “Once a British subject, always a British subject,” and no latitude was allowed for transference of citizenship to the United States with residence in that country. To-day we never cease to wonder that Great Britain could be so impolitic as to take such a high-handed course. Time, however, has changed all that, and a war such as that of 1812 will never again stain the escutcheons of Great Britain, Canada or the United States.

Very soon after this Colonel Scott was exchanged, and quickly shook the dust of Canada from his feet and found his way back to the United States.

Let us turn to a little pleasanter phase of this early stage of the war. General Brock, as before mentioned, was killed early in the day at the battle of Queenston, on October 13th, 1812. That his high character and bravery were not overestimated the sequel will show. Thompson, who fought on our side, and who wrote of the war in 1832, being an eye-witness, says he was held in such high esteem, even by the enemy, that “during the movement of the funeral procession of that brave man, from Queens{53}ton to Fort Niagara, a distance of seven miles, minute guns were fired at every American post on that part of the line, and even the appearance of hostilities was suspended.” From some relative of the author who fought on our side the word has come down to him, that the Americans fired on their side of the Niagara River an answering shot for every one our men fired, all the time they were marching the seven miles down the river in the funeral procession. And the relative in the ranks added that every voice was hushed, not a word was spoken, grief was apparent in every man’s face, and every one seemed sorry because we had such a war on hand, and because we were engaged in the business of war with our kinsmen.

And now the second year of the war had come with its attendant vicissitudes and dangers.

Very few of the militia had been allowed to leave the ranks during the past winter, for an attack was expected just as soon as the ice should break up in the bays on Lake Ontario. In the early spring of 1813 the ice seems to have left the bays very early, for on April 26th the American forces were enabled to appear off York, in gun-boats and transports, and eager for the fray. Now, it has always been asserted that Great Britain availed herself of all the savages she could get, both in the War of 1812, as well as in the War of the Revolution in 1776. In a measure only is this true. We see them, however, at this time helping to oppose the landing of the Americans at York on April 26th, 1813. If the author speaks in{54} positive terms he hopes to be forgiven, for his forbear, Roger Conant, was there, musket in hand, and by his own lips has given the record which by natural descent has come down to the author. He said Indians were placed along the lake bank, one Indian between two white men, to repel the advance of the Americans from their boats on landing. That is to say, two white men were supposed to be able to keep one Indian up to his duty. But they couldn’t do it, for when the Americans really did land, and began the attack, many of the Indians got up and fled back from the shore of the lake to the forest beyond. And it is further told to the author by the same descent of lip service, that some of our militiamen were so incensed at the Indians for running away that they turned their muskets around from the Americans and fired at the fleeing Indians. Very probably their aim was faulty, for so far as is known no Indians fell, and more than likely our men did not aim to kill.

The result of the landing of the American forces we all know only too well, for our few men could not stay the hands of the assailants, who landed at will, and took possession of the country about. Near where the monument of the old French fort is, in the Industrial Fair grounds, near also to the York Pioneers’ log cabin, was the scene of this Indian running and the American landing. On the next day we find the Americans advancing upon the old fort to the east of the scene of the landing place. For a time, we know, our men made a stand for{55} defence around and about that old fort. It is not at all probable we could have held it permanently, for the Americans outnumbered us, and were just as brave as our men were when at their best. Just how it was done my ancestor did not seem to know, but the word somehow, by very low whispers or signs, was passed around that the fort would be blown up, and that it was better to get out. Such a word came to Roger Conant, as he always stoutly maintained, and, acting upon it, in the very nick of time, he dropped out of the fort, when it blew up and killed so many Americans. He said that to his startled vision the air appeared full of burnt and scorched fragments of human bodies, and that they fell about him in a horrifying manner.[C] It is not in the province of the author to express an opinion as to the expediency of this act, but it was done no doubt for the best, and we to-day find no fault with our general in command who gave that terrible order.

Yet York and its neighborhood were still at the mercy of the American conquering army, and General Sheaffe began to think intently of his own safety. Mounting his horse he rides eastward, down King{56} Street towards Kingston, and leaves his troops to follow more leisurely on foot. It is twelve miles from Toronto to Scarborough, where Levi Annis lived at his hotel. His testimony was that General Sheaffe appeared before his hotel door with his horse quite done up, and covered with foam. On going to the door and asking as to the trouble, General Sheaffe explained to Levi Annis that he had ridden from York, without drawing rein, and that it was most important that the Americans should not catch him. There certainly is room for excuse for General Sheaffe at this juncture, although Levi Annis was naturally much astonished at the state of nervousness in which he saw him. We must not forget that the General had only 1,500 men, all told, with which he had to defend all Upper Canada, and with this very small support no doubt he felt as he said, “that it was most important that he should not be captured.” Just as quickly as possible after the blowing up of the fort, some 150 men of the British regulars and Canadian militia got together and made their way to Kingston. At this time the first Don bridge had been built. It was of logs, mainly pine, which were cut near to the last approach to the bridge. A considerable causeway extended over the mud flats, on the east side, to the span of the bridge proper. It was very crude, and had been built in 1800 without the aid of experienced men or mechanics. It stood well enough, nevertheless, and did its work well, until that memorable day when our men retreated over it and burnt it as they went—April 27th, 1813. It was done as a

BURNING THE DON BRIDGE.

(From a sketch by Isaac Bellamy.)

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precautionary measure in order to impede the progress of the victorious Americans, should they choose to follow in pursuit.

To those who did military service in this war 200 acres of the public lands were due. Roger Conant did not receive his 200 acres, although most justly entitled to them. To know the cause why he did not receive his land grant it will be necessary to go back a little. After the conquest of Canada and the Treaty of Paris (in 1763) which followed, some British officers were given appointments and places in Canada—no doubt to provide for them. When Upper Canada was made a separate province in 1791, more of these officials were given places. These persons seemed to have nothing in common with the people. On the contrary they seemed to seek to rule and get good livings out of them, and essayed to keep their places, becoming in time the Family Compact. It was their acts and those of their successors that caused the outbreak in 1837 which led to the Canadian Revolution. To these pampered office-holders it did not appear that the U. E. Loyalists, who had made most magnificent sacrifices for our country, were worthy of even civil treatment. So to Roger Conant they never gave the military land grant, and this treatment was meted out to most of the U. E. Loyalists who so faithfully served through that most unfortunate and deplorable war.

Peace! peace! Peace tardily came at last in 1814, the Treaty of Ghent having been signed on the 24th day of that year. The author realizes that, to-day,{58} Canadians in their well-appointed and refined homes fail to enter into the feelings of our forefathers whose hearts leaped for joy as they thanked the great God for that inestimable blessing of peace. Fond mothers told it to the infants at the breast as they bounced them aloft and reiterated again and again, “Peace, darling, peace!” The gray-haired sire, whose days were numbered, dropped unchecked, unbidden tears of joy, silently and without a voice, as he too thanked his Maker again and again for that peace between neighbors and kindred that never should have been broken. No more would the neighborless settler fear peril as the darkening shadows of evening came about his log cabin in the great forest, or dread that before the light of another dawn armed foemen might come and take him prisoner, and drive his wife and little ones into an inclement winter night by the application of the torch. Strong men grasped each others’ hands, and shook, and bawled themselves hoarse in simple exuberance of spirits, and in the intensest feeling of thankfulness that peace had come to them once again. Nor was this outburst of feeling mere exultation over the Americans. All felt that we had honorably acquitted ourselves in a military point of view, but the Americans at the same time had fought with valor, and we really had not much to taunt them with.

It would perhaps be superfluous to record many of the particular charges which our people laid at the door of the Americans during the war. It is in evidence equally that the Americans laid quite as{59} many sins to our people for their acts, while making forays on United States soil. So far as one may judge there is not any preponderating weight of evidence for either side. It is true we do accuse the Americans of burning the public buildings in York after the taking of the place, when the fort blew up on April 27th, 1813. The author is inclined to think that the Americans should not have applied the torch. On the other hand, we blew up the fort and utterly destroyed many hundreds of Americans in an instant, including their general.

The testimony of the great General Sherman, who, in 1865, marched with an army of 70,000 men through Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas and Virginia, destroying everything in a belt fifty miles wide, and than whom no one was better qualified to judge, was this: “War is hell.” It would have been futile for our people to expect humane war. There are no recriminations to make. In closing the records of the War of 1812 let us realize with our forefathers that peace, blessed peace, came to them and has ever since been with us. God be thanked.{60}

CHAPTER IV.

Turning to ordinary affairs, we find that at this date our Government helped the settler to exterminate wolves by paying a bounty of about $6 for each wolf head produced before a magistrate. In reference to these ferocious animals, once so plentiful in Canada, an anecdote of the author’s grandfather will be found both interesting and instructive, giving us a true glimpse of the county in 1806. Thomas Conant, whose portrait is found on opposite page, and who was assassinated during the Canadian Revolution on February 15th, 1838 (vide “Upper Canada Sketches,” by the author), lived in Darlington, Durham County, Upper Canada. In the fall of 1806 he was “keeping company” with a young woman, who lived some three miles back from Lake Ontario, his home being on the shore of that great lake. Clearings or openings in the forest were at this time mostly along the lake shore. Consequently, to pay his respects to the young woman, he had to pass through some forest and clearings in succession. It was in November of that year. Snow had not yet fallen, but the ground

THOMAS CONANT.

Was born at Bridgewater, Mass., in 1782; came to Darlington, Canada, with his father, Roger Conant, in 1792. On February 15th, 1838, during the Canadian Revolution, he was foully massacred by one Cummings (in Darlington), a despatch bearer, of Port Hope, Ont. The assassin was applauded for the act by the Family Compact.

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was frozen. Tarrying until midnight at the home of the object of his affections, he left, alone and unarmed, to walk the three intervening miles to his home. Getting over about one-half the distance, he heard the distant baying of wolves. Fear would, it may be supposed, lend speed to his feet, but thinking rightly that he could not outstrip the wolf on foot, he walked quietly along, watching for a convenient tree for climbing. In a very few minutes the wolves were upon him, in full cry, eyes protruding, tongues lolling, and ready to devour him. A near-by beech tree, which his arms could encircle, furnished him with the means of escape. He climbed, and climbed, while the wolves surrounded him and watched his every motion, never ceasing their dismal howls the live-long night. Thus he kept his lonely vigil. To lose his hold for a single second meant instant death. Great, however, as was the tension upon his strained muscles, they held on. Morn tardily came at last, and with its first peep the wolves left him and were seen no more. When they were really gone, he said he for the first time began looking about him, and found, with all his climbing, he had ascended a very few feet from the ground, and but just out of reach of the wolves’ jaws as they made frantic jumps to reach him. We may, however, be safe in assuming that the scare and involuntary vigil did not do him much harm, for in the March following (1807) he married the girl he went to visit that night, and made no complaints of having been maltreated by wolves.{62}

In dismissing Thomas Conant at this time, the author digresses to say that he was born in the United States, and was only a small lad when Roger Conant, his father, brought him here. He was a generous, industrious citizen, and was always noted for being one of the best natured men in Canada, and possessed ability of a very high order. He was liked universally by all who knew him, and he pursued the ordinary avocations of life, such as Canadians then pursued, up to the time of his assassination (as before mentioned) during the Canadian Revolution, on February 15th, 1838. He went down to the grave from the stroke of a sword, wielded by a dragoon, and without any provocation other than accusing the dragoon of being drunk, as he was and had been many times previously when on duty as despatch bearer. But such was the state of affairs in Canada in 1837-8 that no investigation was held, nor was the murderer ever punished even in the mildest degree. The author asks the reader’s indulgence when he says he is very certain that only his grandfather’s (Thomas Conant) untimely death prevented him from leaving a name after him high up in Canadian annals, for he was a man of grand physique (6 feet 2 inches in height) and of commanding talents. He had a well-balanced mind and had wealth at his command.

Surveyors were now at work plotting out the townships, and settlers were coming very rapidly to occupy the lands which were surveyed. Readers will bear in mind that the Family Compact was still in full power.{63} All grants for lands had to come through them. A story of a famous old land surveyor is in order in this place. He had been surveying for many seasons, and, about quarterly, came to York to make his reports and show the plots of the new townships laid out. It so happened that an uncle of the author’s was chain-bearer (whose office Fenimore Cooper, the novelist, has immortalized) to this long-winded surveyor. At the time of his service as chain-bearer this uncle was only a lusty young man, and was not supposed to know the very first elements of surveying. Among other things it was his duty to erect the tent for the nightly bivouac, and make a fire at the tent mouth. Before the dancing, fitful flames, lights and shadows in the forest primeval, he nightly sat with the lordly surveyor, and saw him prepare rude maps of the past day’s work. And, without any sort of knowledge of surveying, he saw him just touch a parallelogram here and there (which would represent 100 acres) with the point of his red pencil; but ever so light was the touch. Night after night he saw dots go down on the parallelograms, and when the quiver was full of sheets of survey, to York he went with the surveyor, to report at the Crown Lands office. He said that in the office he noticed the officials in charge scanning very intently for the red but faint dots. We all now know the result: friends of the government officials had secured hundreds and hundreds of acres of the best lands in the region surveyed, while the surveyor became a mighty land-owner of most choice lands, and died a very, very wealthy man. As may be sur{64}mised, he had marked the choicest 100-acre lots with faint red dots, and he and the officials grabbed the very choicest lands in that surveyor’s district. Should a would-be purchaser ask for any certain lot, he was put off for a day in order that they might see in the surveyor’s map if it really was a choice one, as they surmised, since he asked to buy it, in which case some friend immediately entered for it, and consequently that choice lot the settler could not purchase. Using a fictitious name to illustrate, it is said, and truly, too, that Peter Russell, Governor, deeded to Peter Russell, Esquire, many choice lots of 100 acres each of the public domain in Canada, in the days of the Family Compact. But here one can justly remark that the eternal fitness of things comes pretty nearly correct after all, for, although that surveyor was fabulously wealthy, none of the property to-day is in any of his descendants’ possession, nor are there offspring of any of the Family Compact with enough pelf to-day, severally or collectively, to cause any comment. “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small,” in Canada just as they did in Greece and Rome in days of yore.

This travesty of the conveying of public lands was one very just cause of complaint on behalf of the people, and the refusal of the authorities to correct it helped materially to cause the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38.

The settlements in central Canada were at this time for the most part close to the edge of the lake. Many very worthy, hard-working, law-abiding men{65} and women of Canada found their last resting places in places of sepulture, as they had found their homes, beside the waters of Lake Ontario. Most pathetically all such graveyards appeal to the tender side of any Canadian who loves his country and his fellows. When we stop to consider all the hardships they had gone through, with unremitting days, weeks, months and years of the hardest and most strenuous muscle-aching toil, and remember, too, that they fought and conquered the forests of Canada, it would not be human to pass by the memory of such a noble race. Their fight had not the spur of excitement to keep up their courage, as in war, but it was a fight, nevertheless—silent, monotonous, trackless, soundless and alone, in forests greater than which earth presents few examples if any.

Noble men and women, pioneers of Canada, who gave us our birthright, you merit our regard and ungrudgingly you shall have it! On earth is no greater or more glittering example of a better, more prudent, loyal, law-abiding, religious and industrious people than were those now asleep in the soil of Canada, and from whom we sprang.

Old Ontario generally is placid and beautiful, ultra-marine blue, and shimmering. But he is not always so. When rude Boreas awakes the slumbering giant, he frets, and froths, and spumes, and roars. As he is in his might he becomes awful to look upon, and doubly so if one ventures upon his bosom. And while he is spurring and warring, his waves continually come upon the shore, each time a little{66} higher and higher, searching each nook, cranny and fissure along the bank of the water’s edge. Many such storms, you can easily understand, you who live distant from navigable and great waters, tend to undermine the foundations of the banks, which after a few more beatings fall with a plunge, a roar, and a cloud of densest dust, into the waters below. In this manner does old Ontario encroach at points upon the land. The sequel may be readily seen. Those in their graves must give them up, while their bones whiten the shingle for many a sunshiny day. This is no fanciful picture. With a fowling-piece upon his shoulder the author has passed along the foot of the bank, where a graveyard is, and seen skulls, long hair, ribs, femurs and other larger bones of the human body bestrewing the beach. And he has seen also where the bank has fallen away, only one-half the length of the grave, and where only one-half of the skeleton went down with the submerged bank, while the other half remained in the grave, and the point of severance of the bones was plainly observable on the bank above the beholder’s head. Flesh, of course, there is none. Time has long since decayed and changed that.

Noble men and women, the pioneers of Canada, you deserve better graves, and cushions to lie on of the softest and most enduring velvet!

Pursuing this subject a little further, the author may observe that he personally owns a graveyard on a large farm which has been used by whites since 1798 and by red men before that on Lake Ontario

OLD GRAVEYARD NEAR OSHAWA, THE PROPERTY OF THE AUTHOR.

Graveyard on a bluff beside Lake Ontario, at Port Oshawa, overlooking the surrounding country for a radius of ten miles. The red man, with an eye to beauty, first used this for his place of sepulture, and now my tenants plough out skulls, stone pipes, thigh bones, and iron tomahawks with a star on them, which were given to the Indians by the French before the English Conquest of Canada. The waves of Lake Ontario perform a perpetual requiem to the memory of Indians and whites here interred.

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shore, where the waves produce a perpetual lullaby and a requiem to the sainted memories of the dead.

In this case there is no particular danger of the graves being washed into the lake, but it seems hardly meet that any private owner should have absolute control of the remains of the forefathers of so many now dwelling in Canada. During his life no one shall be allowed by him to meddle with the spot, but to save it for all time he has made a standing proposition to deed it to any properly organized church that would receive it and look after it. No such body has yet been found to receive the gift in trust, but the author hopes that his only son, Gordon, may keep it and hand it down to his son, and his son, in order that it may never be disturbed.

About the year 1833 Millerism found a lodgment in Canada from the New England States, where one Miller, by his preaching, proved very clearly, to some minds, that on a night in February of that year the earth would pass away. Now, quite as great a proportion of the people in Canada embraced this doctrine as did those of the United States, when populations are compared. These persons had not the slightest doubt that the world would really burn up on the date announced. Hence there were many who during that winter, up to the time, failed to provide themselves with wood for heating their houses. The old Virginia snake fences being all about, they proceeded to take rails from off the fences and burn them in their own houses, for they surely would have enough from this source to last until the 15th Feb{68}ruary of that winter. But even though they were to die so soon they could not well do without food, and they had failed to provide any. John B. Warren at that time kept a large general store in Oshawa, and was noted for his wide dealings. And we accordingly find that good Millerite farmers came to him with their sleighs and offered him their own notes, endorsed by good neighbors, for as much as $300 per barrel for flour, which they would take home in their sleighs. It was then worth generally $5 per barrel. John B. Warren, to his honor be it said, always refused to trade with them on such terribly unequal terms, but explained to them that they could have the flour and could pay for it if they found themselves alive after 15th February. Warren, it will be understood, did not become a Millerite. Again, it is related that a husband who had for his second wife, Jane, lived near the graveyard in which slumbered his first wife, Elizabeth. As the hands of the long “grandfather’s clock” of those days got around to midnight, this husband said to his wife, “Jane, put on your things and let’s go over to the burying-ground, for I want to die beside my first wife, Elizabeth, so as to meet her the very first one after the great fire.” Jane’s faith, it seems, was not so strong, and she flashed fire at his manifest preference for her predecessor in her husband’s affections, and replied, “If that’s your game, you may go, and I won’t live with you any longer.” And it is added that she did not live under his roof again for several months after the great fire that was to be. Several different dates{69} have been assigned since that first dread day, and no doubt some earnestly looked-for date is regarded as now approaching by this small but earnest body of people.

One Hoover believed the Millerite doctrine so very strongly that he gradually fancied himself more than human, and not amenable to nature’s laws. He announced that one day in the fall of 1832 he would walk on the water from Port Hoover, across Scugog Lake, seven miles to the mainland. The faithful gathered, and hundreds besides from curiosity. Hoover entered the water, slowly waded from the shore, and sought refuge behind an old pile of the dock, where he remained a few minutes. There were boxes like big boots upon his feet. Soon the crowd called vociferously for him to come out. When he did emerge from behind the pile he turned his face shoreward and gained solid land. The boys began to hoot and laugh at the would-be miracle-worker. Then Hoover made an explanation nearly in these words:

“My friends, a cloud rose before my eyes and I cannot see. I cannot walk upon the water to-day while this cloud is before my eyes. Soon it will be announced when the cloud has been removed, and I will do it.”

The crowd went away, never again to assemble at Hoover’s bidding. Millerite farmers who were usually good husbandmen, as the day approached, failed to turn their stock out of their pens, or to feed their animals, and actually nearly starved them.{70} To-day all that is past, and in almost every instance those who embraced Millerism, and those who then opposed it, have gone to the great silent majority. Millerism is not now known in Canada.

One other sect now, so far as I know, is extinct in central Ontario; it may be worth mention. I say extinct, but I am not quite so certain of that, as there yet may be some isolated persons of that faith here and there in Ontario. I refer to the Mormons. During the summer of 1842 Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-Day Saints, came to central Ontario and spoke at open-air meetings, camp-meeting-like, as well as in houses. He even attempted to perform miracles by curing sick persons. I get it from persons on the stage of action this day, who heard Joseph Smith in Upper Canada in 1842, and they say he was a good talker and had a very insinuating manner, and they naively add that it is almost beyond belief that any one could fall in with him. It is only fair, however, to say in favor of the sincerity of those who joined him, that polygamy was not then announced. We ought, I think, to make this admission to let off those who did join as easily as possible; and from central Ontario there were Seeleys, McGahans, Lamoreaux and others, with their families, who sold their farms and gave the money to Joseph Smith, and went off to Nauvoo, Ill. It is a little singular, too, that these people were never again heard of directly from their new Mormon homes at Salt Lake, where they no doubt removed after the break up at Nauvoo. All these Mormon converts{71} vanished from their neighbors with Joseph Smith, and never again sent any word to their friends and relatives left behind. I was at Salt Lake City for a short sojourn in 1879, and upon passing a stonecutter who was at work upon a square building stone for the new great Mormon tabernacle, asked the workman, “Do you know any one called McGahan about these parts?” Instantly the stonecutter dropped his tools and looked me very intently in the eye and replied, “Yes, I do. What do you know about them?” I explained that they came from Ontario, their former home, when the stonecutter urged me to go and see them; said they lived only fifteen miles down the valley south from Salt Lake, were wealthy, and would be pleased to see me, and most earnestly urged me to go. But my faith in Mormon integrity in those days was too low, and I dared not leave Camp Douglas and the protection of United States soldiers as far as fifteen miles away. Never since has any kind of trace been heard of our Mormon converts or their descendants.{72}

CHAPTER V.

Among the doings of the first parliament of Upper Canada there is none on which we can look back with greater satisfaction than the abolition of slavery in this country. Persons who have not looked closely into our early history may be almost disposed to express surprise that such a piece of legislation was passed. The subject is so interesting that I will speak more fully on the point. Great Britain abolished slavery in the British West Indies as late as 1833, and paid twenty millions of pounds for the slaves to their owners. It is difficult at this time to tell why our forefathers in Ontario were so much in advance of the Mother Country as well as the United States, for we find that they abolished slavery from Upper Canada in July, 1793. Of course, there were not many slaves in Upper Canada at the time, still there were some, but it seems that no compensation was ever paid to the owners for such slaves. Just think at what a fearful cost of treasure and precious lives the United{73} States was called upon in the War of Secession to stand in order to rid their country of slavery. Had they abolished slavery at the time our forefathers did, no doubt the great war of the rebellion would have been averted, and besides, in 1793, when we abolished slavery, they could not have had very many slaves at the most, and even if they were paid for, they would not have cost anything like so great a sum as Great Britain paid for her West India slaves in 1833.

Then I maintain that our forefathers in Upper Canada in 1793 were far in advance in public spirit and true philanthropy of our American cousins, for we do not find that the Americans at this time made any great agitation to rid their country of the curse of slavery. If there were no other fact to be proud of in our early history, this act of our forefathers is one on which we may justly feel gratification. I will insert the Act abolishing slavery in full. In July, 1793, the first parliament of Upper Canada at its first session, called together at Niagara by the Lieut.-Governor, John Graves Simcoe, passed an Act as follows:

By this simple Act of our first parliament our country was effectually rid of this pest without the shedding of a drop of blood or the expenditure of a single dollar in money. All honor to our forefathers for their wise act, and a cheer for our banner free province.

Our forefathers at this time, and long after, had no stoves in their log-houses. All cooking, as well as heating, was done by the fireplace. A crane swung on hinges into this great fireplace and could be swung out from the fire at pleasure. Attached to this crane was an iron, having notches therein, and fitting over this pendant iron rod was another shorter iron, with a link as of a chain on the end thereof. This link fitted into the notches on the first-mentioned iron. By this means the lower iron could be raised or lowered into or above the fire at pleasure. Thus our forefathers did their first cooking in Upper Canada. The corn cake, or wheaten cake, when they had it, was baked in the ashes, and wonderfully sweet old persons thought it. The fact that it was covered with some loose ashes did not detract from its sweetness, as they were soon brushed away, leaving the toothsome cake within.{75}

The first improvement in the culinary art of our forefathers came with tin bake-ovens. These were tin trays, as it were, open on one side. They would be set before the fire-place, with the open side fronting the fire. Thus the rays of heat would be collected, and in a measure confined within the oven, and the bread or cakes within were soon nicely browned and baked. It was considered an immense stride by our forefathers when they got these bake-ovens, and for years they did not aspire to anything better.

Ovens out of doors were built by some of stones. They were generally conical in shape and open in the centre. An immense fire would be built in this out-door oven, and when burnt down to real live coals, would be all drawn out. Its stones would thus be thoroughly heated. Into the cavity in which the fire had been, the bread would be inserted and the door stopped up. Enough heat would remain in the stones to thoroughly bake at least two batches of bread. But this was done at a fearful waste of wood, which, of course, was of no account at that time. The advent of stoves changed all that, and now a fireplace of wood in an Ontario home is more a luxury than a necessity, and but few are to be found. But many of my more elderly readers will remember the huge gaping fireplaces of the past when a great “back-log,” two feet or more in diameter, would be drawn in with a horse into the house, and the horse unhitched, leaving the log before the fireplace. Once at the fireplace it was an easy matter, with handspikes, to{76}

FIREPLACE AND HOUSEHOLD EFFECTS IN USE IN UPPER CANADA IN 1813.

(By permission from the J. Ross Robertson collection.)

KITCHEN UTENSILS. UPPER CANADA, 1813.

(By permission from the J. Ross Robertson collection.)

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roll it to the back side of the fire. Since matches were not then invented, the fire was something to be closely guarded, lest it might go out. But this big back-log would usually keep a fire on for some three or four days, being covered up at night with the ashes and embers that it might smoulder all the night.

Wild leeks were then used as an article of food. As soon as the snow disappeared in the spring they would be found in abundance in the forests, and were gathered as the first spring vegetable. Their unsavory smell, or that imparted to the breath of the eater thereof, seemed to be no bar to their use. When all partook of the leek not one could detect the odor from the other. Likewise the cowslip, a little later in the season, which grew in shallow ponds, furnished a dish of greens to our forefathers.

To show how difficult it was at this early day for the poor settler to obtain money, I will relate an anecdote of about 1807. Levi Annis was living at this time with his father, in the county of Durham. During the summer and fall of 1806 they had chopped and burnt a fallow of thirty-one acres, which they sowed with fall wheat. As a preparation for sowing, the land was not ploughed at all, but it was loose and leafy and ashy from the burning. The wheat was sown broadcast by hand among the stumps. It was covered by hitching a yoke of oxen to the butt end of a small tree, with the branches left hanging thereto. The oxen drew this to and fro over the fallow among the stumps, and thus covered the wheat. This was called “bushing in,” and was the first harrow used{78} by our forefathers among the stumps. However, the fallow upon which the wheat was so brushed in produced as fine a crop of fall wheat as ever grew, falling not much below thirty bushels per acre. Now this wheat could be exchanged for store goods at will, but not for money. Levi Annis, however, took the first load of it to Bowmanville, and was told by his father that he must get $5.50 on account of the whole crop to pay his taxes, for he must have the money to pay his taxes, but the rest he would take store pay for. The merchant with whom he dealt actually refused to advance the $5.50, saying he could get all the wheat he wanted for goods. The young man had to drive to another merchant and state his deplorable case to him and his urgent need of $5.50, and that if he would advance him the money he should have the whole crop of thirty-one acres. Finally the second merchant took pity upon the young man in his dilemma and advanced the money. Thus it was with the utmost difficulty that he could get $5.50 in cash out of thirty-one acres of wheat. This shows us to-day how difficult it was for our forefathers to get money.

Most of the refugees from the United States at the time of the American Revolution of the last century, who sided with Britain, and came to Canada and this section, came by way of Niagara. This north shore of Lake Ontario was then a wilderness, with no clearing or settlements at all. Where Toronto now is was an Indian camp when some of those refugees came through and over its present site. Of course,{79} such refugees are termed “United Empire Loyalists,” and right well they deserve the name, for many of them left lands and houses and goodly heritage in Massachusetts to come over here and live under the old flag. The Royal grants which they received were given to them ostensibly for their loyalty to the Crown, but I sometimes think that our Royal governors at those times used them as a means of peopling the country, and it would almost appear that this consideration had as much to do with the grants for loyalty as for real bona fide settlers. The United Empire Loyalists came around the head of Lake Ontario, and stopped first beside the various creeks which flow into Lake Ontario, for two reasons: one, to enable them to catch the plentiful salmon in those creeks; and the other, that they might cut marsh grass for their cattle at the marshes formed at the streams’ mouths. There was no grist-mill nearer than Kingston, and these refugees had to go in bateaux with their grists (when they had any) all this way. They skirted close along the shore, and pulled their boats up at night and slept in them. Twice per year was, for many years, the greatest number of times they would go with the grist. Rather hard lines for those who had left the comforts and civilization of the Eastern States for the wilds of Canada.

John D. Smith, at Smith’s Creek, now Port Hope, erected a grist-mill some time after 1800 came in, and his was the first grist-mill between Toronto and Kingston. The boon which this conferred upon the sparse settlers can hardly be realized at this day.{80} Many of these settlers became Indian traders, for the Indians at this time far outnumbered the whites; and semi-annually all the Indian tribes came to Lake Ontario to fish. Their trading was done by barter. A party of traders would set out into the woods with their packs of goods and fire off three guns in succession, which was the signal to the Indians that traders were there. Next morning the Indians would invariably come to the rendezvous to trade their furs for ammunition, blankets and trinkets. The furs were sent by bateaux to Montreal, and were for many years the only commodity which would command the cash in the market.

The next commodity which brought cash was black salts and potash. This was before the square timber began to be exported from this locality.

Just about the time that the settlers began to subdue the forests, the War of 1812 broke out and sadly disarranged all the plans of the settlers. Some of the sparse settlers, known for probity and reliability, got contracts under the Government as despatch bearers between certain stations, and for this received weekly, during the unfortunate time, Spanish milled dollars, in which they were then paid. The military impressment law was, of course, in full force during the war. The cannon and military stores were hauled along the shores from Montreal to Toronto, as the war progressed, as it was not safe to trust them on vessels on the water for fear of capture by the Americans. The mouths of streams had to be forded. The writer can call to mind many anecdotes of his{81} forefathers of that interesting time in our history. The straggling settler would be ploughing among the stumps with his yoke of oxen, when a squad of British soldiers would come along and make him unhitch from the plough, and hitch on to the cannon without any waiting or time even to go in for his coat. Usually two yokes of oxen were attached to each of the small cannon. On arrival at the garrison at Toronto the owners of the oxen were invariably well paid in cash for their services. Two persons with oxen from this locality were once pressed into the service. One yoke happened to be tolerably fat, and the owner sold them to the military authorities in Toronto for a good price in money, for beef for the troops. The money obtained for that yoke of oxen enabled the owner to buy and pay for 200 acres of as fine land as to-day can be found under the sun.

Nor was it infrequent for the passing soldiers to be billeted upon the inhabitants for a night.

Indians used to spear fish when the first settlers came here, along the lake shore and off the headlands. No matter if the water was rough, the Indian would stand in the prow of the dug-out log canoe, holding some sturgeon oil in his mouth. Now and again he would spit this oil out upon the water, which would so calm it for a moment or two that he could see the fish and spear them. By such sleights the Indian invariably succeeded in procuring food from the forest and flood, while the white man could hardly do so until he learned from the Indian how to take game and fish. It was always the policy of the first settlers{82} to treat the Indians kindly. They did this because the Indians gave them like treatment in return, and also because they far outnumbered the whites and could easily have destroyed them. An Indian was never to be refused something to eat if he came along hungry. My forefathers have told me that an Indian came along one day nearly famished and asked for food. Through some mishap he had been a week without food. A lot of cold meat was set before him and a quantity of corn bread. The old settler sat beside his fireplace and saw with surprise the eagerness and dexterity with which he managed to appropriate this cold meat. And still the Indian ate on, without apparent flagging, until at last the four pounds or so of cold meat was gone. Then he gave a grunt of satisfaction and sat before the fire. Soon he appeared in great distress and began rolling on the floor. To cure the surfeit the settler knew no better way than to grease his abdomen and pull him about. Just what virtue the grease had the settler did not know, but thinking that his body must necessarily stretch to master all that meat, he knew no better way to produce the stretching than by greasing him. And grease him he did, with the Indian all the time roaring with agony. However, after sundry greasings, rollings and groanings, he got relief, and sat once more beside the fire. On going away he told the old man what a good meal he had had, and that he ever would remember him. It is a fact that the Indian in his forest home used many times to be for days without food, when game was{83} not secured. When he did get game he gorged himself, but of the manner of relieving a surfeit in the woods the white man does not seem to know whether it was by grease or otherwise.

At a logging bee in those old times whiskey was ever present. All the settlers in the locality would invariably turn out and help at the logging. Wonderful stories they tell of logging an acre of land in an hour and a half by three men and a yoke of oxen. Old men to-day tell me that they were mere lads then, and were the “whiskey boys” at these loggings. Whiskey was partaken of by the bowlful, and no ill effect seemed to follow from it. If a man were to drink one-half the quantity of whiskey to-day he would be more than drunk, and sick on the morrow. It must be that the whiskey of those days was better than the modern stuff. It was not supposed to be at all wrong to drink whiskey in those days, and they tell of an Irish immigrant who settled in Pickering, who had no cows, and had to provide food for his family during the winter. He procured two barrels of whiskey, which he and the family used with the cornmeal porridge during that winter. There were young children in the family at the time. It was not maintained that the whiskey was as nutritious as milk would have been, but yet they all came out in the spring in good condition, none the worse of the thrice daily consumption of whiskey.

Barns were sometimes moved from the manure pile about them. Manure was not considered of any value upon the land, for the land was rich enough{84} without it. In a series of years the manure would accumulate about the barns, impeding access thereto, and they were actually moved away to get away from the manure, and then the manure burnt. Of course, we would not think of such a proceeding now, but there are farmers in Darlington, in the county of Durham, who burn their straw even now. When threshing, the straw is spread over a field, as delivered from a machine, by a boy with a horse-rake. It is then burned, relying for manure upon the ashes which the straw makes. This is not told as an example of good farming, but it illustrates the exceeding richness of Ontario soil.

Since the early American colonists burnt witches at Salem, their descendants, who came to Upper Canada as U. E. Loyalists, brought the belief of witchcraft with them; and many of them who came here about 1800, and before, really did believe in witches. I have heard my forefathers relate a witch story in all seriousness which I think worth repeating, as showing to us that the New England people who burnt witches were really sincere in the belief. About 1800 a settler in the spring of the year did not enjoy very good health. Nothing serious seemed to be the matter with him but a general inertia, or seediness. There was no medical man to consult, so he did the next best thing by consulting his nearest neighbor. The neighbor upon being told his symptoms at once pronounced him bewitched. An old woman in the locality was at once picked out as the bewitcher. Now for the remedy to break the spell of the witchery. A{85} ball must be made of silver, and they melted a silver coin and made a rifle ball of it. An image of dough must be made to as closely resemble the supposed witch as possible. And it was made. Just as the sun rose the bewitched must fire at it with his rifle and the silver ball, and the dough image was set up on a top rail of the fence, and as the sun rose he fired and just grazed the shoulder of the dough image. In about an hour the old witch came to the house in great haste, and wanted to borrow some article. Were they to lend her the article desired the spell would come on again, but refusing, the spell was broken; of course, like sensible men, they did not lend the article. Even they went on to say further that the witch was hit and wounded slightly on the shoulder, where the dough image was struck by the silver ball. However, be that as it may, they asserted that the sick man speedily got well and was never again bewitched by the witch in question nor any other. Of the efficacy of the unerring aim of the silver ball I do not vouch, but I do vouch for the real bona fide belief of the old narrators of the whole tale.

There were buffalo in Ontario once, without a doubt, and I think I can prove it. When my people first came here, their own and two other families for some years were the only settlers between Toronto and Port Hope. They had cows, but by some fatality their only bull died. Somehow, three cows strayed away one summer and did not return until late in the fall or approach of winter. Next spring these cows had a calf each, and these calves partook partly of the{86} mother, with the head and foreshoulders of the buffalo. Having a shaggy mane and long hair on their foreshoulders like the buffalo, they were without a doubt part buffalo. The progeny of this half-buffalo stock increased, but they never became thoroughly domesticated, and when a bull, some years after, could be obtained, they had to be killed on account of their viciousness.{87}

CHAPTER VI.

I referred in the last chapter to the Spanish milled dollars in which military services were paid for. Mexican dollars were also in vogue, and a few years previous to the American War of 1812, some enterprising New England counterfeiters, fancying the densely-wooded portion of Lower Canada, near the state lines, would afford a secure base for their operations, emigrated to our lower province. These Mexican silver dollars were used as a currency for small moneys almost to the exclusion of British coins. The reason for this was because these Mexican unmilled dollars were of pure silver, almost without alloy, and were worth, intrinsically, rather more than their face value. In these forests the counterfeiters set up their presses and dies, and succeeded in making Mexican dollars so very nearly like the genuine ones that they passed unquestioned. Indeed, there was no limit to the amount these fellows could produce, or as to the amount of wealth they could accumulate thereby;{88} that is to say, so far as wealth could be accumulated in those early days among forest fastnesses. However, this band had good houses constructed, and as well furnished as they could be at that early day. One of the traditions about them is that they were in the habit of throwing a dollar into the spittoon when they wanted it cleaned, which perhaps shows they had all the hired help that money could in those days give them. They appear to have lived a free-booting sort of life and to have enjoyed such luxuries as money could command. So expert had they become at the business that paymasters in the American army actually crossed over the lines by stealth, through the woods, and bought these Mexican dollars from the counterfeiters to pay the American troops with. This is a fact, anomalous as it may seem, and no doubt these paymasters reaped rich harvests by these transactions. As an illustration of the cleverness of these counterfeiters I will note that at one time they actually passed four thousand of their coins on one of the banks in Montreal.

We may, therefore, assume that as counterfeiters they had arrived at considerable perfection. The flooding of the Province of Quebec with these Mexican dollars somewhat disarranged the even flow of trade transactions.

On the close of the American war, however, these Mexican dollars were gradually taken out of circulation. The genuine ones were mostly taken to England to be recoined into British shillings and sixpences. This altered state of affairs caused these counterfeiters{89} to pause in their career, and they ceased to produce the Mexican dollars for fear they might be traced out. Counterfeiting bank-notes was what they next turned their hands to. In those days the “greenback” had not been invented, the engravings on the bills were not very elaborate, and they found some one among them who could cut the die plate of a bill. Thus far they had got on well, but the signatures to the bills presented an almost insuperable obstacle. That oft-repeated remark, that “the old fellow always helps his own,” was true in their case at least. One of their number was found so clever with the pen that he could imitate the signatures to perfection. It is asserted that this signer claimed as his share for affixing the signatures a full share in all the band’s proceeds, and he was to do nothing else at all. The other members were to do all the work and he only did the writing, and lived like a gentleman in what had then become a small village in Quebec, near the province line. He had a fine house, carriages and servants; held several offices of trust, and had even rare and costly bound books in his library. Indeed, he seemed to be a person of culture in every way, and no one for a moment suspected him of any complicity in such a nefarious business as counterfeiting.

To show how clever he was as a penman, I will tell this anecdote by way of illustration. Some twenty thousand dollars’ worth of promissory notes had been sued in some court in the State of Vermont. The signature on these notes was disputed by the reputed maker, and a defence set up that they were{90} forgeries. This important case was thoroughly defended by the ablest counsel of the day, and yet the case seemed likely to go against the maker of the notes. Happening to get a hint, this attorney for the defence quietly asked all the attorneys in the court to write their names on a half-sheet of foolscap, which he produced, torn carelessly from the other half-sheet.

Each one wrote his name. Then this attorney for the defence brought the signatures to this person who did the bank-note signing in Quebec. On the other half-sheet of foolscap this more than expert penman reproduced in exact fac-simile the attorneys’ names. Back into court he came with the two half-sheets of foolscap, one containing the genuine signatures and the other the forged ones, but both sheets alike in every respect, even as to jagged edges, where torn asunder, and every other particular.

Each signing attorney was then put in the witness box and asked to swear to his signature. Not one of them could do it. This fact threw doubts in the minds of the jury as to the genuineness of the signature of the notes, and the defendant got a verdict of “not guilty.”

As the country continued to be flooded with these notes, the Government finally began tracing their issue to the fountain head, and suddenly and without warning made a descent upon this respectable citizen’s fine house. Not a scrap could be found to incriminate him, and the searchers were about to leave with apologies, when, happening to look in the attic, they found a single unused die, which one of the gang had thoughtlessly left there.{91}

The finding of this die of course caused his arrest, and he and two others were put on trial for their lives. Forgery in that day in Quebec merited the death penalty of the law. They had moved to Canada, however, for protection, and even in this instance Canada did not fail to protect them still. They had forged only notes of the state banks of the United States, and it seems that our law could not fairly get hold of them for forging the notes of a foreign country, and they got off scot-free. But the prosecution broke them up and they fled, having lost their pseudo-respectability.

It is asserted that this expert penman and cultivated man afterwards migrated to the United States, became an inmate of nearly all the penitentiaries the United States then possessed, and finally died in one of them. So, in this instance, as ever, the way of the transgressor was hard, although seemingly so fair for so long a time.

“Can you tell me where I can buy shingles?” for many years after the breaking up of the gang was one of the formulas which strangers used when coming into the former counterfeiters’ locality to buy counterfeit money. A man of sixty-five now tells that when a lad he once in the spring packed his bundle in his handkerchief, swung it over his shoulder on a stick, and sallied out looking for work. A stylish team passed him, driven by two men, whom he asked for a ride. And they gave him a ride, and asked him while on the way “where they could buy some shingles?” Not knowing, he could{92} not tell them, but his curiosity was aroused to know what men, dressed as they were, and with so fine a team and so light a rig, should want with shingles. Finally, after repeated inquiries, some one on the way told them to turn off the road, and back in the woods they would find “shingles.” It is asserted that for some years after the close of the American War of 1812 this counterfeit money had, among those who dealt in it, a certain market value. Sometimes the dollar was worth as much as forty cents, and at other times it had a greater value. Other catch words were used and known among those who dealt in this commodity besides “shingles,” but this term seems to have been most used and most generally known.

A long time it took to rid that part of Quebec of the remaining stamps and dies, and to stamp out the counterfeiting entirely. But as the country became more settled up and the roads improved it was gradually stopped. So far as I can ascertain, this narrative contains an account of the most systematized and successful series of forgeries our country at that time had.

Some of these clever New England forgers knew when to stop. One of them, it is said, moved away to New Jersey and bought a fine farm there from the proceeds of his forgeries in Canada, and lived the life of a country gentleman until his death.

The strangest part of this tale is yet to follow. I got it from the lips of a resident in the West, a close observer and likely to know.

In the early settlements of the Western States{93} bordering on the Mississippi River, each state issued bills which were almost valueless in any other state. All sorts of forgeries were committed on these state bank bills. This money came to be known as “stump tail money,” and amidst the general confusion of currencies and hasty settlements the forgers were enabled to reap rich harvests. The forgers began to be caught and driven still further west to the Missouri River, as the States became better settled and things settled down generally. Nearly all of those forgers who were caught acknowledged that they were descendants of the gang of forgers whom I have been speaking of on the province line in Quebec. And more, they said in their confessions, that those who got away were likewise of the same descent. From this it would appear that in the guild of forgers the faculties are transmitted to succeeding generations, like those of caste in India.

I have said that in the early days of the century the settlers in Ontario did not entertain very correct ideas as to the prospective value of lands. The following anecdote of that time will illustrate this: Levi Annis, descended from Charles Annis, already alluded to, when about eighteen years of age had made a little money on his own account by trapping. He had saved enough money to buy himself a couple of bull calves six months old, and calculated to secure them. Just before he got to buying them, it came to his knowledge that for the same sum which he would pay for the calves he could buy outright 100 acres of land. For some days he was in doubt whether to buy the calves or the hundred acres. He asked his{94} friends, and they reasoned that there was lots of land, and land he could buy any time, but calves were scarce and he had better buy them when he could. Consequently he bought the calves and let the land alone. To show how lightly land was valued in those days I make the comparison. But this is not at all in relation to the bargain. Had he bought the 100 acres of land, which he thought of doing, even before his death he would have seen a part of the town of Oshawa built upon it. To-day there is upon this land a large manufactory and numerous dwellings, and its value at this time is almost beyond estimating. Had he bought the land and simply kept it, and literally done nothing else, it would have made a rich man of him. But he chose the calves, and it is evident in the light of the subsequent events that his choice was a poor one.

An Indian tale of 1800 comes to my mind which my forefathers have told to me. In the early days the settlers had to devise plans to keep their sheep from the wolves. As their flocks increased their next great difficulty was to keep their sheep from the Indians’ dogs. The first settlements were, of course, along the shores of the great lakes, Ontario and Erie. Twice a year, spring and fall, the Indians would come out from the woods to fish in those lakes and marshes, and at the outlets of the streams. So numerous were the Indians at that time that they far outnumbered the whites, and when they came for the semi-annual fish they would form a regular village, as they congregated in their tents beside the shore of some marsh or bay upon the great lakes.{95}

The settlers’ policy was one pre-eminently of conciliation to the Indians. But they would at every visit be accompanied by a lot of half-starved, ill-favored curs, which would worry the settlers’ sheep. At one visit they had a particularly large gaunt brute of a dog, which badly worried a sheep of my forefather. He remonstrated with the chief, and desired him to keep the dog at the camp, which he promised to do. Nightly he penned his sheep as usual, to keep off the wolves, but during the day this dog continued to worry them when out of sight among the log and brush on the partially cleared fields, and finally killed one. My people resolved to suffer it no longer, and at great risk of their lives and property shot the Indian dog—dead as they supposed. Then they took the dog that the Indians might not find him, and know that they had shot him, and put him in a hollow pine stub, the top of which stood some ten feet from the ground, and which was hollow to the bottom. Bury the dog they dared not, because the sharp-eyed Indian would discover the newly-turned earth and fish it out, and they knew they could not otherwise hide him successfully. That evening about forty Indians came looking for the animal, and searched every place, probable and improbable, indoors and out, and my people dared not refuse them admittance. Without a doubt my forefather will be pardoned for “telling a white one” when he averred that he had not got the dog. At this juncture it became by far too serious to jest or prevaricate, for their lives literally depended upon the Indians’ successful search for that canine. Search as they would, however, they{96} did not find it, and darkness gratefully set in and put an end to their investigation for that day. But little sleep the settlers were able to take that night through dead fear that the Indians might possibly find the cur. Next morning, just at the first peep of day, my forefather was up and out to the stump, when to his intense astonishment and disgust the dog was barking and scratching within the stub to get out. He had not been effectually killed, and had come back again to life. Now here was a dilemma, and what was to be done? To get up on the stub and fire at the dog again was more than he dared, for it would arouse the Indians only half a mile away.

An expedient he soon hit upon, however, and he resolved that day to go to logging that he might burn the stub without arousing the keen suspicion of the Indians. Yoking his oxen, a pile of logs was soon gathered about the stub and set on fire. The dog’s cries grew fainter and to him beautifully less, and finally ceased. But he did not dare to stop the logging for the day, and worked at it faithfully all day, whether he wished to or not, that no suspicion might rest upon him for the burning of the pine stub. It is needless to add that the Indians did not get the dog, and that they never found out what became of him. At this time this may seem a simple story to tell, but to the participants it was a life-and-death matter, and I have heard my forefathers say that the old man would have gladly given all his sheep, dearly as he prized them, could he have recalled that shot, when he heard the dog howling the next morning in the stub.{97}

CHAPTER VII.

That uprising of 1837-38 in Canada is now generally termed the Canadian Revolution. Most worthily does it deserve to be called a revolution, for the people who were its supporters afterwards got all they asked for. It was not a rebellion but a revolution, and it did great good for this country in the end. The fact of the very narrow and selfish rule of the Family Compact again comes to us, for having goaded the people to resort to extraordinary measures, they also persecuted persons who came, or whose fathers came, from the United States. All hail to those who, in a prominent or lesser way, took part in this rising on the side of the patriots. It is an honor to-day for any Canadian to be descended from one who took part and bore the burden and danger of service in the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38. It is not to be argued but that the patriots went rather too far, but no less could be expected when the people{98} once were aroused for such just causes. Those who fought on the other side were equally as brave, and did their duty manfully and bravely as they then saw the light. It was, nevertheless, the efforts of the few patriots (whose fortunes we shall follow in part) that gave us our liberties in Canada, and likewise brought about constitutional government. Likewise were the effects of this revolution good for the Motherland, for every colony since that time has been free to carry on its own domestic concerns at will, which Canadians could not possibly do before the Canadian Revolution. The day is now here when those alive are proud of the part their forefathers took in the struggle, and the disposition of many writers to try to gloss the disturbances over, and make them appear small and puny in the way of concerted efforts, are not pleasant to us nor true in their spirit. In a word, no one can be found in Canada to-day who would dare to champion the cause of the Royalists and the Family Compact on that occasion, and assert that the patriots had not sufficient causes for their uprising. Only recently has this been the case, for it has been fashionable heretofore for every one to make light of the Revolution and to disclaim any connection with it.

The patriots were only trying to get wrongs redressed and a constitutional government inaugurated. They had no wish to uprise against Great Britain. Particularly is it true that the great bulk of the patriots were not uprising against the Motherland, for the author’s forbears, who knew well from actual{99} contact with the patriots, have frequently told him so. The rule of the Family Compact they would not endure longer. They were goaded to exasperation by the infamous acts of that clique, and they were careless of what consequences might follow.

It was “Junius” who said, “The subject who is truly loyal will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary acts.” In accordance with that sentiment the patriots sought only to have the wrongs redressed, and not to take up arms against Great Britain in any sense. In the following pages some of the terribly arbitrary acts of the Family Compact will be given, for but very few Canadians to-day have the least inkling of the high-handed manner which this tyrannous power made use of in venting its private hatred on the patriots, both individually and collectively. It is, however, a matter of strong congratulation that though the Family Compact was victorious in the revolution, its rule was but short after it. The patriots secured all the privileges they asked for, and the Family Compact shrunk into nothingness.

The hanging of Lount and Matthews was really judicial murder, and the exportation of 232 Canadians to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), where nearly all of them lost their lives, was an infamous deed; also the persistence with which the Compact pursued the patriots is enough to bring tears to the eyes of every thinking Canadian to-day who really loves his country. When the Southern States revolted and fought from April, 1861, to April, 1865, and brought about the most terrible war on record,{100} wherein more men were killed than in any war the world has ever known, no one was hanged at its close. Nor was any leader imprisoned or exported, nor was the private property of the leaders confiscated, save that only of Jefferson Davis, the leader, and only a part of his private property withal. Whereas, here in Canada, because our patriots had the manliness to be men and stand up for their rights, though committing no overt acts, they were hanged, imprisoned, driven to the United States, or transported for life. In the case of the author’s own grandfather and parents he can bring out some features exactly. One Colonel Ferguson, who lived a mile and a quarter north of Whitby, considering his measure of loyalty to be so far in excess of that of all others about, took it upon himself to pay domiciliary visits to the homes of many with the troops under his command. He had the command of a few militiamen whose homes were in the locality of his visits. There were no overt acts being committed during the winter months of 1837-38, but it made no sort of difference to Colonel Ferguson. As a tool of the Family Compact he never ceased to annoy his neighbors. Very vivid impressions come to the author from the tales of his own father of Colonel Ferguson coming at midnight of a winter night with his men, surrounding the family residence and turning all the inmates out in the snow while he ransacked and searched at will. Many times during that memorable winter was the search repeated, but the author could never learn what Colonel Ferguson expected to find as a result of his

THE OLD CONANT HOMESTEAD AT PORT OSHAWA, BUILT IN 1811.

Here United States prisoners from General Hull’s army, which surrendered at Detroit, were fed while proceeding on their way by boats under guard to Quebec. Here also domiciliary visits were paid on several occasions during the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38, the house being surrounded by troops at midnight, and my people turned out in the snow while the house was being searched.

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diligent searches. Daniel Conant’s New England descent would very probably go far to account for Colonel Ferguson’s insane suspiciousness. In this part of Canada the inhabitants generally were in favor of the movement. Not to be so was to be singular. That is to say, they were in favor of having the wrongs committed by the Family Compact redressed, but not one in 10,000 asked for a change of the political connection of Canada. To effect such a sweeping change as that would be was not the object of the agitation, and at this day of writing it seems very hard that the inhabitants should have been persecuted simply because they loved their country; but so it was. It would be well to instance another case of the tyrannous misrule of the Family Compact and their persecution of unoffending persons. A farmer living near Oshawa, being the son of a United Empire Loyalist, seemed to have all the Compact’s hate and suspicion centred upon him, simply because his father came from Massachusetts. The suspected man had done absolutely no act to place him in the eye of the law. Like nearly all others, he sympathized with the patriots, not for a moment supposing it to be a crime to love his country and its people. But Colonel Ferguson thought differently, and made a sally to capture the farmer. Now, capture meant almost certain death, for it would mean being incarcerated during the very cold weather in unheated guardhouses and gaols here or in Toronto. Knowing this, he avoided capture by changing his quarters every few days and never sleeping in a house. Usually he slept{102} in the granary of a barn, burrowing into the bin of grain until almost or quite concealed, with the grain effectually covering him. One may rightly conjecture the terrible hardships of this poor farmer, exposed as he was to the inclemency of a Canadian winter. Fires in a barn are, of course, out of the question, and therefore he had no comfort of a house and a fireside the whole winter long. Such ill-usage could possibly have only one ending, viz., death, which followed in the fall of 1838. Nor is this an isolated case, for there were many such, but purposely we follow its details in order to present a faithful picture of life in Canada during the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38.

One more instance we must narrate before the indictment of the Family Compact is complete. David Trull, a resident of New York State, and a relative of the author, happened to come to visit his relatives about Bowmanville and Newcastle in the fall of 1837. While here on this visit the uprising took place, for the fight at Montgomery’s was on the 3rd of December, 1837. His visit having come to an end, he started for home the same way he came. On to Toronto, then, went David Trull, to get on board a small steamer running from the Queen’s wharf to Niagara. As he stepped upon the gang-plank a uniformed sentry presented a bayonet and cried “Halt!” threatening to run him through. He turned back from the wharf, frightened and amazed, proceeding to his hotel, which he had only that morning left. Telling the hotel-keeper of{103} his trouble the worthy Boniface befriended him. He was warned that he must not on any account whatever, as he valued his life, let any one know that he hailed from the United States, for, said the hotel-keeper, “If you do they’ll put you in prison and hang you.” He was further advised to put on working clothes and act as hostler about the hotel, with a view of slipping away on the steamer later, when suspicion had been allayed. For many days he put in the time at watering and grooming horses for young would-be military satraps, who ordered him about, and whom in his own country he would have treated with contempt. But he got away on the steamer at last, and almost vowed when once on United States soil never again to set foot in Canada. Realizing, however, in after years that only a very small portion of the Canadian people were disposed to misuse a guest, as they had done in his case, he overlooked it, and came back on visits in after years. To his dying day, however, he never forgot the arbitrary treatment of the Family Compact, and his hate for them went with him to his grave.

Daniel Conant, the author’s father, was a very large vessel owner at the time of the Canadian Revolution. At the earnest requests, entreaties and tears of some seventy patriots, whose lives and liberties were unsafe in Canada, he took them in midwinter across Lake Ontario in his ship Industry to Oswego, N.Y. During the inclement weather of that voyage his ship was lost, while all got over safely (vide “Upper Canada Sketches,” by the author).{104} But Daniel Conant and his officers and sailors dared not come back home, even without their ship. To be caught meant transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), or death by hanging at home, according to the mood of the authorities. To gain home and friends once more they walked back to Niagara in the spring of 1838, and crossed the Niagara River at its mouth, landing boldly at the wharf in the village of Niagara, where was a garrison and guards always on the watch. To get past the guard was the point at issue. John Pickel, who had been mate on the lost ship, has the credit of getting them out of the difficulty. Making for the canteen he hilariously began treating every one who came in sight. Being plentifully supplied with cash by the author’s father, he persistently kept at the treating, giving many most loyal toasts, “and was glad to get back again on Canadian soil.” These words to-day, after an intervening sixty-three years, seem, no doubt, tame and hardly worth preserving. Let us, however, remember the time and the terrible risk then run. As the shades of evening came on they quietly, one at a time, dropped out of the canteen, the garrison, the village, the clearing, and into the darkness of the forest. Hamilton was reached in due time, but a detour around to the north of Toronto was made, and justly proud of having saved the lives and fortunes of seventy patriots, whose only crime was that of loving their country, and wishing for reform and good government, they got home at last. It would scarcely be within the scope of this volume to follow

DANIEL CONANT.

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in detail the events of the Canadian Revolution. To do so would make too bulky a volume. We may, however, notice the case of one who was transported, along with several others, to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).

Linus Wilson Miller had come over from New York State, having relatives in Canada, and through sympathy had endeavored to help the patriots. He was apprehended, and in order to get a true inside view of the workings of the Family Compact we will give the court scene when he was brought up for trial at Niagara, July, 1838.

Having been brought under guard to the court room he was asked:

There is no reason to infer that this is misquoted in a single letter. In fact current testimony will bear out all that Miller says, and the reading of this court scene will give us a very true insight into life in Canada in 1838, and will be quite new to the present generation of Canadians. The author gets this court scene from “Notes of an Exile, on Canada, England and Van Diemen’s Land,” by Linus Wilson Miller, and it is probable that the copy of Miller’s book that I possess is the only one in Canada to-day.

Miller was in due course sentenced to be hanged, but this sentence was commuted to transportation. We find him and twelve others, all Canadians, chained and sent by steamer Cobourg to Kingston. From Kingston the party were sent by another steamer to Montreal. After being changed again they reached Quebec. Here the thirteen Canadian prisoners were put on board a timber ship and sent to England. From the fact that so very few Canadians know that Canadians were transported to the other side of the world, the author makes special mention of this matter. To-day we would not think of doing such things, and very many Canadians will be inclined to question the truthfulness of the statement. But, in all, ninety-one Canadian state prisoners were sent to that distant penal colony. A few lines{110} of verse may be inserted as very apt and striking. They are by T. R. Harvey:

So far as can be known only thirteen of the ninety-six ever got back home to Canada, after years of waiting, hoping and praying. All the others found untimely graves in that far-off land, where they died broken-hearted and alone.

Linus Wilson Miller did not get home until August, 1846, he being one of the very first to reach America. A sailing ship brought him to Pernambuco. At that port the captain of the American barque Globe accepted a bill drawn by him on his father for his passage, he being totally without money. Englishmen and Americans resident at Pernambuco however, on learning the facts, and being acquainted with the desperate treatment of Miller, raised the funds to take up the bill and send him on home. To-day we consider the execution of Lount and Matthews simply judicial murder, and Sir George Arthur went to his reward in after years with a heavy load on his conscience. It is hardly in the bounds of possibility for him ever to forget the time when Mrs. Lount knelt before him and prayed for the life of her husband, and he refused to as much as listen to her.

Van Schultz too, poor fellow, a Pole, who escaped oppression in his own country, came to the United States; then, fancying us oppressed, he voluntarily tried to help us, and, as we all know, was captured at the disturbance at Windmill Point, Prescott. Generous and impulsive, but misguided, his execution was another judicial murder exulted in by the Family Compact. Linus Wilson Miller’s crimes to-day would perhaps be met by a half year’s sentence of incarcer{112}ation. But he was broken down in health by the hard usage and hard work he had to endure in Tasmania, as well as were all the other state prisoners. Being a state prisoner he would not now be compelled to labor, if treated as political prisoners are treated the world over. He and all the others were worked to the bone, flogged, and most of them sent to early graves in that far-off land.

Thank God, we have changed all that.

Lord Durham came out as Governor-General right after the trouble. Responsible constitutional government was granted, and all the reforms the people asked for. Not in the most remote degree was the Home Government responsible for our misusage, nor for the uprising, for it knew nothing of it. In illustration of this, the following example is pertinent: When Sir Francis Bond Head, who was the supreme Governor General during the uprising, was on his way home he stopped at New York. There he met Marshal S. Bidwell, then an exile, and a man universally acknowledged as at the head of the bar in Canada. Sir Francis deliberately told Bidwell he had received instructions from the Home Government to appoint him judge. Bidwell turned and fled, and never bade adieu to him. On gaining the street he first thought of returning and apologizing for his rudeness, but the injury was too great, and he never saw Head again? Can we wonder at the Canadian uprising when such things could be?

At the top of a parchment Crown deed to one of the Conants the name of Sir Francis Bond Head appears, and never can the author look upon that{113} parchment without unpleasant thoughts of the man’s poltroonery and narrowness.

It is not out of place to record here the fact that Benedict Arnold, the traitor, received a grant of 18,000 acres of our lands in Upper Canada not far from the author’s home. No Canadian ever liked a traitor, nor do we like the memory of Arnold, hence special mention is made of the grant. The British Government gave him £10,000 besides. There is a little verse which covers all the points nicely, thus:

DESK USED IN THE LEGISLATIVE CHAMBER BY W. LYON MACKENZIE. UPPER CANADA, 1837.

(From the J. Ross Robertson collection.)

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CHAPTER VIII.

Daniel Conant, as a vessel owner on Lake Ontario for many years, felt keenly the great need for proper harbors and docks for loading and unloading his vessels. Up to the close of the Revolution of 1837-38 he had, when near home, made use of Whitby harbor, which was four miles westerly from Port Oshawa. But the great drawback to Whitby harbor was its shallow water, which caused much trouble in getting away from its single warehouse when his ships were fully laden. At this juncture of the long-felt want (about 1839) one Smith came along and contracted to build new docks at Whitby harbor, and to place them beside deep water. Daniel Conant became Smith’s security on his bonds for £1,100, or $4,400, for due fulfilment of the contract. It may be incidentally mentioned that the author most distinctly remembers that his people spoke of Smith as most eloquent in prayer, especially when in {115}the family circle. This gift, added to the want of the docks, captivated David Annis, the author’s great-uncle, and his father as well. The bonds for £1,100 were endorsed, and were held by the Bank of Upper Canada in Whitby, of which Peter Perry was the agent and manager. For no assignable reason Smith absconded in May, 1838. The loss was so great in that day, at the close of hostilities, that money could scarcely be obtained at all. To raise £1,100 at once almost broke Daniel Conant’s heart.

To Peter Perry he went, and Perry saluted him by the query, “Do you intend to pay it?”

The reply came quickly: “Yes, every copper. Give me until fall—1st November—and you shall have it all.”

Perry almost doubted it, and asked how he would get the money.

“I have four ships on the water and 150 acres of winter wheat, and I will sell enough land to raise the balance,” was the answer.

Perry, to his honor be it said, granted the extension, and Daniel Conant sold 1,200 acres of land in Whitby at an average of $200 per 100 acres, which are to-day worth $9,000 per hundred, to help to make up the amount. True, it was not business to pay so quickly and sacrifice so much, but, as he explained, he felt that he must get out from the transaction, and he did. The author knew very well John Ham Perry, at Whitby, one-time registrar and son of Peter Perry, and now realizes that he was for many years in most straitened circumstances, and most deeply to-day regrets that he{116} never aided him for having helped his father, a mistake which can never be repaired, much to the author’s regret.

Lying upon the Great Lakes and the mighty St. Lawrence, Canada was specially favored. The water afforded a means of communication for persons and goods before roads were hewn out of the forests. It must be very evident to any one reflecting, that boats were much more important factors in transportation before the days of the railways than they are now since railways intersect our country in every direction. To Upper Canada very many of the emigrants came from the British Isles by steamboats upon Lake Ontario. To such a degree of importance did captains of the steamboats attain, that we have no marine captains of these days, even those of the great ocean greyhounds, who can compare with them in dignity. Among these captains was old Captain Kerr, who for so many years sailed the side-wheel steamer Admiral. Now the Admiral had, as all those of that day had, before the sixties came in, a huge walking-beam, and with its 800 tons of burden of freight which it was licensed to carry, seemed literally to walk over the waters of Lake Ontario. Especially true the walking-beam comparison is, because the great part of the engine rose and fell, see-saw-like without ceasing, away aloft above the decks and over every top hamper of the steamer.

Now, just suppose the old Admiral has made the dock at some Lake Ontario port. Old Captain Kerr stands upon the upper deck and directs her speed{117} and course as she makes the wharf. Landing at last and the gang-plank thrown out, people are coming on and off, and freight of barrels and boxes is being trundled both to and from the steamer’s deck. Eagle-eyed, red-faced, corpulent Captain Kerr views all and notes all from his coign of vantage, the deck above. And he bellows out his commands to the boat hands below in words so sharp that they fairly hiss as they leave his lips. No matter if they be keen and cutting, they are implicitly obeyed, and the deck hands jump—literally and truly jump (not a figure of speech)—to obey. Meek passengers of those days did not even expect a greeting, pleasant or the reverse, from old Captain Kerr and commanders of his stamp, for they were not noticed in the slightest degree. Early steamboat captains were too great personages to cultivate the social virtues, and they seemed to live within themselves and keep bottled up all the accumulated venom and ire and push of the Canadian summer and shipping season. Faithful old seadogs they were, nevertheless, and the fewness of records of disaster upon the Great Lakes of Canada truthfully testifies to their skill and watchfulness. It is a fact that very few steamers were wrecked or lives lost upon these lakes. Some were burned, because, built of timber as they were, and burning wood for fuel, they were particularly susceptible to fires on ship-board; but of real wrecks there were few. Built of timber and with oak planking upon the sides and bottom, very generally of three inches in thickness, these vessels were able to withstand a slight collision, or a{118} run upon the bottom, without serious injury. Such collisions or groundings to our modern thin steel and iron steamers would to-day simply mean a berth at the bottom of Lake Ontario, without further notice. Rough and burly as Captain Kerr and men of his stamp were, they did great good to our country in bringing safely and quickly, and with very good accommodation, incoming emigrants to Upper Canada; and their churlishness and rigidness we may in a measure excuse.

Previous to the great war in the United States, from April, 1861, to April, 1865, the steamer Maple Leaf ran for many summers upon Lake Ontario. During its many trips it brought thousands and thousands of persons to the different parts of Upper Canada, and served us well and faithfully. Captain Schofield for many years ran the steamer, and emulated Captain Kerr in importance and churlishness. He was unable, however, to emulate him in corpulency. The deep redness of his face may not have quite equalled that of Captain Kerr, but approached very nearly. Captain Schofield many hundreds of times stood upon the upper deck of the Maple Leaf, with his hands upon the brass bell pulls for the engine, and roared out his orders so that passengers and deck hands alike wriggled to get out from under his words by getting out of his range of vision. For checking goods, however, coming upon or going from the steamer, no faster or more correct man ever lived. And Captain Schofield was a sailor in the true sense of the term. No mishap ever befell his steamer. During the great{119} American war she was sold to the United States Government for a blockader for $45,000, and finally never again made any port, but “laid her bones to bleach” on Currituck Sound, in North Carolina. Captain Schofield then went to Rochester, N.Y., and met a violent death when stepping on or off a railway car. To-day he sleeps in the soil of New York State. It is related of him that once he ran into Oswego, N.Y., on a Saturday night to lie there until the Monday morning following. On Sunday his sailors sought recreation on shore; one of them got into some low dive in that city, and on the Monday morning was kicked out minus all clothing. Now, he dared not disobey Captain Schofield and fail to be on duty on Monday morning, but the difficulty was to get to the steamer entirely nude as he then was. Casting about he finally compromised matters by jumping into a barrel, knocking out the bottom and carrying it by his arms so that it enveloped his person, rather loosely, it is true, but very effectually notwithstanding. That sailor came on board, however, and did his duty manfully.

Canadians to-day, who are so very generally dependent upon railways, fail to realize what a great service those important and vituperative steamboat captains and their steamers did for us as a people. They honestly deserve pleasant memories at our hands. Any instance of a captain upon Lake Ontario abusing or insulting any female passenger on his ship is yet to be chronicled. Although only two steamers are singled out and mentioned, the list{120} could be well extended to the Passport, Highland Chief, America, and Princess Royal.

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean in those days (previous to the sixties) was a terrible trial for the poor emigrant seeking his fortune in this new Canada of ours. Being confined to such close quarters, and crowded for so many days, it is not at all singular that many diseases followed the emigrants even after leaving the ocean a long way behind. Deadly typhus fever luxuriated amid such surroundings, while cholera was no stranger to the poor voyagers. One midsummer day Captain Kerr came into Port Oshawa, about 1855, at 9 o’clock in the morning, with a boatload of Highland Scotchmen as passengers. At this port 150 of them landed, and their goods and baggage were placed in the general storehouse upon the wharf. In the presence of Mr. Wood, the port wharfinger, and Mr. Mothersill, a gentleman who was looking on, many of these packages, for the first time since leaving the ocean ship, were opened out in the storehouse. In a very few hours from the time when they saw these goods unpacked, strange to relate, both these gentlemen died, while the landed emigrants started to walk northward from Port Oshawa to get to the homes of their relatives in Mariposa in the county of Victoria. To rest over night they entered a large cooper shop then standing on the south side of Oshawa, and remained for the night. Next morning early they left, and the cooper on coming into the shop was horrified to find a dead man lying upon his shavings. During the night the poor fellow, after{121} braving an Atlantic passage of those days, and now near his goal, died and was deserted by his friends. It is only fair to add, however, that his friends were afraid of the contagion. It is said that the peculiar stuffy smell from these emigrants did not leave the storehouse or the cooper shop that whole summer, and only ceased when frosts came in the autumn. Of such sterling stock our Canadian people came. Perhaps no sadder instance can be given than the poor Scotchman lying, without nursing or medical attendance on a heap of cooper’s shavings, among strangers in a strange land, where every one was afraid of him, and shunned him to avoid the fever that raged in his veins.{122}

CHAPTER IX.

One of the familiar proceedings of the days of early spring in the long ago time, when the pioneers were busy with clearing the primeval forests of Ontario, was the maple sugar making. In our oldest settled parts of Ontario this is, of course, among the things that have been, simply because most of the maples have been ruthlessly slaughtered. On our good lands in Ontario the cleared fields pay better than maple orchards, our farmers have thought, and, much as we now regret the fact, still it is a fact that over most of our province the groves have been destroyed. Most of our youngsters have never experienced the delights of a sugaring-off, and many of our Old World citizens never yet tasted the nectar in its forest purity. Hence I infer that this chapter may give information and pleasure to many readers.

The Jesuit Fathers, who were the first white men in this country among the Indians, tell us that the Indians made sugar regularly every spring by tapping the sugar maple. At this time the Indians did not have iron kettles for boiling the maple sap in. It became a curious question how they did manage to boil{123} down the succulent juice without a kettle to boil it in. They tapped the trees with their tomahawks, and inserted a spile in the incision to conduct the sap from the tree to their vessel beneath. Their spile was a piece of dry pine or cedar wood, grooved on its upper side for the sap to flow down. No doubt this process was extremely crude; still, with all its crudities, they succeeded in producing a considerable quantity of sugar each spring. Their buckets were made by taking a roll of birch bark and sewing up the ends with deer sinews or roots. Thus they got a vessel capable of holding a pailful, and no doubt the sap caught in such vessels was just as sweet as that which we now gather in our bright tin pails, at far greater expense and trouble. Gathering the sap from the birchen buckets, it was carried by the original red man to the boiling place.

At this boiling place was a large caldron made of large sheets of birch bark. Beside the caldron a fire was built, and in this fire was placed a lot of stones. As soon as the stones became heated to a red heat, they were dropped into the birchen caldron, previously filled with sap. By taking out the cooled stones and putting in more hot ones, and repeating the process, even slow as it was, they got the sap to boiling. Once got to boiling, by heating the extracted stones they kept up the boiling, and so continued the process until, after a time, they got the sap boiled down, and sugar was the result.

That was making sugar without the aid of a kettle, and no doubt many will almost doubt the accuracy of{124} the statement. It is a positive fact, however, for my forefathers, who came to this province in the last century, have handed down in family tradition the story of the process just as I have narrated it. Indeed they were eye-witnesses of the process themselves. With the advent of settlers, of course, the Indian soon learned better, and traded his furs with the fur dealer for iron kettles, and then began making sugar much as the white man does to-day.

As to the cleanliness of the Indian method, it is hardly necessary to speak. One can just fancy as to what amount of cinders would be conveyed by the stones drawn from the fire repeatedly and placed into the boiling syrup. Yet with cinders and all a sweetness was found at the bottom, and no doubt the Indian enjoyed his sugar, with all its cinders and ashes, quite as much as we do to-day with all our methods of cleanliness. It used to be an old saying that every one must eat his peck of dirt before he died. Granting the truth of the old saying, then, our Indian brother certainly got his peck of that commodity before half his ordinary life would be spent; and yet the Indian, with all his crudeness, taught the first white settlers to love the toothsome sweet, and to him we owe our knowledge of maple sugar.

The sugar maple is the emblematic maple of our country, whose leaves we couple with the beaver to form our national escutcheon. Its timber is the most valuable for firewood of any in our country, and equally as valuable for many purposes when made into lumber. Waggon axles have been formerly made{125} from its wood. It is the cleanest, prettiest tree among our forests, and the most sought for as a shade-tree, but, being a slow grower, is many times crowded out by trees of swifter growth. It is the tree of Canada in a word, and added to its qualities, as before spoken of, it produces a succulent sap, whose flavor is peculiar to the maple and to the maple alone. Scientists, who imitate nature with their compounds, have utterly failed in producing, by all their mixtures and compounds, a flavor of the genuine maple. Honey can be counterfeited, but maple sugar never. Just what the peculiar charm is about the sweet produced by this incomparable tree one cannot describe in words. It has only to be indulged in to be appreciated. Among all the sweets its sweet is the most delicate and pleasing, and we doubt if ambrosial nectar, supposed to be prepared by the ancients for the immortal gods, began to equal it. So the gods of the ancients would have had a better time of it had they been among the North American settlers, than around and about the Ægean.

Only in North America is the sugar maple found. To cause the sap to flow freely it is necessary to have nights of frost, followed by days of sunshine. March is generally the month giving these conditions, and at that time in the remaining maple orchards in Canada our citizens will be found boiling down this incomparable sweet. Great as has been the decimation of our sugar orchards, yet there are many still found in our province, and the writer advises all those who have not yet tasted the nectar to make an effort to get to a genuine “sugaring-off” and indulge for the nonce{126} in this experience, the memory of which a lifetime cannot obliterate. I will describe a sugaring-off as well as I can, that others not conversant with it may in a measure realize its charms. The trees are now tapped by boring a shallow auger hole just through the bark of the maple. Below the auger hole a tin spile or spout is inserted by driving the sharp end of the rounded tin into the bark. Below the spile is placed a bucket made of cedar, by those possessing such buckets. There are cedar buckets now in use, made sixty years ago, among some of the older settlers, and owing to the peculiar lasting qualities of cedar, are as sound to-day as when first made. Others, as before spoken of, use tin pails or pans, but old sugar-makers aver that the sugar tastes best when caught in the cedar buckets. A shallow sheet-iron pan set over a stove range receives the sap, and in this the boiling is done. The fire, by passing along the arch, thus heats the extended surface of the pan, and the sap is thus boiled or evaporated far faster than it is in the ordinary process by boiling in a kettle. After the sap has been evaporated down to the consistency of syrup it is then taken out of the evaporating pan and placed in the sugaring-off kettle. Up to this time in the process the expectant and waiting sugar eaters have not indulged in the boiling nectar. Reducing the syrup by boiling it down in the kettle is the interesting process. Soon the surface of the sugar presents a yeasty appearance, and it begins to rise and fall in globules. Now is the time for careful watching to see that the mass does not burn; and for fear that it may run over, a piece of fat{127} pork has been thrown into the boiling mass. This has the effect of keeping the boiling syrup within the bounds of the kettle sides, and when this piece of pork is extracted it is about the sweetest piece one ever tasted.

Wooden spoons, if no better ones are on hand, will have been whittled out by some handy whittler. The liquid is taken out into small vessels for individual use, and gradually stirred and cooled. And you taste. It is positively irresistible. And you taste again, and another taste is in order; charming is perhaps the only word which expresses the pleasure of partaking of this more than toothsome tit-bit. Positively there is nothing else in nature to compare with it, and just what the charm is no one can exactly say, only it is the peculiar maple flavor which maple alone, of all things in the world, gives, which causes one to keep on tasting, even to running a serious risk of tasting and partaking too frequently for the dimensions of an ordinary stomach.

When it will “blow” is the next interesting point in the process. The sugar maker inserts a piece of a small bent twig into the mass, and blows upon the syrup adhering to the twig. If it comes off in flakes or bubbles, then it’s done, and the kettle is swung off from the fire that it may not be burnt.

And now for the wax, which to many is the most toothsome part of the whole. Many prefer the wax to the warm sugar. Then dip out some of the hot sugar, still bubbling in the kettle, and pour it quickly upon the nearest snow. In a moment it cools, as it melts a shallow furrow in the snow. Now comes a{128} sticky wax, which will effectually seal together the upper and lower jaws of the participant if he chews lustily. But it’s so sweet, so pure and pleasant, and it’s all so jolly, that such experiences are always red-letter days in one’s life calendar. Pour more syrup on the snow and more wax is the result, and the knowing ones break off the wax in small fragments and allow it to gradually dissolve upon the tongue. And the joke goes around about the green hand and the greedy one, who has his jaws transfixed with the wax, and is unable to speak for a few moments until the wax has partially dissolved.

If the warm sugar was good, yea, incomparably good, this wax is glorious. And you eat, and chat, and eat again, and there’s no rancidness about this maple product to cause your throat to become raw, as it were, as all other sweets do. And so you eat on with impunity, each one’s own individual stomach’s capacity being alone the measure as the amount of nectar one should consume. And this is a sugaring-off. Reader, if you have not already tried it, don’t fail to make an effort to get to a sugaring-off, and my word for it you will never regret it.

We all deplore the loss of our previously magnificent maple orchards. But let us guardedly preserve those now remaining to us. Without speaking of the beauty they give to our country, they give us yearly at this season of the year a pleasure which money cannot in any other way purchase. Indeed, the wealth of our millionaires cannot purchase the pleasures of a sugaring-off otherwise than by going to the maple orchard itself.{129}

CHAPTER X.

Our fathers spent their winter evenings and days of winter storms in working at the flax. It was the universal custom for each householder in our fathers’ time to raise a piece of flax, and, during the enforced housing of the winter, it was broken, scutched and spun around the big cavernous open fire. The distaff in those days was ever upon the floor in the common dwelling room, and as much an article of furniture as the family table. Quite a few of these old distaffs are yet bundled away in garrets, dust and cobweb laden. My own people did not fail to bring the distaff along with them when they came from Massachusetts in 1792, and this one was in constant use until machinery got to be common and the necessity for home manipulation to supply the family clothing no longer existed. To-day all that is changed, and during these midwinter days our people of this part of Ontario have no such occupation to fill in their leisure hours.

The days of wood-getting, logging and timber-making, too, are past; and at this day this people{130} have to develop a new order of civilization to meet the new condition of affairs. Our people read far more than formerly, and very many of their hours of winter leisure are spent over the printed page. In nearly every house one enters, too, in this part of our province to-day, one finds quite a number of volumes of books, as well as the general stock of newspapers. So the taste and knowledge of our people is steadily on the gain; and we are, as a people, taking the benefit of the respite from enforced hours of weary labor at the flax from which machinery has relieved us. Very serious accidents used to occur, too, in those days of hand labor at the flax, even simple as the work may seem. Very frequently the flax would be hung in bunches around the living room of the family, in which the great fireplace was. This flax, having been broken and scutched with the swingle, and ready for spinning, was perforce quite as ready to light as tinder. There were numerous instances of most dreadful fires occurring by this suspended flax igniting from some sparks dropping on it from the open fire. In one instance, not far from where my own house now is, a woman stepped to the road, only five or six rods away, leaving two small children in the room, and before she could get back to them the whole room was ablaze, and they perished, with the total destruction of the house.

Social gatherings largely make up to-day for the hours spent formerly in work at home. Among themselves the people of Ontario are eminently a social and hospitable lot. Almost nightly our folks{131} gather among their fellows and spend their evenings in harmless chat.

But the great pivot upon which our social system revolves in Ontario is the church. At the church our amusements mostly cluster, too; for our ministers are shrewd enough to keep some meetings to come off in the future, which the people look forward to and talk about among themselves. Maybe it’s a lecture, or a musical treat, or some dissolving views, or what not; and these, added to the usual sermons from the pulpit, keep the people continually centred, as it were, about the church. Again, our churches are invariably well lighted and seated, and the air is pure; and, on the whole, they are attractive and pleasant. Hence our young folks even, as well as older ones, choose to be about our churches instead of finding amusement elsewhere. I am not speaking of the devotional part of the matter; our people continue to attend the churches, for that follows as a matter of course. Again, our ministers are shrewd enough to know that they could not hold the people at the churches two or three nights per week as well as Sundays for the devotional part alone; for, without detracting one jot from the purely religious aspect of the matter, our ministers know quite well that the devotional part alone would not hold our people without diversions. Indeed, our ministers are to be most highly commended for so cleverly managing our people as to keep them so at the church’s dangling apron-strings, as it were, to use a homely simile. Many, many times better at the church’s dangling apron-strings{132} than spending the evening at the bars, in throwing dice, or at any such questionable gatherings. And I take it, too, as self-evident, that our people’s faithful following of the church has a quality of the intellect as well as of the heart. A remark of Castellar’s, the great Spanish statesman and orator, illustrates the difference of standpoint that prevails in various countries as to religious observances. He said, “The Protestant religion would freeze me with its iciness.” Compared with the sensuous and fascinating cathedral worship of Europe, our ceremonials, whether Protestant or Catholic, are indeed plain and unadorned. But they attract as intelligent, self-respecting, law-abiding and decent a lot of people as can be found anywhere.

Most marriages are celebrated during our winter months. It is quite manifest that social gatherings and meetings, brought about by the enforced hours of idleness, are very conducive to match-making; and this, perhaps, accounts for the matrimonial activity of the winter season. Not infrequently the expectant bride and groom, having procured a license of marriage, call upon the minister at his house for him to tie the knot. Ludicrous stories are told of the bashfulness of many persons who come on such errands. Some of our clergy yet require the responsive service, and the groom, when asked the question so necessary, “Wilt thou have this woman to be thy lawful wedded wife?” sometimes replies, “I came on purpose.” Well, that’s a good answer, and shows his honesty of purpose, even if it be a little comic. The fellow’s not to be laughed at, however, even if he does make this{133} response, or even if he does pull off his gloves, in order to save them, the moment the ceremony is over and they are pronounced man and wife.

During these midwinter days in central Ontario, our school-boys are trudging through snows and amidst frosts to the Common School. Many an urchin these days declaims on the usual Friday afternoon:

Or those who are more advanced, the more ambitious, essay:

Glorious Common Schools! and our own quite up to any in the world. And, without a shadow of a doubt, too, these urchins who are to-day, during this midwinter, so declaiming, will become our future orators, and their voices will resound in great halls of legislation or fill pulpits in our land. Let us hope that when they grow to manhood they may never become food for powder, and, so far as their military education is concerned, let it be conspicuous by its absence; and yet no loss will be felt, for it will not be among the things needed. Happy Ontario! If we were Germans or Frenchmen, we must serve three{134} years in the army whether we would or not. This is only one more instance named to prove to us all that our own country is the happiest and the freest in the world, and that our people are generally well-to-do and comfortable in their homes, in food and clothing.

The mornings of late autumn, as the nights get longer, begin to have a nipping air. Ponds of water are covered with a glare and safe coat of ice, and our youngsters get out their skates, so carefully laid away last season. The children trudge away to school, and their color is heightened by the morning frost and wind; but gradually the human system is getting accustomed to the change of the season, and the dry, pleasant cold is enjoyable. Immense ice hummocks form upon the banks of our large lakes. They are conical and steep, or blunt and rolling, with a flat place here and there among the convolutions. Daily, as the cold strengthens and the winds dash the billows upon the ice-banks as if they would destroy them, they gather from each wave a little more frozen from it, and so work out from the shore, solid and immovable, as if to entirely close over our inland sea’s surface; but they do not, and they never succeed in effecting any permanent lodgment more than eight or ten rods from the shore. Somehow in freezing they invariably leave holes here and there. Now, let a storm come on and the breakers be driven against the ice-banks and under them—for they do not reach the bottom in any deep water—the pent-up water under the banks, driven up with terrific force by each incoming sea, tries to find an escape. These holes, in a measure, serve for an escape. Sprays or jets of{135} water will be forced up through these holes twenty feet into the air, only to fall upon the surrounding ice and be frozen as hard as its neighboring globules in their icy immobility. The blow-holes of a whale furnish a good analogy to the blow-holes in the ice. Indeed, the most powerful whale can scarcely expel the water from his blow-holes higher than a storm forces it up among the ice-dunes. And as they get too high or too heavy near the outer edge, they break away in great lumps and go floating upon the surface. A change in the direction of the wind sails them away, and we see upon our inland seas ice islands sometimes many miles in extent. Look again for the ice islands in a few hours, and not a trace is seen. The waters are a deep blue, in strong contrast to the white snow upon the shore or the ice upon the edge. Stand upon an eminence and look along the shores and outer edge of the ice-bank, so firmly rooted to the margin. It is jagged and furrowed, and honeycombed, and awful, and withal so still. Not a bird is wheeling over the surface of the water, not a sail is upon it. The voice of Nature is effectually hushed to rest. While you are still observing, let the sun shine upon the ice and water, and you can with difficulty take your eyes off the picture—as fine a picture of the Arctic as we can get, even if it be in miniature. What a contrast from our golden autumn! Those of us who are not particularly subject to lung troubles and who are well fed and clad, really enjoy our dry and beautiful cold and the glint of the Arctic regions which these pictures afford us. Clearly defined and unmistakable is this our winter.{136}

CHAPTER XI.

The reign of winter on the lake shore, with its hummocks of broken ice, seems longer than it really is. Those who observe it day by day are glad when March comes, with its lengthening days and its presage of spring. Soon we have a few days’ sunshine, and perhaps a warm pervasive rain. The change thus made is scarcely credible to those who have not seen it. In a few hours, with the sea beating upon this ice, before so unassailable, the banks shrivel the ice away. Here and there along the shores and among the sands obstinate pieces of ice still linger for a few days, half covered by the sands, which have thus far protected them. But spring, joyous spring, is near. The ubiquitous crow’s caw is once more in the air. Troops of wild ducks convene in the open spaces of our marshes and ponds. Sportsmen, before the light of day, creep up to the open water, and the first morning rays are greeted with a steady bang, bang. The sportsman has his reward. Should the lake surface be rough, so that the ducks cannot rest there, they are forced to fly back and forth, and the shooting goes on all through the day.{137}

The fishing time arrives almost before we have expected it. You are made aware of it, perhaps, by a neighbor coming to borrow a spear. Now, nightly, pitch-pine torches will flare and blaze, casting a lurid light along our creeks. Stand at a distance and watch the fishers. See how their forms are increased in size until they look like veritable giants in the haze of the blazing light-jack. Hear their shouts as they race up and down the stream for suckers, pike, mullet and eels. “Here he goes”; “there’s another”; “plague on your jack—you missed that big fellow”; “hand me that spear, you are no good as a sportsman.” So the fun and jollity goes on far into the evening.

In this land, where the four seasons are clearly and distinctly defined, spring comes to us with a beauty unknown to those who dwell in lands which do not possess such unmistakable divisions of the year. If the winter was snowy, frosty and stormy, it had in its place sufficient enjoyments to make us love it; but now that it has passed, budding spring, with its ever-present deep green, comes to us with a bound, with a new pleasure of anticipation, added to its reality after it is once here.

How quickly our spring comes to us may, perhaps, be best shown by instancing that the last flurry of snow of one season was on the 7th day of April, and on the 20th of April the cattle were out feeding on the grass. A more abrupt change in any given locality is not to be found in any land, and stock generally is soon feeding upon the fields. Fruit{138} trees were in blow three weeks before. Some of the most beautiful sights in nature are now afforded in our land by our fruit trees, laden with their pink and white blossoms, among which darts the industrious honey bee, and beside which are the deep green fields of grass or grain. Among our pastures, at the same time, nature is most prodigal of her beauties. The dandelions dot our fields with their yellow heads. These are the dandelions we used in our childhood days to pluck and hold under the chins of our companions. If the reflected light from the flower on the chin was yellow, partaking of the flower, our companion “liked butter,” but if not yellow our companion “did not love butter.”

Tiny blue violets are also among our fields, and many delicate blue garlands are woven by young hands, hung about our dwellings, and many times find their way into our schools and upon the teachers’ rostrums. The famed primrose of old England is no prettier than our wee violets, and for variety of color and deepness of the same we can safely invite comparison with any land under the sun.

Our clover meadows already wave with the breezes. Walk among the clover and see the ground-hog as he sits upon his haunches beside his hole of retreat, and see how he eyes your every movement. If you do not get too close, nor come upon him too suddenly, he quietly allows you to enjoy a good look at him. Make the first demonstrative motion and he disappears in an instant under the surface. This ground-hog is about the only universal rodent we have with{139} us, and his ravages are so light that as a rule we do not seek his extermination. On the typical occasion referred to, seeding began about the middle of April, and was vigorously prosecuted, until by the end of May it was almost all accomplished. Grains first sown at this time almost completely covered the ground. This was about two weeks earlier than usual. It has generally been a rule among farmers to have their seeding all done by the 24th May, so as to have the leisure to celebrate that day at some neighboring town.

The old-fashioned way of seeding by hand, broadcast, is among the things that were. After that came the broadcast seeding machine. Now seeding machines are drills that put the seed down into the ground at any required depth and effectually cover it. Seed drills are also used as cultivators, and most excellent ones they make, too, so that our lands are now much better prepared for seed than formerly. The farmer who does not possess a seed drill is now considered only half equipped and not up to the mark. This change in the method of farming has given rise to enormous manufacturing businesses, for to supply three-fourths of the farmers of Canada alone with seed drills, any one at a moment’s reflection can see, must make a great business for manufacturers. And when our grass and grain come to maturity, light mowers will cut the first, and the ingenious complex binder will cut and bind the grain and leave it all ready for drawing in. In no country under the sun has agriculture made as great progress as in{140} Canada during the last two decades. Labor-saving machines are as near perfection among us and as plentiful, and far more so than among any people of anything like the same population. Whenever any of our people get an idea that we are slow, just let such semi-discontented persons travel about the land of our forefathers in Britain or on the continent and he will return home fully convinced that they have not yet fully awakened up.

Foul weeds are annually becoming more prevalent among us. We are, in fact, annually seeing weeds in our fields which we never saw before, and whose name even we do not know. So from this fact alone, the old process of farming would not do now at all, neither would fourteen successive crops of wheat on one field, as has been done in Canada. The means of communication are now so quick that somehow these foul weeds of distant parts get generally disseminated over the land and are no longer locally confined to certain areas, supposed to be their individual homes, as they were formerly. Look along our railway tracks and you will frequently notice at the sides of the line weeds which you never saw before. It is only, then, a question of a season or two, when they will get into the neighboring field. There is, however, no need to be discouraged, for if we only look at the lands of the Old World which have been cultivated for a thousand years, we find all the foul weeds we know so far, and many dozens of kinds which we never saw before. Summer fallow and root crops, of course, is the first remedy. Our people are{141} yearly putting in a greater area of roots and feeding more cattle. Our prized privilege of sending our cattle to the British markets alive was formerly one of our greatest boons, and we must try by all means to keep all cattle diseases out of our land, so that Britain will regard us as the favored people. Australia is too far away for live stock shipments. As for the United States, the climatic conditions are such there that we can grow healthy cattle when theirs are affected and beat them; that is to say, we can send live cattle and make a good profit when they cannot, but must send dead meat.

Seeding down and grass feeding upon our fields is another good method to rid our lands of these foul weeds. When the foul plants are young, by eating the fields pretty close our flocks nip off the foul stalks, and keep them from seeding. But if the plant be an annual, during the latter part of the season such pastures can with profit be turned into a late summer fallow, and thus be cleared. Wire root is got rid of by turnips and thorough cultivation. But perhaps the easiest and laziest way to get rid of this pest, which gets down so deep in lighter soils, is to sow buckwheat on such fields thick and heavy. Many farmers assert that a stout crop of buckwheat will choke the wire root out, and leave not a root alive. Ordinarily our farmers sow buckwheat only for this purpose, and to plough down as a green crop for manure. Very few of our farmers, in fact, will grow buckwheat for a crop, and consider it beneath the dignity of the quality of their fat lands to raise buck{142}wheat as a crop. That man partakes of the nature of the soil, is, perhaps, to most persons at first thought an anomaly, but yet it is so. Where the soil grudgingly gives to the husbandman a very moderate living, his hospitality in a certain sense partakes of the nature of his lands. While he does his best for you as a guest, still the heartiness and bountifulness of his larder, for man and beast, is in a measure subdued, as it were, and somehow the guest feels that he ought not to deprive the careful husbandman of too much of his essentials of living. The husbandman is necessarily cramped and bound as his farm is. But go among those whose lands are fat and fill the great barns, and where it’s a task to take care of his bountiful crops, and we find another kind of a man entirely. There’s no stint. Your horse may consume bushels of oats per day if he will, and if ordinarily good milk is not of your liking, cream is just as free as the milk is. Open-handed, big-hearted; a man one involuntarily likes, as you grasp his broad, brown hand, and his fingers give a tight squeeze. And such are the great majority of Ontario’s husbandmen, a people of whom any nation may justly feel proud.

I am wandering from my springtime, and will get back by saying that bee culture among us is becoming fairly developed. Food for bees is in such abundance among our fields and fruits and woods, that in the future this industry must necessarily be much larger. Fourteen years ago I saw a field of about eight acres sown with sweet clover, to feed the farmer’s bees. It was the sweetest smelling field any one

CANADIAN APPLES AT THE GLASGOW EXHIBITION—“THE BEST IN THE EMPIRE.{143}”

ever passed by; a grove of orange trees was nothing in comparison to it. Since it was such a novelty I am mentioning it, for it is the first instance I ever knew of. The farmer, who had one hundred swarms of bees, explained that his bees had been feeding upon the basswood trees, but now that they had got too far developed he wanted this sweet clover for later feed. And this bee-keeper averred that it fully paid him for sowing the eight acres of sweet clover.

Fruit prospects were never more promising than they were last spring. Our trees were one literal mass of blows. If they had all borne fruit the consequence would have been most disastrous, for all the trees would have been broken down. Of course, most of them fell off. It is not frost we so much fear in Ontario for blight of our buds, for we seldom get a frost severe enough for that after the blows come. Blight usually comes from a dry east or south-east wind, blowing steadily for a couple of days. This fact is so well known that on many trees the south-east side will be perfectly void of fruit, while the north-west side, which was sheltered by the rest of the tree, will be in bearing. We shall be able to send to British markets hundreds of thousands of apples this fall, which over there they so highly prize. But let the fruit-grower ever remember that he can’t get the prized red cheeks on his fruit unless Old Sol shines upon it. In order that he may do so the trees must be pruned quite open to let him peep among the branches.

A goodly and beautiful land we possess. We can raise anything which will grow in this temperate zone.{144} Our lands are fat and not exhausted. Artificial manures we do not need, and they are scarcely known among us. In thickly populated Germany and Switzerland hillsides are spaded where too steep for the plough, and the husbandman succeeds in that method upon small holdings. The French peasant, to whom ten acres is a good-sized farm, does not plough his land, but turns it over, away down deep, fourteen inches or so, with a bent bill-hook, and he succeeds, and he and his family are independent and save money. We have room in Canada, not speaking of the North-West, for millions upon millions of persons, who will cultivate many patches of land now unused or in pasture. Health, independence and success await those who will get upon our lands and make an honest, downright manly effort.{145}

CHAPTER XII.

Driving through Ontario in June, the eye continually dwells upon a sea of green, with scarcely any interlude of rock, swamp or broken land. It is simply a succession of well-cultivated farms, mostly trim and nicely kept and well fenced. In many respects our province resembles old England, for, with all our vandalism, we have left a few groves of native forest trees, which here and there dot the landscape, and present to the view a beautiful, impenetrable, clearly-defined wall of green, raised, of course, above the level green of the crops below at the surface and extending up to their very bases. Our fences have, indeed, presented a decided improvement during the past few years. Very many of the boundary fences beside the highways are straight board fences, or straight rail and post fences. Hedges, of course, we cannot boast of. But our fences up to date present a clearly{146} defined boundary of farms, and form a bounded highway straight and clear, sixty-six feet wide.

In many of our still timbered portions of the province the old zig-zag rail fence is in use. But we have now in most places in the province passed by that day, and can no longer build such fences, for it is too great a waste of timber, though in some respects it’s the best and strongest fence we can possibly build, and will last the longest. But its days are numbered, and the fences of the future will be wire fences, which are now legal in our province. They have their advantages, principally in allowing the winds of winter to pass freely through and preventing drifts on the roads. By an Act of our Ontario Legislature, township councils can by law allow owners who will build wire fences before their farms to enclose six feet of the road allowance. Many persons are already taking advantage of that Act, but at all events the roads must be left fifty-four feet wide, taking off six feet from each side.

Road-work is in June quite general all over the province, and when driving along the highways one has to pass now and again over a few rods of awfully rough, unfinished patches of road. Sometimes the turnpiking is only half completed, or again the gravel has been left in great heaps, which give to your carriage the motion of a vessel at sea as it passes over the lumps. A few days, however, will remedy all that, as the road-work gets completed. Brawny, sunburnt farmers, wearing their straw hats, and with shirt sleeves rolled up, gather in groups under a{147} “pathmaster,” and perform the requisite number of days “working for the King,” as it is termed. No doubt our fellows are quite as honest as any one would be under like circumstances, but we have yet to learn that any one has ever injured himself by road-work while so “working for the King” on the roads.

Crops cover the ground completely, and thoroughly hide the soil beneath. Many of them are, indeed, so high that they wave with the breezes. The fields present one unbroken sea of level, green verdure, generally free from all obstructions. Here and there, indeed, may be seen a nicely formed pile of stone boulders, gradually picked up from the fields as the plough exposes them to the surface, and yearly growing a little larger by being added thereto by subsequent ploughings. The farmer can’t afford obstructions these days in his fields, for in a few weeks reapers will quickly cut these crops, or, in many instances, binders will both cut and bind them at one process, and the farmer wants nothing in the way to hinder these great labor-savers. In June haying has already commenced, more especially clover crops. Where a crop of clover seed is sought as a second crop in this season, the clover hay of the first crop has been cut and garnered for some days. Alsike clover is in full bloom, and I defy any reader to say that he ever passed any field, grove, or flowers, in any part of the globe, which sends out a more pleasing fragrance than this alsike clover does. To pass a field of alsike clover when it’s in full blow is beautiful to the eye while resting on the pinkish-white blows, and grateful{148} to the sense of smell for its delicate and pungent perfume. Ordinary sentences are tame, indeed, in trying to describe the beauties of the alsike clover field in full bloom in Ontario. It must be seen and smelled to be appreciated. Now, speaking of all this alsike clover, and red clover as well, naturally leads one to think, what can all this clover seed be used for? It is an accepted fact, now, that Ontario can compete with the world in the growing of clover seed. Germany has been our great competitor, but it is now conceded that we can beat Germany. Driving along through the province in June one passes in almost endless succession field after field of both red clover and alsike, and the question naturally comes up, What is to be done with all this seed? It would appear that Ontario can produce enough clover seed to sow all those parts of our planet adapted to the growing of clover. Recollect, all parts cannot grow clover. If you go west and pass central Iowa, you leave the clover belt entirely; and if you go south and cross the Ohio River, you will not find much more clover. It is true that in Kentucky they boast of blue grass, which is only our June grass allowed to grow up strong and vigorous. But our Ontario is a natural clover country. If we leave a field uncultivated, it somehow, naturally of itself, gets back in clover, no matter if none were sown on the field.

Ontario is a natural grazing country; it must be, when the clover is so indigenous to the soil. It is just as well for our farmers to thoroughly grasp this fact, for with our innumerable springs and rills and{149} abounding clover, we have one of the best cattle and horse-raising countries in the world. If the West, which cannot grow clover and such light-colored barley as the Americans want, is content to grow wheat, we had better by far let the West do it and confine ourselves to the specialties in which they cannot compete with us.

In barley and marrowfat peas we have a monopoly. On account of the money we get for the clover-seed itself we are again ahead of them, and are more than ahead of them in raising horses and cattle, which feed upon our clover. There is something in our climate, soil and feed which produces horses large and strong, which are ahead of the West by far. Hence the westerners continually buy from us to get our stock.

To prove that wheat does not pay, I will instance that the rent of land in Ontario County is usually $5.00 per acre. No matter if one owns his own farm, it is worth that as well. Seed, again, is worth $2.00 per acre for wheat, and the cultivation and harvesting is worth another $7.00 per acre, making the acre of wheat cost $14 per acre. Now, at an average yield of twenty-five bushels per acre, and this sold at 75 cents per bushel, it yields $18.75 per acre, or only $4.75 more than the crop cost. It’s no pay, and there’s no other way to look at it, and hereafter we ought to raise wheat enough only for our own use, as long as it’s such a drug on the market, especially so when we can do much better with peas, barley, cattle and horses. Let those interested ponder over this point.{150}

It might be thought that we shall raise too much clover-seed for the market. It is used as a dye in Great Britain for certain cloths, we are told, and all of our seed is not sown. Hence it is hardly probable we shall produce too much. In the matter of peas, we have never yet produced more marrowfat peas than Europe will take from us. Recollect, but few other countries can produce marrowfat peas. Some places have the bug and mildew, and can’t grow the peas at all, and we have this crop almost to ourselves. Barley, it seems, the Americans will buy from us as long as we grow it, for it’s the best. And in fruit we all know we can produce the best keepers in the world, so that our outlook in Ontario is bright for the future.

When July comes some portions of our province sometimes suffer slightly from drouth. Seldom, however, has the drouth been severe enough to cause anything like a failure in crops, although late sown crops here and there have been occasionally light. This, however, is not so general as to apply to the whole province, for in some sections you may see that our fields never smile more sweetly upon us than they do at this season. In July fall wheat is just turning and beginning to look like fields of gold. In spots in the fields the wheat has been winter-killed, and many pieces are ploughed up entirely. Looking over those fields which were ploughed up and sowed with some spring crop, they present a rather odd appearance, for the vitality of the fall wheat is so great that in many places the ploughing did not kill it,{151} and consequently we see tufts of great tall heads of fall wheat now ripening among the still green and much shorter crop of spring grain. Those who are not familiar with fall wheat could scarcely get an idea how it occurs that fall wheat can be ripening in and among a spring crop, quite green as yet.

Barley in July is in full head and just commencing to turn yellow. Fields upon fields of this grain are passed as one drives on our highways. Those who have not driven much upon our roads, and closely observed, can scarcely believe how general the barley crop is in Ontario at this season. Almost invariably it is looking well, and if it be not as a whole an extremely heavy crop, yet it will be a paying one, and one we must grow. Laying aside all matters of temperance and Scott Act, ours is a barley country, and barley we must grow. Peas are now mostly in full blow, and are rank and of the deepest green. A more luxuriant growth than our pea crop in most seasons cannot be found in any country. If you would judge of the unsurpassed fertility of our soils, just go and see our pea crops. Ontario alone can furnish the soup basis for all the navies of the world.

Our spring wheat is just now putting forth its ear. Oats are just beginning to head. The drouth seems to have affected oats more than any other crop so far. They may, however, if we get some rains, head up heavy, but in any event the straw will be rather short.

We live in a garden here in Ontario. No one who drives about our roads can come to any other con{152}clusion. There are no blanks, and but little broken land; but few swamps, and scarcely a break. Only a few days ago I drove twelve miles without passing a hill higher than forty feet, or seeing an acre of broken land; just one mass of green in the fields. There was positively not one foot of broken land for the whole twelve miles, and I feel that I have a right to say that we live in a garden. Those who are at home most of the time do not realize that they are living under the most favorable conditions in the world. During a lot of travel in every State of the American Union, I have never yet seen anything over there to approach our own country. Of course, out West one can traverse miles upon miles of corn fields, but it’s all corn; but here it’s a general variety, which is so pleasant to the eye, and which also brings in our great returns. And our fruits are upon every hand, from the grape to the strawberry, to the apple and pear, and all succeeding. The only parallel that I ever saw to Ontario is in the plains of Hungary, say, about Buda-Pesth. There is a country very much resembling Ontario, but, of course, not anything like it in size. It was from this locality that we got our present roller process of making flour. I am only making this comparison with Hungary to let our Ontarians know that we have, in truth, the finest country in this world, that we may all be spurred on to cultivate our lands better, for we are only yet in our infancy. Let us all realize that our lands never refuse, when properly cultivated, to produce anything which will grow in the north temperate{153} zone. Famed Geneva or Leman cannot surpass our beautiful Lake Ontario; and then as to size and extent, there’s no comparison to be made. And yet it is beautiful around Lake Leman, and locations along its shores are much sought by all Europe, and command unheard-of prices. Our shore is just as beautiful, and our waters just as limpid and just as cool. About Constantinople is the only other place I can name as being at all worthy of comparison with our Lakes Ontario and Erie shore for residences. Now, it is beautiful about the Bosphorus, and charming beyond measure, and Constantinople must always be a great city, no matter who possesses it. Yet, somehow, just a little digressing, we would all like to see Britain owning it, but Russia never. Then, I say, about Lake Leman and the Bosphorus are the only parallels to our places and resorts along these north shores of our Great Lakes. On the whole, the north shore of Lake Ontario has the preference, for it’s never so hot here at any time as it is about Geneva or Constantinople. We have in Ontario great inland, fresh-water seas, having pure, limpid waters, and a soil which will discount any in the world beside them, and an equable climate. If it does get warm for a day or two, it never remains too uncomfortably so for long, and our evenings are generally cool and pleasant from the lake breezes. Going down into a cellar like the Dakotans to escape hot breezes, which there become insufferable, we never think of. Already along the north shore of Lake Ontario, from Niagara to Kingston, our people{154} gather during the summer months by thousands. Between Hamilton and Toronto, and down as far as Belleville, there are hundreds of summering camps. As one passes along the roads near the lake one sees thousands upon thousands of ladies dressed in white, and gentlemen in shirt-sleeves sporting in the groves, on the green along the shores, or boating about bays and inlets.

People dot the landscape for a couple of hundred miles, and flit to and fro among the leafy bowers. It would, indeed, be hard to find a prettier sight than that of our people summering along the lake banks these July days. While other persons south of us, over in Uncle Sam’s dominions, are sweltering with the thermometer at 104° in the shade, our people are pleasantly cool along our northern lake shores. The consequence is that summer heats do not deplete us. Saffron yellow faces, with high protruding cheek bones, accompanied by dark circles under the eyes, such as are found in hot districts where the thermometer will persist in getting up to 104° and staying there, we know not of at all. Ontarians are a plump, well-developed people, and have, as a rule, fair complexions and good skins. Our ladies are just stout enough to be attractive under these conditions, and developing their physique as they do along our lakes, by picnicking and rowing and games, are the peers of any in the world. Yea! to make a quick and perhaps unseemly comparison, I wish to say that the same causes and the same equable cool temperature which cause our ladies’ cheeks to burnish red and brown, produce for us in our fields the finest barley{155} in the world and the best peas. So Nature has been prodigal to us in her gifts. About Toronto, of course, the greater population centres, and within a radius of thirty miles or so, along the lake on either side, the greater number of summer saunterers are to be seen. As Toronto gets on up to a quarter of a million of inhabitants, as it must, all available points upon the lake shores will be seized upon for outing for its citizens. The day, moreover, must be far distant when we shall be much crowded for space along the lake banks. But it does not need a very far-seeing prophet to see that a dense population must centre in Ontario along our lakes. Think what it was, and you will conclude that rapid as our progress has been, for the next twenty-five or thirty years our progress and increase in population will be five-fold what it was in the past twenty-five or thirty years. Ontarians need not go to Cacouna, or Murray Bay, or anywhere else for a summering. We can do better at home along our own waters. As time goes on we must get more and more of our American cousins from the region of 104° in the shade to come and summer with us. Ontario, in fact, must ultimately be the great summer resort of this continent. Take the readings of the thermometer in Toronto alone, and you will find that it possesses the most equable climate of any city in America east of the Rocky Mountains; and beautiful, and clear, and healthy as it is, it must be, as it now is, and far more so, the great metropolitan city of our country. Ontarians, let us cherish our homes and our birthrights.

{156}

As the fall season comes to us in Ontario the result of the last summer’s bountifulness is visibly apparent. On every side the steady, unremitting drone or hum of the threshing-machines daily falls upon the ear, and well we know that for every hour the thresher runs, bushels upon bushels of grain are being gathered into the farmers’ granaries. Dust-begrimed, sweaty men, with forks in hand, are all the time endeavoring to stop its spacious maw, but never succeeding, for its capacity of digestion is inexorable, and after each forkful it is quite as ready again for another, and so the work goes on by the hour (and the hum comes to the listener two miles away, on the wind), giving the husbandman an abundance for the season. There is scarcely a cessation until the noon hour arrives, when the shrill, ambitious scream of the piping engine which furnishes the motive power gives the welcome warning that dinner is ready. The noon hour past, again a scream from the ambitious engine, as if it would try to be entered among the fellowship of its greater brother engines in our manufactories and upon our railways. With their shirts half dry the farmers again tend to the machine’s voracious maw, knowing full well that it’s only a question of a few minutes, when the increased perspiration will wet them as fully as before.

The golden apples of Hesperides were never more beautiful or pleasing to the eye than those of our orchards, laden with their golden fruit. It is presumed these golden apples were oranges, and even so, it is just a question if they ever were prettier than many of our colored apples. The “King” with its red cheeks, or the “Fameuse,” and many other kinds{157} will rival the famed oranges for beauty any day. Manifestly one of the prettiest sights in nature is to see an orchard of considerable size in Ontario, heavily laden with fruit, and its limbs bending to the ground with their burdens. Let the breeze just gently stir the leaves, and sway the branches, and the dancing sunbeams glinting upon the sheen of the apples’ sides, and then as you walk through and among the trees, nature smiles at you, and you realize that ours is indeed a beauteous and kindly land.

And this is our autumn, clearly defined, and in a few days to be rendered doubly beautiful as the first frosts touch the foliage upon the maples, the birches, and the beeches, and transform their leaves into a broad gallery of the brightest and most variegated colors. Tropical dwellers, who have never seen the transformation, know not of the beauty this world in our north temperate zone affords. It is supposed to be ever green in the tropics, but the winter green down there is not beautiful, but a dull, dusty, dark russet. This decided change, which our fall season produces, they can have no conception of, and we would not trade our season with them if we could. Man loves variety. Universal green one tires of, but our recurring seasons always awaken in us a zest, and we love them in their turn.

Indian summer is soon upon us, with its delicious dreamy haze, when life out-of-doors is appreciated to its fullest extent. You can never quite make up your mind, when this season is with us, whether it be too warm or too cold. Physical existence becomes a perfect luxury, and a feeling of sensuousness gradu{158}ally steals over one. During all the travels I have made to other lands, in different climates, I have yet to find the equal of our Indian summer. Gradually the frost of the nights gets more intense and the leaves fall, and are blown in windrows by the winds. Trees overhanging streams completely cover the still pools with their leaves; the bark of the birch, by way of contrast, is whiter if possible than before, and the few remaining leaves upon the almost nude branches have not yet lost their gay colors. Now let the mid-day sun shine upon valley and grotto, and glimmer and dance upon the thin film of last night’s ice, and you have a picture that even the most obtuse cannot fail to love at sight.

Day by day nature becomes stiller. The earthworm has gone deeper into the soil, the birds have left us for the south, and only the shrill pipe of the blue jay remains of the birds’ summer campaign. Solitary crows, indeed, are almost ever ubiquitous, and their parting caw! caw! will soon announce the order of their going. The fox has prepared his hole by the side of some upturned tree, and the chipmunk has laid away his store of beechnuts for a winter supply. Nature is preparing for winter. This is the interregnum, as it were, and it is neither autumn nor winter. The farmer daily follows his plough, if the previous night’s frost has not been too severe. If it has, he must need wait until nine or ten o’clock, to let the previous night’s freeze soften in the sun’s rays. About the middle of December he has to lay his plough aside, for at last, after repeated warnings, gentle enough at first, the frost is really upon him.{159}

CHAPTER XIII.

If one would see our feathered pets in all their abundant numbers and luxuriant beauty nowadays in Ontario, he must get away from the towns and villages and centres of dense population. At various times I have explored portions of our province that lie far back from the Great Lakes and the more densely populated areas, and have then enjoyed some good opportunities of observing our summer visitants. The “poor Canada bird,” as the song-sparrow is locally called, is one that we cannot but value, seeing that his notes really lengthen and become more charming as the season advances and the weather becomes more boisterous. Even when the nights have become quite chilly, though the days are warm and sunshiny, one gets his varied song-notes if he will only listen. Especially will the song-sparrow pipe up of an evening, just as the sun is setting, and all nature is about to be hushed to rest. He leaves us with the light, after giving us a pleasant chant{160} from his brown throat. The triplet of notes that he gives us, and which we interpret as “Can-a-da, Can-a-da,” is in some localities interpreted as “Van-i-ty, Van-i-ty,” and of course any suitable word of three syllables may be associated with the well-known song of this small bird.

As for the common sparrow, so prevalent in our towns and cities, there is no doubt he has robbed us of a large part of the pleasures of our summer life, for where he is the song-bird is not. The change has so gradually stolen over us that we do not realize that we have lost our most charming birds through the advent of the pugnacious sparrow. Go once away from where he is and the change is so very apparent that one cannot fail to notice it. In the forests away from sparrows there are at least ten times as many birds, and it is plainly the duty of every one, especially of lovers of nature, to aid in exterminating the sparrow in every way possible.

The Canadian mocking-bird is, of course, a catbird, and although he cannot, perhaps, copy as many notes or voices as his American brother can, yet he’s our mocking-bird, and a charmer as well. He is about done with us for this season (fall), and his imitations are not now heard as frequently as they were, but yet he is with us and one can hear him occasionally. Stand near a thicket, a copse, or a “spinney,” as, perhaps, they would say in England, and let there be some water near, and you’ll get the calls from him. Sometimes he is pleasant, and in turn descends to the disagreeable, coming back again to the pleasant and enchanting, and so one may listen by the hour, and{161} every few minutes get something entirely new from him.

The Canadian black squirrel, so exceedingly plentiful when most of us were boys, just able to be the proud possessor of a poor gun, is now nearly extinct in Ontario. Speaking of gunning in our boyhood days reminds me of the off Saturdays from school, when every other Saturday was a holiday, and of the day’s trudge with the old gun for the alert black squirrel, safely ensconced among the tallest tree-tops during the sunny hours of the short fall days. And one had to get up a little, too, at marksmanship, for he was ever on the move, and you seldom got a good shot at him while quietly at ease. The boy’s heart that would not thrill at a day’s black squirrel shooting must indeed be more obdurate than most Ontario boys’ hearts are, as one followed him, always looking up, as he jumped from tree to tree, almost falling to the ground when he made some exceedingly long jumps, but quite recovering himself and never by any possibility falling. Most exceedingly do I regret the gradual extinction of this squirrel—the real squirrel of Canada—and, besides, he’s such an intelligent fellow and so easily tamed and becomes such a pet. The days were when, in his tin revolving cage, he was one of the means of diversion at many a household; and for a stew he had no superior, feeding as he always did upon the choicest nuts to be found in the forests, and he was so scrupulously clean in his habits.

The common red squirrel is still very common, as he chatters away, half way up some forest tree,{162} perched upon a limb. He’s a very valiant fellow, indeed, as he saucily chit-chats, with a guttural noise; but drive him up the tree once, and keep him there you can’t. His first care will be to get down to the ground again and scamper away; and get down he will, unless one be specially alert and active. He will rest upon the tree trunk, head downwards, with his great eyes watching your every motion, and should the least chance present itself for escape he’s down along the opposite side of the trunk of the tree where one is standing, if it be a considerable one, and is away in a twinkling.

Birds gather in flocks at about this time of the year, affording to us who watch a sure admonition that summer is nearly past, and fall close upon us. I saw the first flock of blackbirds on the 4th of September, and my recollection is, from past seasons, that many others are quickly seen after the first flock of any kind of birds is about.

Another sure sign that fall approaches is evidenced by the call of the cricket and other kindred insect life in our midst as the sun sinks behind the heavens. The noises of the evenings just now are particularly observable, and almost rival—or perhaps, if not rival, measurably approach—the choruses of Nature during a tropical night. Those of us who recall our first impression of our stay in the tropics can, at this season in Ontario, get quite a simile at home, and it’s charming too; and our air is so delightful that mere physical existence becomes dreamy and a positive luxury.

The katydid is now at his best, and delivers himself{163} of his “crackling sing” as he descends on the wing, bat-like, among the tree branches, to the ground. Our katydid is never heard during the early part of the summer, and just now, since he is our guest for a short time, it would richly repay our boys to catch him and examine him at leisure. One cannot help admiring him, for he’s a fine fellow; but the great trouble with him is that he’s so plainly a member of the locust family that we fear his congeners might come and devour our beautiful Ontario for us. We are assured, however, by those naturalists supposed to be able to know, that there can possibly be no danger of a locust pest in our humid, cool, Ontario climate, and so we bless our stars that our lines have fallen in such pleasant places. Ontario to-day, the golden grain-burdened, with its hill and dale and copses interspersed, is beautiful beyond compare.

Walk out any one of the fine evenings in July, grandest of all months, just when the sun is leaving us, far away in the north-west, amidst an amber sky, with not a vestige of cloud above, and just as he finally dips, the strong probability is that you will be startled at first, and then delighted, with the quick cry of the “whip-poor-will.”

Stand in your tracks and back again and again will come to you in quick succession for eight or ten times the distinct words, “whip-poor-will,” and then as quickly the cry will cease.

Right away from an exactly opposite side of the landscape, from about a coppice of thick bushes, with some large trees growing in it and protruding far{164} above them, will come the answer to the challenge, “whip-poor-will,” and so the words will be bandied back and forth until the shades of night have fallen in real earnest, giving you, perhaps, the most enjoyable and natural concert one can be treated to in our own country.

As to the bird itself, it is very seldom seen, its color being so nearly like that of brown leaves, or the ordinary color of the carpeted bases of trees in the forest, that he is scarcely distinguishable. Once in a while you will come on him, however, in your rambles, when he spreads his brown wings, of a foot’s distension at least, and alights a few rods on, as before, upon some fallen tree trunk, or as likely as not upon the ground. He stays with us as long as our summer really lasts, and of all the birds that sing, his call is the clearest and most distinctive. The “whip-poor-will” has been celebrated by one of the best of our Canadian poets, Charles Sangster. He says:

To us who are not so sensitive the mournful cry of the nightly whip-poor-will is not so depressing, but I am sure we are all glad to get this gleaning of a poet’s feelings when he hears the uncanny bird.

The golden plover in July is nesting and watching along by the margin of our streams. By chance I happened at one time upon the nest of one situated about half-way under the end of an old log. The nest had been built without any preparation at all as to nest building. During the previous season grass had grown rank and tall about this old log, and the parent bird had simply trodden down the dry and sere grass, and formed an almost level space for the nest. There was but little attempt to hollow the nest even in a concave, as one would naturally suppose, to hold the eggs. Four little ploverets rewarded my gaze, and such ridiculous things they were, too. Scarcely any feathers yet, but just down, as it were, and great long legs, which appeared to be so far out of proportion to their wants that their appearance was absurd, indeed. They essayed to walk away, but it would seem that a plover must learn to balance himself, like a rope-walker. At this stage they grotesquely tipped forward mostly every time. They arose upon their feet, sometimes, but not so often, backwards.

The large Canada owl will be found hatching or sitting in July. This is the owl which is so very white during the winter months, but, like the rabbit, changes his coat during the summer, when he becomes somewhat gray or brown. Of all our birds of prey,{166} the owl is perhaps the most predatory in his persistence in waylaying about a farmer’s poultry yard, and it is no trouble at all for him nor any tax upon his powers to carry off an ordinary hen. Recently I happened to walk along the bank of a stream partly wooded, and in the top of a cedar stump, about ten feet from the ground, I found this great bird’s nest. Three owlets were there, with their great staring eyes nearly as large as those of the parent bird’s, while their bodies were covered with down so thick and so long that it seemed almost like a coat of wool. Perhaps the best way to describe them would be to say they were just fuzzy. Around the sides of their nest, which was made of small sticks, were some small bones, apparently those of mice and rats, but not of fowls, so far as I could see. Even if the owl does destroy some fowls, I could not find it in my heart to hurt the fuzzy little owlets, and I let them remain, fully believing that their parent entirely squares the account by the great quantity of mice and rats which he is daily securing from our fields. Before leaving the owl’s nest I want to say that one day, just as winter set in, an immense number of crows—I should say 3,000 at least—were congregated about the tops of some pine trees not far from my residence—trees about forty feet high. Furiously and persistently did those crows caw, and fly, and hop about, producing such a din as to attract persons a mile away during a still day. The cawing kept up so long that I seized my breech-loader and resolved to investigate the cause of the crows’ congress, as such{167} gatherings are usually called. Cautiously I approached the feathered multitude, wondering what could possibly be up, but no such caution was at all needed, for they heeded me not. Backwards and forwards the more adventurous ones apparently darted into the top of one particular pine, giving at the, same time a tremendous yell. Following with my eye their line of flight, I discovered an enormous white owl perched upon a limb, the object of attack of the more desperate of the whole 3,000 or so crows thus assembled. For many minutes I quietly witnessed this unequal contest, in my curiosity actually forgetting to fire, and found that the old owl was a match, as he sat upon the limb, for them all. Sometimes the crows will gather just the same in congress about a black squirrel, in the top of some high forest tree, but I have yet to learn that they ever succeed in inflicting any punishment upon either owl or squirrel.

The blue heron nests and hatches with us, although many persons think that he goes far away from the haunts of man for the purpose of nesting. I do not know if he be really the blue heron of the naturalist, but he is a heron to all intents and purposes, and his color is mainly correctly described in his name. He is crested, too, and is withal a most magnificent bird. Not infrequently he stands five feet high, and the spread of his wings is six or seven feet. Any one who will quietly watch beside any of our marshes can easily, this time of the year, find his nest, as he alights unerringly in the same spot. His nest is{168} only the marsh grass pressed down beside some hillock in the bogs, where it is dry. As yet I do not know for a certainty how many young the hen bird produces at a sitting, but I have never seen any more than two in any nest. Speaking of the plover with his long legs being awkward and absurd reminds me to say that perhaps the young heron is the most ridiculous of all birds which frequent our province. His legs are so very abnormally long that they seem almost a malformation, but when one comes to consider the use he makes of them afterwards, as he wades for food, one can see that he is properly formed. But at the same time he is the most absurd, awkward, homely and ill-looking, when young, of all the feathered tribe incubating in Ontario. You must pardon me, reader, for daring to presume to differ from great naturalists when they tell us that he never alights upon trees, for I have seen him alight. Not very far from my residence stands a very large towering water elm. So tall, indeed, is this elm that at night it far overshadows all other trees of the forests about, and among the branches of this elm, being an obstruction, as it would appear, is the herons’ line of flight. I have myself frequently seen them alight, and have tried to get a shot at them when upon the perch. So far as my observation goes, however, they do not long remain upon the perch.

Since the law now protects ducks from being food for the guns of boys, they now, generally on Saturdays and holidays, walk in groups, guns in hand, along our streams and marshes, always ready to take a pot{169} shot at anything. The water-hen—generally called hell-diver—gets most of the shots which the boys can spare. This fowl can generally accommodate the boys to all the fun they want, in the shooting line, and with but little danger to itself. Its anatomical form is so peculiar and its sense of sight and hearing so acute that it can, nine times out of ten, dodge the shots from the boys’ guns from the time of explosion of the charge to the driving of it home. Outwardly it is formed very much like the duck, and is about the size of our ordinary wood duck. Its feet, however, are placed far back in its body, like the great auk. From this fact it is a most expert swimmer, and is also enabled to dive as quickly as powder and shot explode. It is not at all uncommon for this fowl to dive to avoid the shot from a gun and swim under water, wholly out of sight, ten rods from the place where it went down.

In reality it is a species of duck, but since it feeds mostly upon small fishes, its flesh is rank, oily, and not palatable for the table. When August comes around it is no uncommon sight to see the mother water-hen swimming around followed by her brood of six to ten young water-hens about as big as cricket-balls. Wonderfully tame, too, they get when they are not daily molested, and one can spend a very pleasant half hour or so in watching the brood as they float along with the mother, every few minutes diving for food.{170}

CHAPTER XIV.

Realizing the fact that the greater part of beautiful Lake Ontario belongs to us, and, likewise, that the most densely populated portion of our province is about its borders, a few facts and observations will, I think, be acceptable to most Canadians. My remarks are founded mainly upon my own observations, from a lifetime residence upon its shores, and also in a measure from Dr. Smith’s report to the United States Government on the fisheries on the lake. First, the lake is a perfect barometer, in this wise: It will foretell the weather to come to us for twenty-four to forty-eight hours in advance, to all who will closely observe it. For instance, suppose we have our coldest winter days, when everything about is held in the tight embrace of Jack Frost, and there is no sign of milder weather, or any relief from the intense cold. Look abroad upon the lake just as the sun is setting, and a light yellow band hangs above the surface of the water. Then in a few hours {171}Jack Frost leaves us, and a thaw is at hand. Or, perchance, during the winter days, when we wish for sleighing, and yet the ground is bare, and it will not come; no sign of snow, nor the feeling of it (as you well know, one can feel it before it really comes). But before that time look abroad upon the surface of the lake, and see a black band extending as far as the eye can reach. Now it is only a few hours, ordinarily about eighteen, before the feeling of snow comes, and then down comes the “fleecy cloud.” It is summer now, and we would know if it will be windy to-morrow. Are there red rays and yellow skies at sunrise? Yes. It will be windy on the morrow. But when the cumulous clouds move easily, and as if not driven above the waters, fine weather old Ontario now gives us—and he always tells the truth. Not to use many words, in the glorious midsummer days, when his surface is just like molten glass, and objects in a depth of sixty feet are clear and distinct, its entrancing beauty comes. Molten glass; but watch, and a mile away you see a streak of ruffled water coming towards you, for just there a puff of wind has caught it. But it dies away and leaves the polished mirror once more to me. Then he rises in his might and tosses our ships about just like old ocean, and sends his spray far upon the shore, and his huge-capped waves advance and recede.

But it never freezes so hard close by the shores as away from its breath. Curious, also, to relate, in the fall it does not “freeze up,” as we say in Canada, as soon as away from it, by two weeks usually. In the spring, again, the frost is gone from the soil quite two weeks before it is gone back from its influence, so I feel safe in asserting that winters upon its shores are one month shorter than they are away from its meteorological influences. And yet leaves do not appear quite close to its waters just as soon as they do a few miles away, anomalous as it may seem, for it does not get warm so quickly as localities more remote. It is never so warm in the summer about it, as it is never so cold in the winter. Dwellers upon its shores rarely, if ever, suffer from extreme heat during the periodical torrid waves which sometimes visit this land. Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes—being about 185 miles long, and of an average width of 40 miles, being widest opposite Irondequoit Bay, where it is 55 miles in width. It is some 6,500 square miles in area, of which Ontario owns 3,800. It is 232 feet above the sea, and usually fluctuates but little in height, though in 1891 it was three feet lower than ever before observed. Persons living at Niagara, it is said, remarked on the unusually small amount of water that year passing over Niagara Falls. I am unable in any way to account for that small flow. We are told it is because the tributary streams and the waters of the Falls were less. Granted, but why they were less is far to seek. In most parts the depth of Lake Ontario is about 350 feet, but off

SCENE NEAR BOBCAYGEON.

A CANADIAN VIEW—LOOKING SOUTH-EAST FROM EAGLE MOUNTAIN, STONEY LAKE.

{173}

Charlotte, N.Y., it is 600 feet deep, and in some places opposite Jefferson County, N.Y., it is quite 700 feet deep. The eastern portion is the shallowest, being only about 100 feet about South Bay. At the bottom are, in many places, vegetable organisms, furnishing food for those fishes which feed at the bottom. Our sturgeon is a bottom-feeder, and some others. About Stony Point is a rough, rocky and sandy bottom, and the other parts are muddy and clayey. An underground passage to the ocean has been mooted many years by persons who have thought the St. Lawrence could not take away all the flow; that is to say, the waters passing over Niagara Falls and those falling into Lake Ontario by contributory streams, which add much to the flow from the Falls. It is a fallacy; there is no such underground passage, and the St. Lawrence easily takes all the waters from the lake. No current is perceptible in the lake. Pieces of wood upon its surface do not flow as with a current down Kingston way, but invariably come ashore with the first wind. In perfect preservation to-day are many ships which have gone down and now rest upon its bottom. Very probably too, the bodies of passengers upon those ships, confined within the hulls so as to prevent their rising to the surface, and thus getting the air, are there yet, and in perfect preservation, for the waters in the depths are always cool and preservative. Were some expert diver yet to go ghost-like among these cabins, his nerves must be upset with the evidences of human tragedies there so vividly to be seen before him. Mainly, the waters{174} are melted snow, and are manifestly pure, and blessed are those whose homes are about this life-giving lake, as well as about all our other great fresh-water oceans. About the shores of the Mediterranean have been for ages the choicest spots for man’s life; that is to say, the regions where the human family could develop most perfectly, and life there passed was rounded and full. Our old Roman bards, you know, were forever singing about the beauties of Mediterranean shores, their “golden apples of Hesperides,” and sumptuous residences built partly upon the land and partly over the sea. Living on the shores of our Great Lakes is generally conceded now to be most conducive to human development; we have left the Mediterranean shores in the background, and now want only the population, for we have a better condition for human life-development and happiness right here, and far more enjoyable, for the great heat of the ancients’ country is absent here in our new land.

Turn the eye southward, from the town, with its noise, bustle and smoke, and look with me over my daily horizon, which indeed bounds a landscape which my eyes have feasted upon all my days, for the past half-century, save and except the years at college and years of foreign travel. Manifestly at the first,{175} the very first, in fact, the eye catches the more conspicuous objects. And it is, in this instance, a great dead but standing hemlock tree, denuded, it is true, of its foliage, but yet bearing its limbs quite in detail. Like great men, it has died at the top, and its impression upon my retina is always associated with the crows’ congress which I saw in its foliage-less branches last fall. The crow, you know, only partially leaves us hereabout for the winter. Many of them do migrate, it is true, but here along the Lake Ontario shore dead fish are always thrown up by the waves, and he can feed at any time; consequently, he does not leave us. So, upon this elevated, dead tree-top, I saw thousands of them gather, and heard one after another deliver his speech in regular order. Oratory they must have, for their voices were plaintive, defiant and grave, in turn, and I dare not deny them intelligent utterance. Close beside this site of the crows’ congress are a few great, large, sweeping elms, whose branches alone would each make very respectable trees. Always their greenness is visible to me, and the quiet contentment of pose of their branches and leaves is always a pleasure. Great blue-crested herons find convenient resting-places on their highest limbs. Stork-like, these great, gaunt birds stand upon one foot, and turn their heads side-wise, and so wise-like, that one feels so near nature when beholding them that it is uncanny to disturb them. I let the eye wander beyond the high elm limbs, and Ontario’s ultra-marine blue waters are before me, upon the far horizon, beyond my extreme{176} range of vision. And when Old Sol rose this morning from out of Ontario’s waters, he heralded his appearance by throwing up into the sky shafts of light of various colors. Some, indeed, were pure violet for a few moments, and others red, and yellow, and blue, but not the blue of Ontario, so that the contrast may be marked for us. He is coming up swiftly, and in a few moments the colors have all changed, and almost before I can turn my head yellow has suffused the whole in the immediate locality of old submerged Sol. Again, the top of a wheel of fire we see upon the water, and now it is all red about. Old Sol has risen, and a globe of fire is sailing upon the waters’ surface. Could any facile brush only put upon canvas for us these phantasmagorial colors, no one would believe the artist, but accuse him of outdoing nature. And now he shines between me and a high hill upon the lake’s bank, surmounted by trees, green at the top and golden yellow along its sides with ripening grain. Our-red men discovered the very striking beauty of this eminence before Cartier ever sailed up the St. Lawrence, and even before the Indian population moved backward and northward upon those backwater chains, and away from Lake Ontario. To establish this fact most indisputably, we have only to look at the many skulls, and larger human bones, generally, which the ploughshare turns out. Then the red man enjoyed his pagan rites without the intermeddling of the expectant Jesuit missionary, who only came ages and ages after; for, among the bones, we find his flints, skinning stones, and stone toma{177}hawks, but no articles of iron, because the Frenchman, who first came here, had not then given him tomahawks of iron and old flint guns. Imitative whites, whose eyes travelled about the horizon, as did the Indians’, drank in the beauty of the scene inceptively, and they in their turn made it their place of sepulture, and to-day it is the white man’s burial ground, embosomed among the evergreen trees, which Old Sol’s rays are penetrating for me. While I stand and worship at Nature’s shrine in the early summer morn, with the sun’s advent a gentle breeze has risen. God has been specially good to us in giving this sublimely beautiful vision:

Down the long, meandering highway my eye rests, and my soul is pained by most irregular, unsightly, great bare poles on either side of it. A beneficent Government has given some grasping fellows the power to put these up and stretch wires upon them, and wrench my soul daily by their ugliness. Europe would not for a moment tolerate such hideous marring of the landscape, but long-suffering Canadians, most law-abiding and complaisant, suffer the nuisance to remain. Not content with the great warty poles,{178} there are huge braces or props leaning to them at every bend in the highway, and I, as the individual, must suffer the sacrilege in silence. A long-suffering people may yet arise in their might and tear these gaunt, denuded forest trees from the face of the earth. There is a forest-covered hill, mainly of second-growth timber, before my eye, and it gloriously crowns what would otherwise be a most unsightly, bald, round eminence. But it is beautiful, dense, green and grand, and a wealthy man, viewing daily this hill upon his horizon, bought the land and keeps the forest that it may please him, and others as well, for their entire lives. Five per cents, or any given per cents, are not to be mentioned in comparison with this good citizen duly honoring his Maker and helping his fellows by his generous act. A forest primeval is before my eye as I turn my glance to the opposite side of the horizon, and it stands high and strong before me. Our native maple has never yet been surpassed for beauty and cleanliness, and here it is our emblem and our pride. Mainly this forest has always been in my mind as the spot where countless myriads of pigeons used to alight in the days gone by. Another forest farther away, and almost out from my horizon, but not entirely gone from it, formed the next nearest roosting-place for this extinct migratory bird, strings of which would fall to my boyhood gun, but now, alas! gone to South America, where food is more abundant and more easily obtained by them. Lesser objects on the horizon do not strike me so forcibly, but as I look more remotely and away{179} over the busy town and its forges, looms and benches, the ridges are clearly marked upon the sky. Geologists have told us these hills were once the shores of a broader Lake Ontario. Evidences of the rocks and pebbles go far to establish that fact, but to us moderns they are very palpable and valuable by keeping off the cold of the north during the inclement season, that we may grow the succulent peach beneath their shelter. “Companies are bodies, indeed, without souls,” for here, with us, the railway company, which exacts its three and a half cents per mile in contravention to its charter, has erected great, unsightly sheds, and stained them a dull red, that their ugliness may be unparalleled. No eye for the beautiful and harmonious can ever be reconciled to the gaunt poles along our highways, wire-bestridden, or to the red architectural sheds of our railway. Summing up, however, the pleasing and unpleasing which I have touched upon, we see that the pleasing and beautiful exceeds the unsightly and ugly. I am indulging the hope that some day, in the near future, a way will be found by which we may enjoy all the best facilities of communication and transportation without having the landscape marred by unsightly poles or ugly railroad sheds. The sensibilities of many of our citizens have been wounded by the act of some individual or company, who, vandal-like, has removed a time-honored familiar forest, or erected a most surpassingly ugly house, barn or warehouse. These marrings of our horizon make life for all more circumscribed, as well as grieve the souls of the cultured. As we love our glorious country, let us beautify and preserve it.{180}

CHAPTER XV.

It was far more difficult for our early settlers in Ontario to pay for their lands by their own exertions, even at the low prices then prevailing, than it is to-day at their greatly increased values. When Ontario lands could be purchased for $4.00 or $5.00 per acre, there was no market for their produce to any extent, and money was extremely difficult to get. Not only the absence of markets was against our settlers, but though they owned a farm it was wholly unproductive and useless until cleared of timber. So it was harder to pay the $4.00 per acre then than it is to pay $80 per acre to-day. A man without capital to-day in Ontario can start on a 100-acre farm, and pay for it off the farm in a series of years, by his own and his wife’s exertions. Of course, he will need a little more to start with in the first instance than his forefathers did, for he must needs{181} make a small payment down in order that he may mortgage the farm to get the balance of the purchase money. Since money is now being loaned on farm security at five and six per cent., he can yearly more than pay his interest and reduce his principal, so that his burdens are daily becoming lighter. His wife and himself pulling together and practising economy invariably succeed on productive farms, and pay for them. We sometimes wonder at our forefathers that they did not take up more land when it was so cheap, but forget that even its cheapness, as it seems to us to-day, was no guide to them as to its being cheap. Grain in early times did not bring money, when these prices prevailed, nor would timber. Furs and potash were the only commodities commanding cash. Hence it was almost an impossibility for an ordinary man to pay for more than 100 acres from his own exertions. To-day, even at $80 per acre on a mortgaged farm, everything he can grow will sell for money, and with his family’s help, and with the growth and increase of his stock, he is bound to succeed.

Even if he must needs practise economy it does not follow that he may not enjoy himself, as the time goes on, while he is paying for his farm. The press will, for a few dollars yearly, give him amusement and pleasure at home. If his means are particularly straitened, even $5.00 per year for weeklies will furnish him the cheapest and best contemporary readings possibly obtainable for the money. Then if he or his wife be at all musically{182} inclined, the evening of relaxation, after the hard day’s work be done, can be pleasantly put in by a song or two, accompanied on an organ, if he has got so far along as to afford one; and he rises with the sun next morning, rested, invigorated, and ready for the next day’s work. And as every harvest comes in its turn he feels gladly thankful that the mortgage is being gradually lifted. Living as he does, and putting forth these efforts to save, he must have good habits. Good habits will invariably give him good health, and life is a pleasure to him, even under the cloud of a mortgage. Slavery some people will term this life, while under the mortgage. If one would get money one must save, and if one be well cared for, housed, clad and fed while saving, he can surely put up with the hard work, for always ahead is the goal of having a 100-acre farm paid for, which will make him independent for life. The mechanic emigrant who comes to us from Britain is not sufficiently versatile to change his mode of life to go on a farm and succeed until he has been here a few years. Having been in our midst a few years he gets his eyes opened, and learns in a measure “to be a jack-of all trades,” and then many of such former mechanics do succeed on farms and pay for them. Our native-born Canadian, who follows some mechanical trade when the mechanical labor market is over-supplied, is making a serious mistake. Very naturally many of our young men drift into this life, for their work is over at six o’clock, and they can wash, dress and walk the streets when their farmer brother at home{183} is yet in the fields. While the mechanic goes through life with tolerable ease upon his day’s wages, as a rule he is not saving much for his declining days; but his farmer brother invariably is. His farmer brother will have soiled hands, and wear his working clothes the whole day through, and cannot go about the streets in the evenings, nor attend so many places of amusement, but he enjoys himself just as well at home, and he is saving for a rainy day. If trade be dull and shops shut down in the middle of winter, he is quite indifferent, for his cellar is well supplied, and his fields are ploughed ready for next spring’s sowing. Prices for his grain may be low, but still he has his living, and no one to call master, and is as free and independent as any king upon a throne. Writers on political economy tell us that all true wealth must be produced from the soil. Now, if this be true, then the nearer we get to the soil at first hand the better off we must be. I have already endeavored to show that those on the soil lead the most independent, free and healthy lives, and since Ontario has lots more of lands yet for the farmer, let those out of work and with no very bright or sure prospects before them, go on those lands. Many workmen could remedy the scarcity of employment in the winter, and their having not much to live upon, following strikes of trades-unions, if they would cultivate the soil. If the mechanical labor market be overstocked, the common-sense remedy would be to lessen the supply. Here with us the proper way to lessen the supply is for our smart mechanics, who know our{184} country and its conditions, to get away from the towns upon farms; and if in the course of time such persons, succeeding in their new calling (which I have tried to prove is not a life of slavery, but of hard toil and self-denial, and wealth and independence), as succeed they must if they put forth the necessary effort, and pay for their first 100 acres, there is no law or moral obstacle to their buying 200 or 400 more if they can. Should they not be able to work so much land, surely they are at perfect liberty to rent it to others, and enjoy the rents and profits from it as the result of their labors. Very few farmers fail in Ontario; so very few, in fact, that our former bankruptcy law did not provide for the farmers’ failure at all. They invariably succeed, and the instances of old decrepit farmers, with nothing to support them in their declining years, are so very few that any reader hereof cannot call to mind very many examples. Reader, you will have to think twice before you can point to an old, infirm farmer with nothing to support him in Ontario. I only wish I could say as much for the mechanic. Even with the good wages they get, it is almost a superhuman task to save a competency for that period of life which must come to all of us surviving, when our limbs become too stiff to obey our will, and too weak to maintain the strain of toil. But I did not set out to write of the mechanical trades or kindred subjects; I am only trying to induce more mechanics to go upon farms and be independent of bosses, strikes or trades-unions.{185}

My observation of travel in continental Europe, Britain and the United States gives me the ground to fearlessly state that in Ontario a man with a capital of $10,000 can enjoy more and be more independent than he can in those countries.

Say his farm costs $8,000, or $80 per acre; but from my intimate knowledge of lands in Ontario, I would not limit myself to that price. Good land is always the cheapest, and I would not hesitate in paying $100 per acre, and more, if the productiveness of the farm will warrant it. But assuming $80 per acre to be the average for a good farm; now add to this $2,000 upon the 100-acre farm for stock, implements, etc., so that the entire $10,000 is fully invested. Upon this 100-acre farm, paid for, the farmer can enjoy as good a living as can be got in any other calling in life. It can’t be done in Britain, but it can be done here. If I would settle on such a priced farm in Germany, in the first place it would not begin to be as productive as the Ontario farm, and besides, my growing sons would have to be soldiers for three years upon reaching manhood, or leave the country. The best lands to be found in Austria are in Hungary, which is a wheat country, and not one whit better than ours, of a like fertility, and at least two and a half or three times the price. In France I have noticed that by the most rigid and grinding economy the small peasant will lay up a competency. But the economy practised by the French peasant is something our people cannot and will not use. The usual conveniences and amenities{186} of life the French peasant knows not of; a cloth is never laid upon the table, and the bread for the mid-day meal is usually cut from the loaf in advance for each person, and laid beside the plate. A full spread, with meat and other dishes, literally filling the table, so that there is plenty left after the meal is partaken of, they know not of; still they live, and secure a competency in a small way.

Rural life in Ontario is far preferable to anything these countries can produce. We are not forced to be soldiers, and we can buy and own absolutely the land which we cultivate. But there is another point, not usually thought of in regard to Ontario farming. That is its certainty. We never get a failure of crops, for although our crops may be more plentiful some years than others, we never fail really. We never get any serious drouths nor floods, and our cattle are never diseased, as they are in several States of the Union. Our taxes are so small a matter that we do not generally give them a second thought. Nor are our winters so severe that our stock will be injured by the cold; nor will our children coming from or going to school be caught in blizzards. But the farmer who prepares his land properly, and puts forth an effort in downright earnest, is bound to succeed.

He is eligible to any office within the gift of the people, if he be that way inclined, and he does not take off his hat to any lord or duke in the land. Literally he is master of his own situation; an honest, fearless, loyal, independent yeoman, with himself{187} and his family absolutely provided for, and above all want. Pulling up and moving away he never thinks of. He has his home, and knows what a home is and should be. The temptation to go upon some cheap lands out west, where grasshoppers are possible to destroy his year’s crop, he does not even think of. The western American’s ease and little regret in pulling up and leaving for a little farther west he cannot understand.

He sticks to his home, and yearly improves it and adds to its value, and is ready to fight for it if need be. Ontario runs away south into the best States—agriculturally—of the Union. Even some American writers honestly assert that it is better situated (north of the lakes) than their own lands in the same latitude, south of the lakes. For a fact, we know Ontario gets less snow than northern New York or Ohio does, and the seasons are not nearly so trying in Toronto as they are in Buffalo. Granted, first, that the reader knows of the richness of Ontario’s lands and its little waste places, and also of the downright hard work of its people and their love of home, if you will then take up the map and note how Ontario is situated—surrounded by water and having a summer nearly as long as that of the north half of France—you can come to no other conclusion but that, with a capital of $10,000 in a farm and appurtenances, in Ontario one can enjoy most and be the surest of success.

One great fact which distinguishes Ontario is its little waste land. Draw a line from Lake Simcoe to{188} Belleville, and all that portion of old Ontario west of that line possesses less waste land than any tract of country of equal size known in the world. There are no mountain wastes nor extensive marshes within this space, but nicely undulating lands with frequent streams, and almost naturally drained. Farms in Ontario are 100 acres each, ordinarily, and the 100-acre farmer is a man generally to be respected. He brings his family up respectably, and educates them at the common school so that they are capable of filling almost any position in after life in which they may be placed. Such farmers are intelligent and more or less travelled. Last summer I recollect being the guest of a Yorkshire farmer who farmed 560 acres of Yorkshire lands. He was a man of sixty-five, wealthy, and had been on the farm all his lifetime. During this time he had been to London only twice, at some horse shows. The River Tweed, dividing England from Scotland, was only two hours distant from him by rail, and yet he had never crossed it. As to going over to Ireland, he had never even thought of it. Our Ontario farmer comes to our provincial shows, and jostles among city people now and again in our different cities, and thus gets his rough corners rubbed off. And he is far more than the equal in intelligence of any yeoman in the Old World of anything like his means.

The 100-acre farmer will ordinarily have 60 acres in crop yearly, which will average him $20 per acre. The balance of his farm is in hay, pasture, and forest.{189}

Now, from this 60 acres of crop he nicely supports his family, and yearly puts by a nice little sum to buy lands for his growing boys when they shall need them; of course, he cannot save the whole $1,200 obtained for his crops, as his family must be maintained out of this as well as pay for repairs and improvements. However, most Canadian farmers’ wives supplement this grain product by the butter and cheese from the cows running upon the pastures.

Indeed, the wife’s help is a very great element to the farmer’s success, as regards saving money; and she deserves her place of importance beside her husband. Our Ontario farmer drives a good team upon the roads, encased in first-class harness, and a smart light spring buggy behind them. Rope traces and straw collars, which one sees in the South, would be beneath his dignity, and one must search Ontario over and over to find an example of such. And he is well clad in clothes, the product of the factory loom. Only a few years back he wore clothes made from home-grown wool spun by his good wife and woven upon some loom near at home. But latterly the factories have produced tweeds and fullcloths at so small a price that it has not paid him to work up his own wool. His table is well supplied with not only an abundance of food, but in great variety, fruit in various forms forming a feature at almost every meal. The universal meat diet of England is not acceptable to his palate nor suitable for our climate, for our systems require a laxative in this climate, which fruit gives him. His wife is more than the{190} equal in cooking of her friends in Old England. She can compound more dishes out of the same material, make more tasteful and toothsome pastry than one can buy in a pastrycook’s shop in Europe. She does not consider it beneath her dignity assisting in milking the cows, teaching calves which are to be reared to drink milk, or possibly feeding the pigs if the men be busy.

As a transformation she can, after a wash, quickly don garments fit for the parlor, and entertain company at her board with an ease and heartiness truly surprising to European travellers who visit us. Even if not able to converse in half Frenchy English, many of them can dash off a number of tunes upon an organ or piano in a manner acceptable to most persons not musical critics. An organ is in most good farm-houses, and sometimes a piano, and the daughters are daily becoming proficient on them, practising after the evening milking is done.

Well might the European ask, “Where are your peasants?” These are our peasants, and the reason you do not recognize them is because they are on a higher plane in cultivation, taste and education than yours are; and even if they do appear as ladies and gentlemen, they are not above engaging in the arduous toil of the farm.

Ontario farms are worth so much in dollars, because, for the reason I have already given, of the little waste land, and also because of the industriousness of its people. Look across the border at our American cousins and you do not find the genuine American{191} doing the downright hard work. The European emigrant performs that duty for him, while the American fills the offices to be filled, and does the scheming.

But the Ontario farmer will do downright hard work after the manner of his sires in the British Isles, and he has not yet learned to shirk it. It is this industry which makes our province, makes our lands sell so high, and gives his home an abundance, and puts yearly a nice sum at his credit in some savings bank. One great difference between the Canadian and the American is in this particular—the American does not lay up for his children as the Canadian tries to do. My observation leads me to think that the American does not put forth an especial effort to set his sons up in the farming or other business, but lets them commence at the foot of the ladder to work their own way up. On the contrary, the Canadian farmer, almost without exception, is yearly trying to lay aside a sum to buy, or help to buy, farms for his growing sons. Thus the Ontario farmer never gets satisfied, as it were, or never gives up work as long as he is able to perform it. Americans, on the other hand, will rest upon their laurels, and live without any exertion, on small incomes. Indeed, from my own knowledge, I know that many American farmers in Michigan have rented their small farms and moved into the villages to live on an income of $300 per year. Our farmers have the true British greed, and would not think of giving out on a $300 income. Now, I argue that our state of affairs is the best for the prosperity of our country. Never becoming satisfied, they never cease{192} to work, and thus they have produced the most smiling and prosperous country in the world. This picture of Ontario farm life is true to-day, and I ask the reader if it is not as desirable a life as is obtainable anywhere. Our Ontario farmer owns his own soil, is well fed, housed, and clad, ever striving to do for his family, loyal to his government, and at peace with his God and with man. I have yet to find his equal, as a class, for the general well-being or common weal.

Until a few years past nearly all Ontario people did their year’s business with their town merchant on the credit basis. Goods for family use would be freely purchased on credit the whole year through, until fall came and the annual grain selling time, when large bills would be rendered by the merchant. Large enough they generally would be, for, buying goods without restraint and paying no money for them, the farmers would hardly realize that such seemingly small purchases from time to time would amount to so much in the fall. But little credit is now given, and goods and supplies are generally paid for as purchased. This very beneficial change is no doubt owing to the fact that now the farmer has a greater variety of products of the farm to sell than formerly, which come in in their turn in different seasons, and thus give him a steady supply of funds. Paying as he goes, he is not nearly so apt to buy things he does not really need, and his sum total of the cash purchases for the year will not amount to so much as his annual store bills did formerly. The merchant likewise can sell his goods closer for cash than he could if he had to wait{193} a whole year. The fact that the credit business is being largely superseded by the cash system is one of the best arguments as to the progress of the country. All along these townships lying upon Lake Ontario the farmer delivers his barley in the early fall by waggon to the elevator at the lake. This barley money usually gives the farmer his first fall money.

Tenant farmers generally pay their fall rent with their barley money. Very many of the teams coming down with barley take coal home with them. It is an undeniable fact that the lands bordering upon the lake do not have any more wood upon them. Fifteen years ago a person who would have made the assertion that the majority of the inhabitants would be burning coal to-day would have been scouted. It shows us how much we are dependent upon our neighbors south of us for our coal supply. There undoubtedly is abundance of wood northerly from central Ontario, but for fuel purposes it is almost useless to us. Our railways won’t carry the wood to us if they can get anything else to carry, and even having carried it, when the price is considered, wood becomes almost a luxury. We may as well look the future squarely in the face and realize that in a few years a great part of Ontario along the lakes must depend for fuel wholly upon United States coal. Formerly a few farmers of push and great physical strength would attend to their farms during the summer and follow lumbering and the timber business during the winter. That class of men possessed any amount of push, and performed more manual labor than any man can be found willing{194} to do now, even for money. Numbers of such men became wealthy, for they had double profits coming to them all the time. Rudely as they farmed, they got a profit out of the virgin soil, and the winter’s limited business paid them as much more, hence those who would endure the severe physical strain necessary to carry on this mixed business made money rapidly. Such men got along faster than the ordinary farmer. But that is all changed now. Farming is now a matter of skill, and not brute force and strength as formerly. There is no longer any lumbering or timbering to be followed in the winter, and the Ontario farmer hereabout will get no more profit from that source. Then he must rely to-day only upon his farm and what he can make it do during the summer. When he used to swing his cradle among stumpy fields, then it was a question of physical endurance and strength. But all that is changed now, for his work is nearly all done by machinery, and he must learn to manage the machinery. To make money and succeed well at farming to-day requires as much skill as it does to succeed in any other calling. When the soil was new he could draw upon it unfairly, and still with all the abuse it smiled upon him. Seventeen successive crops of wheat upon the same land has not been uncommon in the past. And yet with all this abuse the last crop was nearly as good as the foregoing ones. This will give one an idea of the extraordinary richness of our soil, and without a doubt a good deal of our soil could be so abused now and it would continue to produce and pay. But the hus{195}bandman has learned to husband his resources, and refuses to draw so heavily upon his soil, and hence to-day he practises a succession of crops, roots, manuring, and ploughing in clover, roots, etc. This he has commenced to do lest he might exhaust his lands, not particularly because he had to do so, but simply through fear of the future. The day may come, when our lands have been cultivated as long as they have been in England, that we shall have to buy outside manures and pay ten dollars per acre for them, as the British farmer has to do; but since we do not, the lot of our farmers is ten dollars per acre better than that of the English farmer.

The most independent person in Canada to-day is the person who can do most things within himself. If a man were to emigrate to Canada who knew nothing but the art of cutting diamonds, his chances of success among us would be slim indeed. For general versatility the Ontario farmer is the equal of any people in any country. He can cultivate his lands, do an odd job of carpentry, build a log-house with his axe, and some can even shoe a horse or relay a plough coulter at their rude forges at their homes. Not long since I had occasion to call on a farmer and found him repairing the family clock, which obstinately refused to run in obedience to its pendulum. It was an ordinary brass affair, and not being a practical watchmaker, the farmer had taken the works out of their case and was vigorously boiling them in a pot of water on the stove. Rude as such clock repairing was, he succeeded in freeing it from superfluous{196} hardened oil and grease, and got it in running order once more.

The Ontario farmer’s success is not anomalous when we come to consider him physically, capable as he is of performing an almost unlimited quantity of manual labor, and of so many kinds.

An American friend happened to be visiting me while a gathering was taking place not long ago here, and on viewing the farmers and their sons, made the significant remark, “What material for an army!”

Dean Stanley, who paid us a visit a few years before his death, said that “the people who could conquer this climate could achieve anything sought.” As to conquering the climate this we have done, and to-day there is no more law-abiding, peaceful, intelligent, and industrious class in any country than among the rural sections of Ontario.

The emigrant who comes to us complains that our farmers work him too hard, or, in other words, that he becomes a slave. During the pressing season of seeding and harvesting there are no people anywhere who work harder than our Ontario farmers do, and with our short seasons it must necessarily be so. As yet very few farmers ask their hired help to perform more work than they do themselves. The farmer generally works side by side with his hired man, and what the farmer can stand it would appear his hired man can. No farmer asks his hired man to plough in the drizzle and rain, which he had to do in England, and come in at night wet to the skin. He does not get his beer as he did in England, it is true, because{197} in our climate of extremes of heat and cold we do not need the beer, and were the hired man to partake of it as freely as he used to in England he could not perform his necessary work for a long time. He sits at the same table with his master generally, and gets just the same fare, and has a bed and room to himself, same as if quartered in an hotel. Meat three times a day he can usually have if he wants it, which he certainly did not get in his Old Country home. And he is paid for eight months’ work, with his board and washing included, $160, or for a year with the same perquisites, $200. Now, the emigrant who comes over here and expects us to feed and lodge him for nothing must certainly think this country a second garden of Eden. As to farm hands flocking into the cities during the winter, I have only to say that I do not see what possible business they can have there. If a man refuses to engage for a whole year he gets his $160 for eight months, and very many remain with some farmer during the winter, doing chores at a low pittance, or perhaps even for their board. Well, he has got his $160 for the eight months of the year, and during the winter he need not spend it, and by the winter’s rest he is recuperating his physical powers even if the farmer did work him very hard during the summer. Those who grumble at the life I have pictured of a farmer’s hired man had better go back to England; but, for a fact, we do not see them ever going back. But the thrifty emigrant, who works away and saves, soon gets enough money together to become a tenant farmer, and becomes himself boss in{198} turn. Usually such men are far harder on their hired help than those whom they themselves worked for. As a tenant farmer he pays about $5.00 per acre per year rent for his farm and the taxes, and if he has a growing family and a saving helpmate, in a few years he has saved money enough to quite or nearly pay for a farm of his own. Could he have accomplished that in the Old World? And still they grumble at our country, call it rural slavery, and write home to Old Country journals letters calculated to do us harm. So many young men leaving their fathers’ farms and flocking to the cities and towns might lead some to infer that the farmers’ sons were sick of life upon the farm. I do not so interpret it. Take, for instance, a farmer owning 150 acres of land and having four sons. Now, to divide his land equally among his sons would give each thirty-seven and a half acres, which is too small for a farm to be profitable as a farm. Then the farmer educates a couple of his sons, who leave the family farm and pursue other callings. With the industrious habits they learned at home, and with good sound physical bodies, they are quite able to succeed in their new callings. One instance of signal success in Ontario farm lands comes to my mind, and I will mention it. A Canadian, the oldest son, whose father died, leaving the mother without means, went to work among the farmers at twelve years of age. For the first three years he only got $40 per year. Notwithstanding this low wage he saved a little out of it. As he grew older he began to get a little more wages, and thus{199} worked seven years to save his first $400. At this time in his life he turned sharp around and went to school, and soon became a school-teacher. With his first year’s salary as teacher, and a few dollars he already possessed from his former earnings, he bought his fifty acres of land and paid about half down for it. Then he hired a man and started to cultivate the fifty acres, by the help of a yoke of oxen. Night and morning he worked faithfully upon his land, chopping and logging, and attending to his school duties during the day. Soon he had his first fifty acres paid for, and then bought another farm of the same size, adjoining it, which he paid for in the same manner that he paid for the first fifty acres, only sooner, for he had the proceeds of the first farm to help him. At this turn in his life he studied for one of the learned professions, and attained a degree, and also educated his other brothers and sisters as well. To-day this gentleman owns 500 acres of land, very nearly all paid for, and farms it himself. His land cannot be worth less than $50,000, and yet he is not over fifty years of age at this time. Another very important feature in this gentleman’s career is that his family have all been taught to labor, and have been brought up to industrious habits, and the individual members cannot fail to make their mark in our midst. Ye city dwellers, do not for a moment suppose that this is only a solitary instance of signal success of country life. Many more might be mentioned, but this is sufficient to show what push, determination and brains will accomplish in rural Ontario. What he{200} has done others can do, and are doing this day. Your examples of city dwellers’ success do not very much surpass this for the years during which the fortune was made. To “blow” about our own country is right and laudable, I maintain, especially when our country in its merits fully bears one out in the “blowing.{201}”

CHAPTER XVI.

In America everything is begun, and but few things finished. Persons from the Old World tell us this, and there is a great deal of truth in it. Driving on Ontario roads one sees a good farm-house, surrounded by trees and fences, all nicely kept, when perhaps the very next field adjoining this well-cultivated farm is considerably given up to stumps and a few boulders, although of stones the best parts of Ontario are happily almost free. There may be a little brook crossing the highway; to get over this brook a bridge or culvert of cedar sticks has been put down, which does well enough in itself, and is quite safe, but it manifestly will not last any great length of time. Now, in Europe, such little streams would be spanned by a stone arch bridge. The little stream as it passes along the fields in many parts, notably in Germany, would be straightened and walled in with stones to keep it from wearing away its banks. Of course, we cannot afford to do all this in our new country, but I{202} think from this time forth what work we do at all should be of a more permanent character than it has been, for the first outlay would be the cheapest in the end. Again, beside a farm well kept, on the next lot will be often found old fences barely sufficient to turn cattle. If it is a board fence half the boards will be off, and one end of them lying on the ground, while the other end still adheres by a solitary nail to the proper post. Or a few posts will have got out of the perpendicular, and point their several ways heavenward, but unfortunately each post points a way and on an incline of its own.

Besides the country roads are, sometimes, even in our best settlements, remains of old logs, nearly rotted away, an old stump or so, and on the sides of the road, upon either side of the waggon track, stumps and convolutions, just as it came from primeval forest, and never smoothed down by the hand of man. The waggon track, passing between these stumps, decaying logs and hillocks, will generally be a good one, but it is this unfinished appearance which causes the European to tell us, with a shade of truth, that things are begun in America but not yet finished. Driving in Europe all seems finished. There is nothing left in the roads, and even if they be narrow, the hedges or walls upon either side are perfect, and there is nothing to mar the scene. It is literally finished. Man has done all there is to do. We must, of course, recollect that ours is a young country, and I am only presenting this disagreeable side of our country that we may begin to right these features. For utility and resource the people of{203} Europe cannot begin to compare with us. The very nature of things here, commencing as we did a few years ago in the native woods, compelled us to seek the quickest and easiest ways of getting on. But all that is past now, and we ought to commence to finish our country.

Those who remain constantly at home do not feel the deficiency so particularly, but to those who go abroad these defects are so glaring that one notices them at every turn. The more we beautify our country the better it will please ourselves, and likewise will be the means of inducing capitalists from abroad to invest among us. We may often see, in driving along our roads, first-class capacious barns and sheds, and every fence on a farm neat and tidy, gates all right, nicely painted, and the whole get-up of the farm neat and thrifty. At the same time this farmer may be living in an ordinary farm-house, or perhaps the original log-house which he built when he commenced to subdue the forest. The farmer is among our best citizens, and presents a striking contrast to our American cousin, who builds a showy house first, and perhaps a very small barn afterwards. This farmer has carved his fortune from his forest and farm, and appreciates that his stock makes money for him, hence he prepares first-class stabling for them, while his own family lives in meagre quarters within square log walls. No doubt his family are quite comfortable in their log-house, but do not essay to cut so great a figure in the world as many of his neighbors of much smaller means and fewer acres. Many times this person will own his{204} 200 or 300 acres, and all paid for. He drives great fat horses on the road, and pulls his cap squarely down on his head, and goes on as if he meant business, which he really does. It is a matter of indifference to him if his wife and daughters be dressed in the latest fashions or not. If they have good, strong, serviceable clothing, he considers it sufficient, and the gimps and gew-gaws of modern times have not yet entered upon his calculations; but he can show a whole row of stalls in his cow-barn containing twenty head of good fat cattle and a lot of growing young calves. Such citizens are desirable, and we are proud of their industry and success. Now and again such farmers get around to the house business, and when they do build, they build well—usually brick, or it may be he has for years been gathering the stones in piles from his fields; if so, his house will be of solid stone walls two feet thick. Many such persons put $3,000 or $4,000 in their houses, and the abrupt transfer from the old log-house to the palatial residence is almost startling to the inmates. Some little time has to elapse before they sit their new house well. But, gradually, furniture comes in furtively in the great farm waggon, returning home from the market, and in a year or so their new homestead is complete in its appointments and in detail, and there is a house any man in America or in Europe might be proud of. The old log-house, likely as not, is left standing behind the new one. As an excuse for leaving the old log-house standing, he says it is handy to put implements in and a good place—up-stairs—for seed corn. But in many instances I suspect he{205} leaves it that he may look upon it and upon the new one likewise in the same glance, and call a justifiable pride to his mind, that the new palace, comparatively speaking, grew from the old log-house, now holding his seed corn and implements. You call on him, and he passes by the old log-house without a remark, but you speak of it, and with just a tinge of pride he tells you, as he pulls down his cap and thrusts his hands in his trousers’ pockets, that on that site where the old log-house now stands, forty-five years or so ago, he cut down four maple trees to make room for it, for there was then no room elsewhere for it on his lot.

In former days, as has already been remarked, the great fertility of the soil caused people to farm rather carelessly and without any consideration of the desirableness of a rotation of crops. Time has changed that to a great extent. I have a number of farm tenants, and would not allow them to crop continually without seeding, etc.—not because my soils are exhausted, but because I do not want them exhausted. While we sympathize with Ireland and would like to see her condition bettered, still to-day I, as a landlord, would not accept her land law and abide by it. If I had to send my leases in to a land commissioner to tell me what I must charge for my lands, I would not any longer own lands, but would sell them out at once and put the proceeds in Government bonds. It is obvious that here in Ontario each landlord and tenant ought to make his own bargain, just the same as regarding interest for money. Until our country is as thickly populated as Ireland is, we need not raise this question of adjudicating upon rents{206} but if that time were to come I would not any longer consider my position as a landlord in Ontario desirable. By this means I would let Ireland have a home parliament, and I was in favor of the Gladstonian programme, but I should think it extremely hard for any government to dictate to me what I must receive as income for my estate, Henry George to the contrary notwithstanding. Should our fair Ontario ever get to entertaining communistic notions, the tenure of property and estates would be not worth the effort to retain, and, as far as I am concerned (and there are many like me), I would rather go over to Old England and take up my abode.

In some instances there is too much liberty in Ontario. In this wise the general public think nothing of tramping over fields, either in crop or not, as the case may be, for short cuts, rather than follow the highways. Some of us are endeavoring to preserve a grove of trees, but there are those who, whenever they are in want of any especial stick for poles, or axe handles, or what not, think nothing of cutting and taking away one or more of the trees of a prized grove. No doubt heretofore it has been thoughtlessness on the part of the public, and the example handed down from the time when timber could be got anywhere for the cutting. But that has passed from us, never to return, and in the future we shall necessarily have to be more strict, as our country is increasing in population. To prevent persons walking over fields is not the idea. I well recollect an anecdote told me in England when I was over there a year or two ago. A man was walking along a{207} stream through a pasture, when he was met by the owner, who asked, “Do you know whose land you are walking on?” “No, I do not.” “Well, it is mine, and you have no business to walk on my land.” “But I have no land of my own to walk on, and where shall I walk?” And the poor man was correct. In Ontario we do not wish even to restrain the poor man to that extent, but the thoughtless and lawless trespass upon crops and timber, and the tearing down of fences cannot much longer be allowed. Those living in the vicinity of large towns keenly feel the need of change in this particular.

Aside from all reasons of utility, it is a very great pity that all our trees are disappearing in the older portions of Ontario. It has been felt that our trees would never be all cut away, and it was thought fifteen years ago that we would not have to rely upon coal. The beauty of England is largely made up by her small groves of trees interspersed throughout the country, and if not great in extent, they relieve the eye and serve as wind-breaks. We have been too prodigal of our forests, but since we have had to go to coal we begin to realize the use, beauty, and benefit of even a few acres of woods here and there upon our farms. I heard an owner of a 200-acre farm near here last year say, that if it were possible he would give $300 per acre to have the ten acres of woods replaced upon the north end of his farm. And this farmer had to draw what wood he did use ten miles, but he wanted the forest on his farm to serve as a wind-break and a thing of beauty.{208}

CHAPTER XVII.

Book farmers come to us now and again. These are usually persons from Britain, possessing some means, but not sufficient to make them gentlemen at home. They have had no particular knowledge of farming at home, but since farming is supposed to be so easy a matter in Canada, they do not for a moment doubt their ability to get on with a farm. They resort to the best works on agriculture; and after the perusal of a few volumes really begin to flatter themselves that they have a very superior knowledge of farming, and are able to teach the Canadian on his native heath just how it ought to be done. Such a man purchases his farm and usually pays the cash down for it, and for his stock as well. Searching over the community he finds a pair of the heaviest horses he can, for the light Canadian horses, he knows, will be of no use to him, and he gets some long poles made at the nearest carpenter shop, and hires the village painter to paint them in black and red sections{209} that he may set them up for his man to strike out his lands by in ploughing.

Light, strong, durable Canadian harness is not to his mind, for he recollects seeing the plough horses in England return from the fields with great broad back-bands on their harness, to which were attached immense iron chains of traces, and he follows suit. And he sets John to ploughing, properly equipped, not for a moment doubting the result of all this preparation. And after a proper method of ploughing he does raise fair crops as a rule, for our lands are ordinarily so rich that if they have even a fair show at all they will produce. Harvest-time coming on, many other hands are brought into requisition, and he follows up the old time-honored custom in England of serving up the quart of beer per day to each hand. In due time his harvest is all garnered properly, and his work nicely done. His man comes in in the morning and tells him, about the time the first few rains come on, that “one of the sheep is sick.” “All right, John, I will attend to it,” for, of course, he can, for he knows he has at his elbow, upon the shelf, somebody’s treatise on the sheep, which is the best extant. The sheep volume is brought down and closely scanned, and the right page describing the disease sheep ought to have at this time of the year found. With the volume under arm he sallies forth to view the sheep, while John follows with the remedies. Arrived at the sheep he adjusts his spectacles at the proper angle upon his nose, and intently examines his sick patient The more he examines{210} his patient and gets at its symptoms the more he is in doubt if the symptoms really correspond with those mentioned on the particular page of the treatise.

Shoving the spectacles up just a little closer on his nose he re-examines his patient, and glances from the patient to the book, the quandary all the time deepening in his mind. John is not allowed to suggest that the sheep has caught cold by lying in some exposed place through the last storm, and that he only wants warmth and food. It would never do to give in to John, for “what has John read about sheep?” The proper remedy is at last hit upon. There can possibly be no doubt about it, but to make assurance doubly sure he re-reads the page and looks his patient over again. No doubt this time, and John is sent to the house for a bottle, from which he will administer the proper remedy internally. John returns with the bottle, with a little water in it, and our book farmer adds the proper remedy and shakes it up thoroughly. All being ready, John makes the poor sheep swallow the mixture, much against its will, for it’s the most noxious stuff it ever had in its life, and the book farmer quietly awaits the result, his spectacles gradually continuing to slip away from the bridge of his nose, and to run an imminent risk of falling off the extreme end of that important organ. Some twenty minutes now elapse and John says the sheep is worse.

Back upwards again the spectacles are pushed, and the patient critically examined. While the exam{211}ination is going on the sheep dies under his gaze. “Dear me; how can that be? I must have got the wrong page. Oh, yes, I see, I did get the wrong page. Never mind, John, I will fix the next one up all right in case it becomes ill.” And he closes the book with a snap, and goes back again to his library.

Such book farmers invariably have failed in Ontario. I defy any reader to fix on any one such book farmer who has succeeded. When he comes to strike his balances, after his crops have been marketed, and has taken an inventory of stock, he finds that his crops have cost him more than they brought back in cash. Another year will remedy that, however, and he tries it again, only to find the balance on the wrong side once more. Usually two years suffice to teach this book farmer that he is not a farmer, but he may possibly hold on for three seasons. Then he calls a sale, sells or rents his farm, and gets a neat, comfortable little dwelling in some neighboring town, which is quite sufficient for him and his household, even if it be not palatial in its appointments. From his retirement he writes back to England that farming won’t pay in Canada, for he has tried it, and it certainly will not pay.

This does a great deal of harm, and our country gets in bad odor among many persons at home, when the book farmer alone is to blame, and not the country.

As to failures at farming, I do not think you can call to mind the failure of any farmer in Ontario, on{212} any good farm, who farms his land in right down earnest. Benjamin Franklin said:

And that was perfectly true then as now. Look at the farmer in Ontario who rolls up his shirt sleeves and follows the plough, who does as much work himself as he possibly can, and only hires for doing that which he can’t do himself, and you will find that farmer succeeding.

We have been getting in Ontario of late another class of farmers whom I wish to speak of. They are the sons of men of means in Britain. Usually they are about twenty years of age, and have just left their schools and homes. Every avenue at home being so full, they are sent to Canada to learn farming, with the parent’s view of buying them a farm as soon as they have learned the occupation. Sometimes these persons pay a small sum to our good farmers, annually, to be taught farming, but they are to work at the same time the same as a hired man. Such a one has worn good clothes all his life, and the transition from a tight-fitting, neat suit to garments suitable for shovelling manure into the waggon is very sudden and hard to endure. A blister or two is on his hands at night, and his back aches from bending so many times all day with his fork for the billets of manure out of the heap. That night he tosses upon his bed, for his bones even are tired and ache, but he is up betimes next morning and at it again, only to find that he has{213} more blisters on his hands again in the evening. If he sticks to it he soon gets accustomed to the work, his blistered hands get all calloused over, blisters are no more dreaded, and he stands his work well. Those who stick to the work succeed and learn to farm well, but in very many cases he gives up and goes to town, and waits, all anxiety, for the next remittance from home. For a couple of years the remittances come to him pretty regularly, and our young would-be farmer is a gentleman about town. During those two years, however, some very urgent letters have been written home for money, and thus far they have not failed to draw. At this lapse of time, and after the receipt of so many letters asking for money, it begins to dawn upon the parental mind that the son is not sticking to the farm in Canada.

Reluctantly and grieving, the parent makes up his mind to send no more until his son will begin to do something himself. Our would-be farmer then gets some light occupation, and does not fail to continue to write for money. Mamma, with a mother’s love, may still send over a few pounds, but if all the pounds cease to come, go to work he must at last.

It is hard to get at what these young men really will do in the end. Some even get so low as to drive a circus waggon, while others work as day laborers in some of our manufactories. When some months roll round, and the parents at home find that their son is still alive and promising amends, past offences are condoned and more remittances follow. And so the years and months slip by, money-less at times and again flush.{214}

It really appears to us here in Ontario that the families from whence these young men come have no end of means, and we grieve to see them fooling away their time and opportunities. Who ever heard of learning to farm in that manner, or who ever heard of any one succeeding in Canada by such methods of life?

I am glad to say, however, that many such young men who are sent out to learn farming do succeed. They who have the grit in them, and who really make up their minds to work, do, notwithstanding the blisters on their hands, or callosities, or tired limbs, get over them all and become self-sustaining and good citizens.

For those who will work we have plenty of room, and good places are always open to them, but the man who comes to us, and who cannot throw off his Oxford suit and don blue overalls and shovel manure when it is required, will not succeed as a farmer in Ontario.

A class of farmer in Ontario I may say a word or two about is the sporting farmer. Usually he is the owner of 150 acres or so of inherited lands, upon which are good buildings, which his father erected, and also cleared the forest from the land. He’s not going to take anybody’s dust on the roads, and he procures a horse which can pass that of any of his neighbors. For a time this satisfies him, but sporting men begin to find him out, and tell him where he can get a colt which can go in less than three minutes. Gradually he comes to think that he might as well get

A SAILING CANOE ON LAKE ONTARIO

{215}

a colt, for it will make a fine driver, and now and again he can win some races, which will go to reduce the price he must pay for him. Entering him at the races, he must necessarily be prepared to back his own horse, and he makes his first bet on a horse-race. Once more sporting men are too sharp for him, for though his horse makes a good dash and behaves well upon the track, it comes in just a head behind, and far enough in the rear to lose the race. He is assured, however, that with some training his colt will do better, and he pays a professional trainer to train him.

At the next race he enters him again, and again backs his own horse, for success is this time assured. By some mischance this time he again loses the race, and his money at the same time. But by this time his courage is up, and he’s bound to win, so he buys a better horse. Again the process goes on, at the end of which he still finds himself out of pocket. The 150-acre farm, which his father prided never yet bore a mortgage, now gets “a plaster” put on it. While this racing has been going on, his farm has been neglected, and does not produce as formerly, so that he is in a poorer position to pay the interest on the mortgage and make both ends meet at the same time. In most cases such young men lose their farms, and at middle age have to begin at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up by themselves and unaided. Fortunately for them, however, they know how to work, and can get along even in their reduced state.{216}

The hunting farmer is another class which we have in Ontario. Like his sporting brethren, he, too, has inherited a farm and can easily make a living, and some money besides. He keeps some hounds and a breech-loader. Do a flock of pigeons fly over, the plough is left in the field to get a shot at them, and the balance of that half day is consumed. Or it may be that some ducks are around in the swamp or creek a mile or so from his house, and a day must be given to them.

A fox has been seen around some hills in the neighborhood, and he must have a day with the hounds. While all this is going on, with the press of work, while he really is at home, many things are neglected. Fences, which his father used to pride himself in keeping always trim, begin to lean. A gate has lost its lower hinge, and a few shingles have blown off the corner of his barn. Gradually his farm loses its neat, trim appearance, and the neighbors begin to call Johnny So-and-so a shiftless fellow. Hunting farmers do not usually lose their farms, for their losses are mainly through want of care for their farms. Unlike his sporting brother, he does not bet, but has a keen zest for the chase, and must indulge in it.

If you will look about you, you will find that such persons do not add to their means, but just get a fair living from their farms, and do not make any great improvements on the homestead. His neighbor beside him, who may take even a day now and again for a hunt, but who daily plods along and follows his{217} plough and drives his own horses, has bought another farm and has a credit at his bankers or at some loan and savings company.

The country school-teacher under the old order of things, and before the school law was amended, deserves a notice. Numbers of these old school-teachers, who furbished up their faculties and got passably well qualified to teach an ordinary district country school in the past, in many instances married the daughters of neighboring farmers, who attended their schools as pupils. In some instances, without a doubt, this teacher had occasion to punish his future wife for some slight infraction of school laws. Causing her to stand upon the floor or to write an extra exercise was a frequent method of such punishments. Becoming the teacher’s wife must, in after years, one would say, make the position rather anomalous, and would, one would think, be a delicate, debatable ground between husband and wife as the years rolled on. Ontario wives are noted for their urbanity, but in such instances it would be manifestly fair for the wife and former pupil to indulge in a little punishment for some infractions by her husband of new rules as the time went by. She could not fairly be blamed if she now and again gave him an extra dose of salt in his porridge, or refused him a light in the evening to do his reading by, or even indulged at a little pull of his whiskers, to pay off old scores of ante-nuptial days. We, however, charitably infer that, at the time the teacher insisted upon his punishments of his future wife, Cupid had not got around.{218} These marriages have uniformly been happy ones, and these former teachers have become successful men after turning farmers. In many instances they get farms with their pupil wives, and having the work in them, usually succeed, and become good men for our country. Such former teachers are frequently found in our township councils, are school trustees, and useful men generally. As their children grow up to the age of understanding, it, however, must be just a little funny for their children to know that “pa” formerly punished “ma” in school, and they are always bound to aver that “ma” has not yet got even with “pa” in the account of punishment.{219}

CHAPTER XVIII.

There are some few persons in every community who have always a weather-eye open for a likely horse which they may see passing by. These men are usually free-handed, and know how to match horses and train them nicely, that they may drive quietly and travel evenly and slowly, so as to be desirable carriage teams. When they can make a trade for such a desirable beast they are in their happiest moods. Trade failing, if the owner does not wish to trade, they will buy for the cash at the very lowest possible figure. Disparaging others’ goods which one wants to buy seems to be the general rule among traders in our province. Not that it is thought that such tactics are disreputable, but it would seem almost inherent in the nature of such traders. Perhaps the farmer has a likely young horse harnessed beside a steady old one, which he is driving along, and the horse-trader fastens his eye on him.

“Wouldn’t you like to trade my off black beast for{220} that awkward colt of yours?” and the conversation is opened and the “dickering” commences.

“How much boot would you give me?” and the farmer turns and looks attentively to the trader’s old nag, checked up so high and so tight that he champs continually at his bit. But it’s an old beast after all, although nicely groomed and made to look its best. On its nigh hindfoot is just a suspicion that a spavin has at one time been “doctored,” and on the whole the trader’s horse much resembles the shabby genteel man with his threadbare broadcloth and napless silk hat carefully brushed.

“As for boot, why I really ought to have $35, but seeing it’s you, I’ll trade for $25,” says the trader.

And the farmer chirrups to his team, becoming impatient with the man’s absurdity. “Hold on a minute, let’s see if we can’t split the difference,” says the dealer.

Now, there’s this peculiarity in many an Ontarian’s dealings that it is very generally proposed to “split the difference” where the buyer and seller cannot come to terms. It may be a hap-hazard way of doing business, and has no foundation in sound reasoning; yet it is a fact that very much of the buying and selling in rural Ontario is done by “splitting the difference.”

Our farmer, however, has not yet seen any difference to split, and thinks still that he should get the best. And the horse-trader tells of the merits of his horse, its weight, how gentle it is, how well and handily it will work, and impresses his idea upon the{221} farmer that his colt is yet untried and scarcely broken. Up to this time in this “dickering” the farmer has not made a positive offer, and once more chirrups to his team and starts upon his way.

“Stop a minute. If you think you could not split the difference, how will you trade, any way?”

“Well, I might trade even, since your horse is heavier than mine and better able to do my work, but how old did you say he was?”

And the farmer gets off his waggon and looks in the horse’s mouth.

Here, as all the way along in this “dicker,” the horse-trader has been too sharp for the farmer, and the horse’s teeth have been nicely filed and his horse is made to appear only seven years old.

A swap is made at length on even terms, and this horse-trading jockey drives off with the farmer’s valuable colt, worth about $165, and leaving for it an old used-up horse, worth perhaps $80 at most. And these horse-traders are not gipsies either, for every one expects them to trade horses, but men in the community, who, take them out of their own specialty, pass as respectable men. Between services at the church this trader slyly tells his neighbor how he got $125 the better of So-and-so at the last trade, with a sly laugh and a cough. With his forefinger he digs his companion gently in the ribs, and in great confidence tells him that he knows where there is another whopping good trade for him. A bank account this man has, too, and in every way is the pink of perfection, save in his own peculiar business; pays his bills{222} promptly, dresses his family well, and is never backward in his contributions to the church, and is really, as he pretends to be, a decent man. But on a horse trade he would cheat his own father. Just how he reconciles this peculiarity with his theology we have never been able to discover, but somehow his theology is elastic enough to stretch over the point, and he conveniently allows it to do so.

Maybe it’s a horse I want to sell, and I have advertised the fact in the local papers. After tea, and on the eve of setting out for a drive, this horse-buyer comes along and inquires for the “boss.”

“Understands I want to sell a horse,” and I tell him that the hired man is in the stable and will show him the horse.

But he must talk with the “boss,” and I am forced to go to the stable with this would-be buyer.

“Bring out that Clyde horse, John; this gentleman wants to buy him,” and John leads by the halter the horse which six months ago I paid $180 for, and now having no further use for him, I wish to convert into bankable funds.

“Rather stocky, and just a little heavy in the legs,” and I prepare myself to hear my good, sound, strong horse so run down as to be only fit for slowest and easiest work on a farm.

“You’d be asking as much as $125 for that horse, I suppose, boss?”

Now, as far as I have ever known or can discover, I never yet heard of any one selling a horse for as much as he gave for it, unless he belonged to the{223} horse-dealing fraternity. I reply, however, “A hundred and forty dollars is my price for this horse, and I paid $40 more for him only six months ago.”

“Whew! boss, you paid far too much; don’t know as you know it, but just now the Americans are buying lighter horses, and horses of this stamp don’t sell so well. Now, if you were to say $130, I might—”

“John, take him back to his stall, for I am afraid this gentleman and I can’t agree.” And John turns the horse for the stable door.

“Don’t be in such a hurry, boss; perhaps we can split the difference.” An appeal, as before, to “split the difference.” But at this stage of the dicker I am thoroughly disgusted, and wonder if it be necessary to practise so much deceit and cunning in the purchase and sale of a horse simply.

I reply that $140 is my price, and not a cent less. “Well, boss, I guess I’ll take him, but you’re a very impatient man anyway. There’s a blanket on the fence; I suppose you’ll throw that in, and, of course, the halter now on him.”

In sheer desperation to get rid of this pest of a buyer, I give up the blanket, and the horse is put in the buyer’s charge. “Grand growing weather now, boss; hope your turnips haven’t been eaten by the fly;” and thus the conversation drifts to polite subjects, and he inquires as to the health of the family, and I can do no less than reciprocate and ask him if his care are likewise well.

There’s something mean about the whole transaction, and one feels that his manhood is lowered by{224} his “dickering.” This buyer knew that my horse was richly worth all I asked for him at the first, but he formed a deliberate plan to cheat me out of just as many dollars as he could by lying, or by running my horse down contrary to his own deliberate judgment.

There’s a gathering at neighbor Jones’s, and I see over the fields a lot of carriages in the road. Looking still, I see the village hearse come driving down the road towards the house, with its black plumes nodding as the wheels feel the inequalities of the road. More of the neighbors have collected, and now I see the pastor of one of the village churches coming in his light covered carriage.

“So Mr. Jones’s eldest boy has gone, boss, and it will likely be rather hard on the old man, for he did think a lot of the boy, even if he did run away from him,” neighbor Dixon remarks to me as he is driving by to the funeral. This neighbor Jones is one of the fore-handed farmers of Ontario, and the only quality that can be praised about him in any way is his industry. Up before day dawn, winter and summer, and drudging daily till dark at night, and his wife’s just like him.

He’d only two boys, and this oldest one was so harried at home that two years ago he ran away to Texas and became a cowboy. Only a few short weeks ago he returned with seeds of that dreadful malarial fever in his system, and only to die. The second boy is not yet old enough to run away, but in the ordinary course of events, as soon as he does get old enough, he’ll follow his poor dead brother’s example.{225}

This Jones is a Yorkshire man, and his wife is a North of Ireland woman. Last winter they boarded the school-master. At four o’clock of a winter morning this dame would call him up for breakfast. For some days the school-master stood it meekly, until he finally told Mrs. Jones that this first meal would do for a lunch, and that he’d take some breakfast before he went to school. It is a large farm-house Jones has, and it is nicely painted and well finished, and for a marvel contains really good and appropriate furniture. The matter of furniture can be explained, for Jones sold a lot of hay to some cabinet-maker, and being afraid of his pay was glad to get the furniture.

His hired help are worked beyond all reason, and have scarcely ever a part of Sunday for themselves. Some poor ignorant fellow of an emigrant has come over and has not yet learned our prices, and Jones has pounced on him, and so he gets his work done for a song.

Get rich? Of course, he does. How could such a man help it?

The parlor is open to-day—the first time I have seen it for a twelvemonth—and the shutters are thrown back. Neighborly decency says I must go to the funeral, and I get my horse and carriage.

In the parlor the boy is laid, and the fine embellished coffin contains all that is mortal of the poor lad, Jones’s eldest heir.

Well, it’s a nice parlor, even so, and those things which money could buy in a lump are there. The little bric-a-brac, or knick-knacks, or books, are of{226} course absent, for Mrs. Jones only sees the parlor monthly, when she dusts it out, and no one has any time about Jones’s to make it homelike.

Books are conspicuous by their absence, save only one, a large gilt family Bible, opened last when it was put in here, some months ago, for no one has any time to read at Jones’s.

A hush, and the minister rises and announces the hymn. Neighbors’ wives and daughters have mercifully gathered, and, standing in the hall, and upon the stairs, raise their voices in one of Watts’s soul-stirring hymns, and gradually the assembled neighbors join in. A prayer follows, and then the solemn warning. All voices are hushed. Boys of the neighborhood are the bearers—boys whom this Jones boy once loved and made his confidants and associates. The coffin is placed within the hearse. The procession moves, and soon the grave closes all, and Jones has lost his oldest son, and is disconsolate for a day or two.

Again the parlor is closed. When its cobwebs will be again dusted from it, as I have attempted to do, it is impossible to say. Possibly not until the next boy comes home to die like his brother. I am picturing Jones’s home to show one of a class of money grabbers and slaves in Ontario. The bright sunshine of a home is not there. Books, papers, recreation, society and neighborly chat are all absent.{227}

CHAPTER XIX.

Your city dweller turns away from a life in the country on account of society. Granted that we in the country cannot make calls and pay fashionable visits as easily as you can. But most good country families have a few genuine friends and acquaintances whom they visit periodically, and such visits are really appreciated by the persons entertaining. There is not much duplicity about our friendships, for we are not so much thrown together as city people; and when we do meet at the different family boards, genial right good fellowship is the rule. The cant and half-friendly reception of your city fashionables we know not of.

There is no aristocracy in Canada, and all attempts to found any such class in America have signally failed. It is contrary to the genius and spirit of the democracy of America, for are we not quite as{228} democratic as our neighbors to the south of us? Of all the prominent families who were on the boards at the time of the American Revolution, in the last century, only five are in existence this day. What a comment on the mutability of human affairs! Your titles and riches don’t stick in America, and there is many a boy in rural Ontario who now follows the plough who will yet rise to eminence as his years increase. To create and maintain a titled class in Canada, in the face and eyes of the great Republic adjoining us, would be an anomaly, and it never can be done. There seems to be a growing disposition to exclusiveness among the city families, and to discriminate to too great a nicety as to whom their sons and daughters shall marry. Their alliances in the matrimonial way are ever to be with those of the presumably rich, in contradistinction to others possessing push and merit, but not quite as many dollars in immediate view. So far as I can judge, I do not know of the son of a business man to-day in any of the country towns hereabout who inherits the wealth his father once possessed, and who pursues his father’s calling. John Adams, when ambassador of the United States to Paris, wrote home to his daughter who asked his views about her approaching marriage: “Marry an honest man and keep him honest.” In Adams’s advice there is no mention of the dot, as the continental Europeans use the term, and it is earnestly to be hoped that this word will never find any currency among us.

The long winter evenings, when our inhabitants{229} must perforce remain by the lamplight, are the most trying period for our young people. Some sort of excitement seems to be the great desideratum. In most country parts the local church will have evening anniversaries and teas, to which the near inhabitants invariably flock. Ministers on other circuits usually come to such gatherings, to assist the local minister, and much genial talk usually flows. The half-grown farmer’s son at these meetings usually essays his first attempt to wait upon the fair sex, and brings some neighboring farmer’s young daughter to the entertainment. Paying the required admission fee for both, he considers her usually his partner for the evening, and pertinaciously sits by her side. His half-bashful, scared look, and the twitch of his downy moustache, even if they do show some awkwardness on his part, betoken a thoroughly honest fellow, whose intentions are above suspicion.

The influence which the clergy exert upon the community cannot for a moment be gainsaid. Ontario to-day listens to her ministers, and in a great measure they form a standard for the opinions and actions of its inhabitants. It must necessarily be so, for Ontario people are a church-going people, and in many country parts the ministers are the best read and most cultivated persons in their midst. All honor to our clergy, for they have done and are daily doing a good work. Even sceptics tell us that we must build gaols or churches. We prefer the churches, hence we have them, and our people attend them and listen to our ministers, and crime is rare, and our people are{230} law-abiding, no mobs, and industrious. Protoplasm, evolution, or modern agnosticism have not reached our rural population to disturb their simple faith.

Comparisons of travel lead me to think that our country churches might be made more attractive. Who has not seen in the Old World gems of little country churches, moss-grown, ivy-wreathed, and surrounded by trees, shrubs and hedges? Among the graves at the church’s side are invariably rare shrubs and grasses, let alone flowers, but the whole embowery of green giving an air of quiet repose. And with the steeple or tower pointing to heaven, no place seems better calculated for reverential feelings than do the rural churches of the British Isles.

In Ontario we build bare, glaring walls, and our churches are right, from a modern architectural point of view. Even if we cannot grow ivy, we can greatly beautify our churches and grounds by planting shrubs and evergreens, and thus relieve the stiffness of our newly constructed churches and grounds.

Henry Ward Beecher says that he never knew a bad family to come from a home where there was an abundance of books and papers. Our Ontario farmers do not provide enough and sufficiently varied reading matter for their families. Most of them take a weekly paper, an agricultural paper, and generally some religious paper, the organ of the denomination to which they belong. These are all well enough so far as they go, but pictures are perhaps the quickest, best, and most agreeable way of imparting instruction. All our farmers could{231} easily spare annually the cost of enough journals to make home daily attractive, so that the new papers to come each day forward would be looked for and something sought. The London Graphic or London Illustrated News would keep us posted pleasantly on matters at home, and, in fact, they would follow England all over the world, and improve the family taste at the same time. From New York a paper should certainly be taken, for we must, of course, follow our cousins just south of us, with their seventy-five millions of people. The New York semi-weekly Tribune would keep us thoroughly up with the times, and there will be nothing in it that one need be ashamed to read before his daughters, which is a great recommendation in this day of trashy literature. By all means add Harper’s Weekly Illustrated, and Frank Leslie’s as well, for they do not require much time to read—the pictures show for themselves; and then there is the Century Magazine, which is perhaps the most popular to-day. As to merit, I only wish we in Canada could afford to produce anything nearly as good. Its illustrations will shame any English magazine, and I would certainly add Harper’s Magazine as well. For the little folks, by all means the St. Nicholas Magazine, beautifully illustrated, and with stories down to the mental calibre of the little ones. Of course, I would not forget our own productions, and would take a few of them in addition to those now taken.

Now, I know a good many will look upon this as too much to read, will say it costs too much, etc.{232} They can all be taken for less than $50 per year, and if once they begin to come to the family, the boys will soon stay at home nights rather than go prowling around the country or seeking society in the towns and villages.

Excitement people must have, and your city people get their excitement by conversing with one another, the theatre, lectures, etc. But if our country people would take the periodicals I have outlined, in conjunction with their social gatherings at churches and in neighbors’ houses, they would have a constant fund of excitement and pleasure at home. Each mail would be looked forward to with eagerness, and the quiet evenings at home would be most pleasurably and profitably spent.

Even if they read upon subjects quite foreign to their own occupations, some knowledge would be gained. Knowledge from whatever source is valuable, and some day will, without a doubt, come into play. In this fast century many people who are able financially eschew a country life, and flock bag and baggage to the cities. There are some instances wherein a city life is more desirable than life in the country. Admitted that the city dweller can hear the best lectures of the day, and now and again witness a play of genuine merit upon the stage, yet there are pleasures in a country life which will outbalance those privileges, and of which I cannot help speaking now and again when my pen flows freely and I am in the humor. When writing of life in the country I do not mean twelve miles from a lemon, as Gail{233} Hamilton writes in her New England bower, but rather within easy reach of the daily mail. Around me are no signs of want. The examples of wretchedness the city dweller has brought to his notice so very often we know not of. It is truly said, “that one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” So far as our pleasures and feelings are concerned we do not want to know, i.e., while we are willing to relieve the distressed we are glad that such examples do not come before us to harrow our feelings.

My hardwood fire burns brightly in the open fireplace as I sit behind double windows defying the 7° below zero without to penetrate, and my books and papers rest upon my writing-desk within easy reach of my hand. The children come in from their slides upon the ice with cheeks aglow and faces on fire, induced from the sudden change from the cold outside to the genial warmth within. You city dweller would think half-grown boys and girls too big to enjoy their hilarious, life-giving fun, and would want them to be nicely dressed and walk your city streets in the prim of propriety.

The examples of all great men and women prove distinctly that in order to be such you must first have good constitutions to support big brains, and our children by this are laying the foundations of such sound constitutions. Soon enough they will be men and women, and let them have their fun as long as they can.

In this locality most of our lands are held by inheritance. The sons of the pioneers who cleared the{234} forests are the owners of the soil as a rule to-day. The rising generation, the immediate sons of the pioneers, are not as a rule equal to the old stock. The reason is, so far as I can judge, that they have seen the hard toil and steady, unchangeable life of their future, and having received a little education, which their fathers did not possess, they judge themselves too smart to follow their fathers’ footsteps. A good many of these sons, as I have before remarked, flock to the cities to live as half gentlemen, and very many others lease their farms to tenants, and reside in the towns hereabout.

There come before my mind as I write dozens of instances of young men who inherited a hundred or a hundred and fifty acres of land, worth probably from $80 to $125 per acre, or, say, they are worth individually $8,000 to $12,000, and these young men think to be gentlemen on these means. There are so many of such instances that I must needs make a note of it. Seemingly they get on for the present tolerably well. But the fences and buildings which their fathers built are yearly rotting away, and there is no timber here to replace them; and having yearly lived up to their full rental it becomes a serious question to know what this class of persons will do in the end. Englishmen with small means are gradually buying up such farms. Given the entering payment, and your sturdy English emigrant, who has spent a few years in this country, will pay for the property from the money which he makes off it.

Many of the pioneers and their sons in this locality{235} have been as nomadic as the Indian. Having cleared or partly cleared up their lands, which they obtained for a merely nominal sum, or by Government grant, and spent many years in hard toil, in fact the very hardest kind of toil, they pull up and sell out, and move to the promised West.

So far as I have yet been able to learn, I cannot now recall a single instance in which an Ontario farmer, from this locality, who left a 100 or 150 acre farm, is to-day worth more money in the West than the same lands he left are worth here to-day. It would appear that these persons obtained their properties too easily to learn their real value, and hence are supplanted by the emigrant, whose previous lot in his old home has been a hard one.

Upon the other side of the picture, there are some of the sons of those pioneers who early learned wisdom, and commenced just where their forefathers left off. Such young men or middle-aged men are buying out very many of the small properties around them, are keeping good blooded and grade stock, and are a credit and a benefit to the country. They ever dispense a generous hospitality when called upon, and ordinarily will give the visitor as much of their time as he desires. Their sons and daughters are invariably healthy and well on in a common school education, and are the hope and interest for the future of our glorious Province of Ontario.

And yet there is a dark side to their lives, or rather that of their wives. Female help in the house is so difficult to obtain that the wife of many and many a{236} man, who is worth easily from $30,000 to $50,000, has perforce to perform more hard manual labor than has the wife of the ordinary mechanic, the owner, perhaps, of a very humble home, and who earns his $1.25 or $1.50 per day. Pardon me, reader, for drawing this unpleasant picture, but it is indeed too true, and there is something very wrong in the “eternal fitness of things,” when men of such ample means are able and willing to pay for servants to ease their wives’ lots, and they cannot be obtained. The only hope on this score seems to be in emigration. When our country becomes more thickly populated, and a living in the country is not quite so easily obtained, then the daughters of households having therein a number of girls will go out to work rather than be pinched at home. Formerly the daughters of the farmers would go out to work among the neighboring farmers, and usually married the sons of those farmers, and became in their turn mistresses themselves. All this is now past, and our farmers’ families, with increasing wealth, do not go out to work but feel perfectly able, as no doubt they are, to live at home.

Not a few of our farmers, feeling that they were not big enough upon their own farms, became storekeepers or manufacturers in the towns. No doubt, in the abstract this may be well for the general progress of those towns in building them up and laying the nucleus of new industries. They do not, however, as a rule, succeed in the new fields of business they have chosen, or if they do not become the principals of businesses in the towns, they sometimes lend their{237} names as endorsers to assist those who are principals of such businesses. Endorsations were sometimes very easily obtained by the glib-tongued business man, and for a time all went on well, until some financial crisis overtaking the business man, consequent ruin came to the farmer. These instances have been so many that I speak of them as exemplifying another phase of life in the country. Latterly, however, the landowners are becoming more conservative of their means and credit, and are disposed to “paddle their own canoe.”

Since the law of primogeniture was abolished in Canada, the hold upon land has become very slight, and the examples of large landed estates being retained in the same families for over two generations are so very rare that they need scarcely be mentioned. In some cases our rich men make a terrible mistake in bringing up their families. They are not taught to labor, but live a life of ease, with the idea that the family property will be sufficient to support each individual member. But with the nomadic habits of our Canadians, and the light stress usually heretofore laid upon the paternal acres, each individual share soon vanishes, leaving them to learn to fight the battle of life at a terrible disadvantage, because frequently they are then past their first youth at least.

My wood fire still burns brightly as I turn to my morning mail with its treasures of current literature. Talk about your city bustle compared with this, in my cosy seat beside the fire and all these treasures at{238} my elbow! There are no gas bills to pay, nor water rates, and the mail comes to me daily, just as regularly as your city mail does. Then what do we want with your city?

Speaking of the post-office reminds me to say that the meanest hovel in the land can to-day put itself in almost daily communication with the best minds of the age. Such service the mail hourly and regularly performs for us, and is such a great factor to the pleasure of our lives, and yet we scarcely bestow a thought upon it. No, I do not propose to try to assume that life in the country would be very pleasant or desirable away from the mails. Given a daily mail and a comfortable country-seat, and easy access to the train, so that I may come to the city quickly and easily, if you have therein any real intellectual treat, and I yet fail to see what are the inducements to make one prefer life in the city to the free life in the country.

A rural life is a natural life, and a city life is an artificial life. Man in his first estate was an arboreal being, and in such surroundings throve as he does to-day. Our Ontario families, as a rule, who leave good properties in the country to go into the cities, make a mistake in almost every respect. Even if the parents do not feel the trouble wrought upon their families during their lives, their children almost invariably do not make the men and women they would have made had they hung on and occupied the paternal acres. In most instances these are sold, and in a few years the money scattered. Had they held on to the paternal acres, and bought more, they{239} would have been among our staunchest and best citizens, as well as among the wealthiest.

In Europe all successful men look forward to the day when they can own and live upon a farm. Bismarck had his country home, and we know he prized it, for we often heard of him going there to get away from the cares of office. Going back to earlier times, we find that the great men of the world loved their country homes quite as much as the English country squire does at this day. I take down old Xenophon from its place on the bookshelf and see that he says he sees the ridges piling along the ælian fields, and from the way that he makes the remark, he loves the sight, and loves to be in the midst of such ridges, where some husbandmen are ploughing. Theocritus hears the lark that hovers over the straight laid furrows, and if Theocritus did not love such a scene and dwell in its midst, he would never have given it to us at this remote day. “Establish your farm near to market, or adjoining good roads,” old Cato says. So old Cato loved the country, and we all know his head was level. I am afraid some of us in Ontario have followed old Cato only too literally, and have built our houses almost overhanging the road-side, when they would have looked far better and presented a much prettier sight set back from the road and surrounded by trees and lawns. Hesiod tells us that we ought not to plough the land when it is too wet, and also how to put in a new plough beam to replace the broken one. Homer the Great says a farmer should keep two ploughs on hand for fear one{240} should get broken, and he does hot forget to praise the wine which the country produces about his rural home, and adds some caution about its too copious use.

When Hesiod and Homer loved country life in Greece so long ago, can we be amiss in praising a country life in Ontario to-day? As my eyes run up and down the pages, I can hear the swallows twitter and the lark sing, in my fancy, as they heard them. They praise the crispness and freshness of the vegetables which their gardens yield them, and they can go on and describe feasts which they partake of at their country homes, the materials of which come almost without exception from their farms. Virgil, I infer, was not much of a farmer after all, but he tells us that he loved his country home, and seems not to have the most remote thought of removing to Imperial Rome. Mostly he praises the bees and the wine, so it is evident every one sees a beauty in country life for himself, as his peculiarities may be. Yet Virgil left us some very good hints, though he evidently made some mistakes. He tells us, for instance, that lands only need cultivating to obliterate the obnoxious weeds. Tull, however, said about one hundred years ago, that the land only needed mixing by deep ploughing to make it produce indefinitely. Now, Tull was a man of means, and only lived a rural life from the love of it, as did the old worthies whom I have instanced. Ontarians, we have a grand country, and we who are in it, let us stay therein and enjoy it. Let those persons remain in the cities who are now{241} in them. For us nature in all its beauties is daily unfolded before our eyes, and let us daily enjoy those beauties. If we can by any means inculcate an increased love of country homes, we will continue to beautify our homes and improve our country.

Real properties in the cities and towns of Canada have been very fluctuating, often being held at prices far beyond any intrinsic value they could possibly possess, while again, the very same properties fall away, and frequently become totally unsalable. Yet during commercial depression good farm lands have held their value very well and have even, after a temporary period of dulness, steadily risen in value year by year.

To illustrate the peculiar change of town values to which I allude, I may give an instance coming under my own knowledge. One of my forbears bought, about the year 1815, a large building tract situated on King Street, Toronto, very near the market. For many years after the purchase this property was wholly unsalable. Taxes were put upon it, and yearly it became a burden. Somehow, in Canada we are not very careful, as a community, of the rights in property of the individual. Accordingly, in this instance, taxes for street improvements, with gas, water, sewers and other special levies, were put upon this land. A day finally came, about the year 1845, when to own property in Toronto meant either disaster or a very large income from without to retain it. A purchaser coming along at about that year, his offer was taken with avidity. My{242} people were glad to get it off their hands, and thus was closed a history, so far as they were concerned, which was a fair sample of city property in Canada and its mutations for more than thirty years. Since that time the property in question rose to enormous value, but has again fallen on account of trade to some extent deserting the locality.

Another feature of city and town life we must notice, viz., the constant interchange of views among the inhabitants as to business and politics on account of their close proximity to each other. An instance occurring in one of our Canadian towns will illustrate what I mean. In this town some few moneyed men gathered nightly and exchanged views on stocks and the like. Some of them had speculated in this way to the extent of a few hundred dollars and had been moderately successful. At one of their meetings some one introduced the subject of lard.

Lard became the topic. Others came, heard and pondered. Small lots of lard were then bought in Chicago, and in a few weeks sold, and some ready profits realized.

“If a little capital will win money in lard in Chicago, a large capital will yield much more” was the reasoning, so they joined forces and got nearly every man with ready cash in that town to put money into the joint fund for lard. Again they bought in Chicago—this time largely—and the commodity began to rise in price. Moreover it kept on rising, and never seemed to recede a point. These operators began to reason that if they held all the lard, they{243} could dictate prices and could control the article. They put more money into it and bought more lard, for they considered it to be what is called “a dead certainty.” Days and weeks passed and lard still held on. Fortunes truly seemed to be within the grasp of our group of townsmen. There could be no mistake about it, for they had, as they considered, all the lard in America cornered, so that no one could beat them.

One day, however, some persons in Chicago offered an immense quantity of lard from some unknown source. So great was the amount that our townsmen could not tackle it.

Down came the price. Still down it came, and down every day, until in a few days these lard cornerers in the Canadian town were entirely “cleaned out” and a loss of $2,000,000 actually sustained. From that loss for ten years afterwards that town was as quiet as a country place, and its magnates felt and acted with the timorousness of poor men.{244}

CHAPTER XX.

To show the possibilities to be accomplished in Ontario, I purpose to cite some instances coming under my own observation of Ontarians who have succeeded. I take the ground, that the opportunities are as great, if not greater, in this Ontario of ours, for persons to achieve success, as in any part of the world. Certainly the Old World presents no such field for successful operations, and the only possible parallel can be found in some of the neighboring States.

Of the two I would certainly give Ontario the preference, for most of those who have risen in the United States were in some way helped by their parents and friends, whereas our successful men have invariably risen from no beginnings at all, as our country emerged from the forest.

Now for some instances of success: About twenty-three years ago, one who could not read came to{245} this part of Ontario, possessing not one dollar, nor had a friend in America, but had come over from Ireland a few years previously quite alone, in order to better his condition. He began by chopping wood by the cord. Saving enough thereby, he bought a team, and then bought wood by the lump and hauled it to town to sell. Then he bought a wood lot, and proceeded to haul the cord-wood from it, which he sold to manufacturers in the towns. After a time he got his lot cleared of the wood, and put fall wheat on it, seeding the land down to clover and timothy at the same time. The next season he had unlimited quantities of grass for stock, and hay for wintering them. Then he went around the country and bought up cattle in droves, and put them on this grass. As soon as they were in condition these cattle were sold off for the Montreal market, for we had not at this time begun the business of shipping cattle to England. It is needless to add that he always bought his lean cattle at the very lowest possible figure. If some poor fellow, no matter how distant, was obliged to part with his stock by a forced sale, this man would be on hand, and invariably secure it. This cattle business coined money for him. Where he got his knowledge of the cattle business I am unable to say, but unlettered as he was, and unable even to write his own name, he seemed to take in all knowledge intuitively, as it were. In a word he seemed to drink in knowledge as a sponge takes up moisture. He could often be seen standing listening to groups of men who were talking,{246} saying but little himself, but treasuring up every word dropped by them. The original wood lot was added to by another, which in its turn became a gold mine to him by the sale of its wood. This in its turn was cleared and seeded down to grass, as the first one was, and cattle placed on it as well.

Soon the first cleared lands became arable, and he then ploughed up the virgin soil, and began raising barley and peas. Invariably his crops turned out extremely well, which gave him funds to buy still another wood lot. And so the process went on. Should a lot of lean cattle come into the Toronto market in the fall, unfit for butchers’ use, our successful man, always with one eye looking to the east, while the other looked to the west, scented the bargain afar off, and came and secured the lot.

Without making repetitions, I will dismiss this man by saying that, a few years ago, before he divided his land among his sons, he was the absolute owner of 700 acres of land, and possessed besides an enormous stock of cattle, horses, and farming appliances generally, and was then easily worth $80,000—in twenty years he had made $80,000 from nothing in Ontario. This fact needs no comment. It shows the possibilities of our Ontario, and for a solid gain, without gambling, but property made to keep, I think I can safely defy the world to beat the record.

The next example I am going to relate is of success achieved in a totally different field, but wholly the growth of Ontarians, and it can be justly cited.

Two brothers came out from Ireland about thirty-{247}five years ago. They possessed a good education, which is all they did possess besides the clothes upon their backs. Each got a situation as clerk in dry goods stores in one of our cities. By dint of close saving and strict attention to business, they were able after ten years to start a store on their own account. In this store they did all their work, and if there was any profit in storekeeping they got paid for it. After a few years they opened out branch stores in smaller Ontario towns, and these branches invariably succeeded and the profits were good. Their credit now had become assured, and buying mostly for cash, with their high credit they were able to buy at the lowest possible figure. The war broke out in the States about this time in my story of these men. The United States money went down a long way below par, but for some time their goods did not rise to keep pace with their depreciated currency. Our men bought largely in the United States and sent over their gold drafts, which were sold at a great premium, and thus their goods were placed upon their shelves at ridiculously low figures.

In boots and shoes, of which they bought enormous quantities, they doubled their money on every invoice. Without pursuing this narrative further, it is just as well to say that as the war went on and the equilibrium came about in the price of goods in the United States, and the depreciated currency got in sympathy, these men found themselves with thousands of available funds on hand.

{248}

Into manufacturing they then entered. In this new branch the same painstaking and foresight which gained them success in storekeeping made the wheels of the manufactories revolve to their profit. Year by year their manufacturing operations succeeded, and they found themselves the possessors of more capital than their manufacturing operations required. Next they became bankers, and again in this new line the old business habits of constant care, watchfulness and keen oversight, wrested success from the business. Their manufacturing operations they still kept on in connection with their banking business.

Success so phenomenal pointed out the principals as sound, far-seeing men, and we next find each brother the president of a bank and their financial position fully assured. During this series of years they have found time to take a relaxation now and again by trips to Europe, besides holding municipal offices among the people where they reside. I am not in a position to tell for a certainty of the wealth of these brothers at this time, but it is conceded by all who know them to be in the hundreds of thousands.

This has all been done in thirty years in Ontario, and done fairly and honestly. They have never gambled, nor taken chances, but always done a square, legitimate business, open to the closest scrutiny. If those persons in our country who are railing at capitalists will stop and read this narrative, they must see that these persons have a moral as well as a legal right to their capital, and it is to the glory of our Ontario that they have made it and possess it. Indeed these men worked and saved and lived close{249} until they made their start, and they surely have a right to it.

All capital in Ontario was acquired by closeness and saving, for very few persons in Ontario brought much money into the country. The capital, in fact, has been created here by just such saving and downright hard work as these men did. What is true in the case of these men is invariably true in the case of others who have succeeded in becoming capitalists in Ontario. I hope this narrative may be in somewise an incentive to others to try and do likewise in their own particular calling.

A young New England lad began about forty years ago selling goods through Ontario from a waggon. His employer furnished the horses and waggon. Every working day through rain and snow found this young man on the road. No storms, nor floods, nor cold snaps deterred him, but every day he did business for his employer, and weekly he made up his balance sheets, and remitted to his employer his weekly sales.

His salary he saved, every cent of it, reserving for himself only enough for the strong serviceable clothing he wore. He got an interest in the business in a few years, or sold the goods on commission. The knowledge he had gained while selling before for his employer at a salary enabled him as he grew older to increase his sales, and likewise his profits. Daily he plodded on, never for a moment swerving from the path of duty, and as in the instances before narrated, such application has only one result—and that{250} is success. Success he certainly did have, and at the age of twenty-five this young man found himself the absolute owner of $10,000.

He then became a farmer. Here, as in the selling of goods, the same perseverance which succeeded before caused success now. In his farming he succeeded. His harvest was always got in first in the neighborhood, and his plough was soonest after the harvest dancing through the fields making the next crop a certainty. It is almost a pity that so good a farmer as this young man was was debarred from farming. His wife’s health failed, however, and he found it necessary to get nearer a town, where she might have better medical care, and so he sold out his farm. From a farmer he became a manufacturer. In this new calling he masters every detail of his business. He is at his work early and late, and daily does more downright hard work than any man in his employ. Gradually his works are added to, and his shop becomes known throughout the length and breadth of our land. Seasons of adversity are guarded against, for he always keeps an eye to the future. In fact, a panic can scarcely strike him. Cash he pays for his stock, and his position becomes so strong that he feels he really knows his ground and is fully master of his business. Capital gathers; it is the same story I have to tell as in the former instances. Such work, plodding and oversight cannot fail to bring accumulated capital. There is no other way to get it so that it will stick. Of course, we have the examples of stock-gambling, but who{251} will pretend to assert that capital by stock-jobbing ever does stick? And now this manufacturer, having made capital, becomes a banker. His banking operations, in the hands of a man who has literally carved his own fortune, cannot fail to be a success. A millowner he next becomes besides a manufacturer and a banker, and about as busy a man as Ontario can produce to-day. Daily he is on the move, early and late he is at his post, and every wheel is well oiled and runs smoothly. Such men are a positive benefit as well as an ornament to our young country. $300,000 he has made in thirty-five years, that being his present wealth, which is conceded by all who know him. Recollect, he began as a lad, fresh from a New England common school, and has literally made himself.

A Scotsman came to Canada about forty years ago, with nothing but his hands to help himself. He had been used to farming at home, and here he hired himself out to a farmer. Year after year he toiled on, worked and saved. In about fifteen years he found that he had saved enough to buy and pay cash for a farm. You, no doubt, reader, think it a long time to work for the first start, but just wait and see what he did when he got a start. He marries his employer’s daughter and sets up farming for himself. If he was a good hired man, he was equally good as a boss, and his farm began to bloom and season after season to look neater. Keeping right on, even with the low prices which he then got for his grain, he added to his farm until he owned absolutely{252} and farmed 150 acres of Ontario’s best lands. Now he is on the high road to success, but the big Scotch heart within him went out to his father-in-law, and this came near being his ruin. His father-in-law had been a wealthy man, but became involved, and the son-in-law endorsed for the father-in-law for a sum as great as his land was then worth. It is only the old history of such endorsations to repeat: the endorser had to pay, of course. The father-in-law failed, leaving the young man almost penniless. Neighbors, not of the sterling stuff he was made of, advised him to sell his stock, because that was not mortgaged, and take the money and run away.

“I will pay every cent,” said the honest Scot, “only give me time.” Away he went to the holders of the notes, and plainly and squarely told them that he could not pay them now, but if they would wait he would pay them every cent.

“Then you are not going to run away?”

“Never! I will work it all out in a little while if you will only wait.”

And wait they did.

The merchants with whom he dealt, knowing the sterling qualities of the man, came forward and told him that he should have anything he wanted. And he bared his arms, went to work, and gradually paid off every dollar of his indebtedness, and stuck to his home when those who counselled him to run away had lost their homes and gone away west. He buys another farm, and with its aid, and the old farm as well, pays for it in a few seasons. A palatial home he erects, and his farm becomes one of the best culti{253}vated in the locality. Now, had this man not been known as a man of sterling integrity, his property must have been all taken from him when those notes became due. But being so favorably regarded, he got the chance which put him on his feet again. His character stood him in good stead, for his merchants having lands they had taken for debts, offered them to our Scot on favorable terms, with easy terms of payment, and the Scot finds himself the absolute owner of five hundred acres of first-class land, besides money at his credit in the banks, and a large farm stock at home. In thirty-five years this penniless Scot makes about $70,000, after the reverses he had suffered from his large-heartedness. Money honestly, fairly acquired, a respected member of the community all the time, a man whose word no one dare impugn, manifestly his course was far better than if he had run away, and it is probable had he run away in his adversity that to-day he would have been in very moderate circumstances. Again, I doubt if any country in this world shows better possibilities than Ontario does for a man to rise. And these are not particularly isolated instances. Many more I might cite of what may be achieved in this glorious Ontario of ours.

Before drawing this chapter to a close, I wish to speak of one more class of Ontario persons, whom I never recollect to have seen mentioned in print before, and these are the Ontario Shylocks. Usually these persons came from the British Isles, mainly from England, fifty years or so ago. They would ordinarily be younger sons of a good family, and not being able{254} to inherit much under the British law of primogeniture, took their one thousand sovereigns or so, and came to Canada. Arriving here at that early day, and there being but little money in the country, their cash commanded large rates of interest. At first they lent their money at 15 per cent, or so, and were for a time satisfied. But as time wore on, the greed of inordinate gain gained upon them, and they began to demand a bonus of 10 per cent, beside their 15 per cent, interest. Getting on in this way, it is almost superfluous to add that they soon doubled and trebled their means. Was some unfortunate settler unable to pay at the appointed time, an additional bonus of 10 per cent or so would satisfy the lender. Lands he would not acquire, for they would never be valuable, he thought, and nothing was worth anything but money. The consequence was that these Shylocks became wealthy. But I almost defy any reader to fix upon any such person to-day, or the family of such a person, who are worth anything now. It appears according to the eternal fitness of things that money so got by extortion does not stick. A Temperance Society of England offers a prize of one hundred guineas to any one who will trace money down to the third generation, got by the sale of liquors. But here in Ontario we do not need to go down further than the second generation to find that money got by extortion does not stick. To-day those very settlers who paid the 15 per cent. interest and a bonus besides, and kept their lands, are still at the fore, and their descendants will inherit many broad acres.{255}

CHAPTER XXI.

When the Manitoba fever broke out a good many persons in this locality, and some of my own tenants among the number, became uneasy and thought of emigrating. Some did so, but notably those who were not located on farms here. For a time they sent back glowing reports, and all seemed well, and even Ontario would not seemingly begin to compete with Manitoba. It is not, however, to be supposed that there have been no disappointments. One instance will suffice. A tenant farmer from near Whitby, worth about $2,000, went to Manitoba a few years ago, and took up 320 acres of land. When the boom was on he wrote home that he could sell his land for $10,000. Next fall passed. His wife came down visiting, and said that they had sold one-half their land for $6.00 per acre in order to save the rest; also that they had threshed three days and only had fifty bushels of grain, and lamented that they had ever{256} left their farm near Whitby as tenants, to become owners in Manitoba. It may be that this is an exceptional instance, but those now even tolerably well located in Ontario run a serious risk in pulling up for the North-West. When Ontario has lands which will produce seventeen crops of wheat in succession, and when we can raise cattle absolutely free from diseases, owing to our climate, what need have we to look to Manitoba? It is now an assured fact, that cattle coming to Canada from England, diseased, and remaining ninety days in quarantine, as they must, lose their diseases, and do not take them on again; hence we have a goodly inheritance in Ontario, in raising blooded cattle to sell to the Americans for breeding purposes, for the diseases which periodically break out in the West and South-West, among the cattle, are positively unknown in Ontario. I met a Southerner from Charleston, S.C., early this winter in Toronto, and in the course of conversation asked him what he thought of our climate. “Just like champagne,” said he. It is an established fact that our six months’ winter, in our clear cold atmosphere, precludes the possibility of cattle diseases among us, and is equally conducive to producing a lusty strong race of Canadians, in hardihood the equal of any race anywhere.

Already Michigan has much of its lands parcelled out in 40-acre farms, and if Ontario land gets divided into smaller holdings, so that the maximum of her farms is less than 100 acres, it will support double its present population. This calls to my mind what{257} I have seen in Germany. The lands along the Rhine River were originally surveyed facing the river with a narrow frontage, and running back a long distance, in some instances as much as a mile. Upon the death of the farmer his narrow strip is equally divided lengthwise among his several sons. These are again divided among his sons in their turn. It is not uncommon, as the result of such divisions, to see a strip of land on the Rhine only six rods wide and a mile long. This shows the reader how it comes that Germany is so densely populated. Again, the area of United Germany is near 210,000 square miles, and it supports a population of at least forty millions of people. Ontario has at least half as much more surface, and is only supporting two millions to-day. As to the comparative quantities of waste land and productiveness between us and Germany, Germany is scarcely fit to be compared with us at all, and Ontario has many millions of acres to be brought under cultivation yet, and these added to the smaller farms will soon double our population. Horace Greeley said on 100 acres two men were enough; on 50, four men; on 25, eight men. Without a doubt our fertile soil will quickly be densely populated and every rood cultivated. Investments to-day are as safe in Ontario as in any quarter of the globe, and its farm lands will rise as the population increases.

Some years ago the Century Magazine published a beautifully illustrated article on “Canada as a Winter Resort.” This magazine is widely circulated, and the publishers boasted that they had printed 180,000{258} copies of that particular number, which was, of course, widely read in Europe. Now, this article was all about snowshoes, toboggans, toques and ice-palaces, and would lead the stranger to infer that Canada is a land of snow and ice. The premises are false, so far as Ontario is concerned, and no one would think of building a snow-palace in Toronto, because during the days required for its construction a thaw would probably occur, which would demolish the ice-palace faster than it was ever built. Out of two millions in Ontario, I think I am safe in asserting that not more than 5,000 of its inhabitants ever stepped upon a snowshoe. As to toques and toboggans, they are scarcely thought of. Our youngsters do some coasting down the hill-sides when we have some snow, and this is the extent of our tobogganing. It is undeniable that we do have some cold weather in Ontario, but such periods are only for a few days, and are invariably followed by mild weather. The four feet of snow on the level, which they consider the proper thing for Quebec and the Maritime Provinces, we know not of in Ontario. Our farmers were ploughing on the 10th of December next before the appearance of the article referred to, and this is not unusual; generally the farmers do not take up their turnips before the middle of November. It is usual for us to have some frost, and perhaps a little snow about the Christmas holidays, and during January we look for our sleighing, if we are to get any, for the season. But even during this midwinter month a thaw is almost certain to take place, and generally clears off{259} the snow, and during this particular January the ponds of water were all open. A small chance, then, for an ice-palace. During February the cold is not so intense, for the days have become longer, and it will almost invariably thaw during the middle of most February days. The month of March is, by all means, the most disagreeable month in Ontario, not on account of its cold, but because it is windy and blustery. Our snow, if we get any in this month, usually drifts at the fences and impedes trade. In April we get freezing nights and thawing days, so that the hubs frozen during the preceding night turn to mud. Some farmers sow in April on land prepared in the fall. It may be that the frost is not quite out of the soil down below the surface, but if the Ontario farmer can get enough loose soil to kindly cover his wheat, he can sow without fear. May is our general seeding month for lands not prepared previously and sown in April. But little chance, the reader will note, for an ice-palace in Ontario.

Without a doubt, the fact that Ontario is surrounded by the immense lakes gives it its exceptionally mild climate. The isothermal line drawn through central Ontario passes through the centre of France and the southern part of Germany. No one thinks of speaking of France as a land of snow and ice, and no more should Ontario be put in that class. Montreal may, no doubt, get tourists sometimes in the winter by means of an ice-palace, and it pays her; but for the impression to get abroad that ice-palaces and snowshoes and the like are the rule in Canada is{260} calculated to do us harm. The emigrant who is perhaps debating in his mind whether he will emigrate to Canada or Australia, is quite likely to choose the latter country if he thinks he must needs learn snow-shoeing as perhaps the first element to success in Canada. We are glad to have our Governor-General and staff at Ottawa enjoy themselves tobogganing down the artificially-made slide of boards and scantling near Rideau Hall, and no doubt the ladies do look attractive by the glare of torches, dressed in blanket cloaks, toques, fezzes, and the like. Such peculiarities, however, do not add to the wealth of our country. The Ontario farmer during these winter months is making manure by feeding his cattle, and drawing it out in heaps upon his land. He is busy, and is every day adding to the productiveness of his lands. He utilizes the snow in getting some rails or posts for his fences, and does not hibernate or fritter away his time. During the few exceptionally cold days he may stay by the fireside, but generally he is thoroughly busy preparing for the coming summer, and there is plenty of work for him to do. While the Quebec farmer passes his time in indolence, the Ontario farmer is daily adding to the cash value of his property and also to its productiveness. When summer does come we find that Ontario far outstrips Quebec in the quantity of grain grown per acre and also in the total quantity produced. And yet Quebec was well settled when Ontario was a howling wilderness.

Now, if the people of Ontario were spending their{261} winters, when not hibernating, in tramping on snowshoes or riding down declivities on toboggans, then might such sport be considered peculiarly applicable to us. To show unmistakably the great difference between the Quebec peasant, who hibernates during the winter, and the Ontario farmer, who works at the same time, look at the effort the Ontario farmer makes to rot his straw, while in many parts of Quebec straw is carefully guarded and husbanded. In Ontario it is the constant effort to get it all used up and made into manure. If we get too much open winter in Ontario, the farmer has as much as he can possibly do to get his straw worked down, because the cattle do not use up enough of it. Hence we frequently see large stacks of straw left over. In this part of Ontario it is more a question how to get the straw rotted than it is how to save it. Then, drawing the comparison between us and the land of toques, where straw is sparingly produced on soils not well farmed, and what do we want with any of that toque and snowshoe business!

Mr. Grant Allen, the eminent writer, who, although born here, was an Englishman by residence and education, having revisited Canada and the United States after an absence of eleven years, took occasion some years since to give utterance to some remarks on our country in the Pall Mall Gazette. His remarks should never have been allowed to pass unchallenged. I cannot go into the matter very fully for fear of too great length, but I must needs touch on the more salient points, and it will be necessary for{262} me to inscribe Mr. Allen’s words here and there as a text for my remarks. He says: “Looking at America with a geological eye, I was impressed as I had never been before with the enormous extent to which the country has suffered from the ice-sheets of the glacial period.” And after making this remark he goes on to say that England has suffered less from this great cause. Now, this remark of his refers to Canada and the United States indiscriminately, and without a doubt it is true to the letter. While I accept the statement as true, I at the same time want very distinctly to qualify it so far as Ontario is concerned. Ontario has measurably suffered from the glacial action, but it has as a whole suffered far less than any one of the other provinces or any of the northern United States, taken as a whole. I am referring to old Ontario alone, and not the new portion lately acquired to the west. Take old Ontario: The moraines have been frequent enough to give us the most alluvial soil of any country of like extent on the habitable globe. This remark does not apply to the more northerly portion of our province, which is as yet but little occupied, for we cannot controvert the fact that this portion did suffer sadly.

Mr. Allen evidently did not know Ontario well enough, or he would have excepted from his general remark the garden of the world. In a former chapter I made the remark that if a line be drawn from Belleville to the Georgian Bay, all that part of Ontario west of that line contains the most alluvial land and the richest of any in the world, with the{263} fewest breaks and the least waste land. My own observation, begot by travel and reading as well, gives me the courage to fearlessly make this remark unqualified.

Mr. Allen goes on to say: “In the valleys there is soil enough, but even there the ice has worked almost as much mischief as it has done on the hill-sides, by heaping up and mixing in a most heart-breaking way enormous masses of boulders, which are almost the despair of the agriculturist.” Now, this remark is true, but sweeping as it is, still I must again except our own portion of Ontario, where there are no “heart-breaking, enormous masses of boulders.” New York and Pennsylvania would come in for a place under this remark, for those who have given the subject much thought and observation have seen that those two States do possess a vast amount of waste land, and even their best alluvial lands are in no sense equal to ours. To forcibly illustrate: A New Englander came to this locality about 1820, and settled on an excellent farm. During the troubles of the rebellion, he felt annoyed at the troubles some ultra-Loyalists gave him on account of his American origin, sold out, moved to Pennsylvania and bought a farm there. A neighbor here went down to see the old man just before his death, when he told his boys in the neighbor’s presence, that they must sell out and get back to Ontario. And he was a pushing man and located on an average Pennsylvania farm.

{264}

“America bears an immense harvest, yet the immensity of the harvest only corresponds to the immensity of the area from which it is reaped. Acre for acre, the Old World yields heavier crops than the New,” again says Mr. Allen.

In regard to our immense annual crop in America it is true that it is really garnered from a tract as big as all Europe. Then, since America has not a population to consume its crop, even if the crop be a light one and the yield per acre low, we in America must annually have an immense surplus, and America is looked upon as the granary of the world. This fact alone establishes my exception in Ontario’s favor from Mr. Allen’s remark, and I feel that I need not say more on this point. But let the Old World recollect that America is yet in its infancy, and when we begin to approach the Old World in density of population, and work our lands better, in spite of the “heart-breaking” boulders, America will surprise the world and prove to it that it is only beginning to do what it can. That it is capable of feeding the whole world there isn’t a doubt, and we want no doctrine of Malthus among us at all. I do believe it is true, acre for acre, the Old World is ahead of us. And yet we have in places soils which would put anything the Old World can produce to scorn, even if we cannot apply the remark generally. It must be recollected that Europe has been drained and its waste places reclaimed, and but few of ours have, so that we have America just as nature gave it to us. Fortunately in Ontario we have but few wastes to reclaim, for, as I have said before, it is the garden of the whole. The{265} only parallel that I ever saw in the Old World to compare with Ontario is in Hungary, which very much resembles our country. Then, again, as to extent, Hungary is nowhere when compared with us. As to remarks about the hard life of farmers in America, it may be to some extent true. Especially is it true for the women; want of domestic help is the trouble, and for the present we cannot remedy this evil until our population becomes greater. Would that Miss Rye and others would send us out more girls.

But in no country in the world do the people live better than they do in Ontario. Nor is there any country where the necessities and sumptuousness of life are more abundant. Go to one of our teas, or soirees, and see the vast amount of rich varied food there spread before the partakers. The richest cakes, the most varied, and the exceeding abundance there seen, must quickly convince even the most casual observer that our people are really well off, and are living in luxury. One sees nothing of this sort in Europe, and we really use food the most prodigally of any people in existence. An ordinary good Ontario family wastes more than a French peasant family uses at all. This is a fact which cannot be controverted. I might instance how carefully the German family lives, and show likewise that the Ontario family wastes nearly as much as these families consume; so even if we sometimes have exceedingly low prices, we fare as sumptuously as any people in this world.

The abundance in Ontario is something marvellous{266} to the people of the Old World. Look into our orchards and see the bushels of fruit lying under the trees and going to waste, and this will convince the most persistent grumbler that we are all right after all, and have but little to grumble about. In thickly populated Europe all this fruit would have been picked up and put to some use as human food. Every apple would be used, and dried and stored away for future use. It is only the plentifulness of everything in Ontario which causes our people to be so wasteful. See our children take single bites from apples or pears, and throw them away, only to bite another. Wasteful again, because of exceeding abundance. Really our farmers have but little to grumble about, for our land literally flows with milk and honey, and is one of the most bountiful countries in the world.

Some of our citizens now and again cast longing eyes towards Florida, fancying that in that land of perpetual sunshine more pleasure can be experienced than in our own land, possessing the four seasons clearly and distinctly defined. It is quite a mistake. This beautiful Ontario of ours presents, as the seasons flow along, a variety of contrasts in scenes and foliage which the warm climates know not of. Our springs are incomparably finer and pleasanter than anything down south, and our foliage is greener and cleaner than hot countries can show. Our summers are just hot enough to give us a taste of what hot weather really is, and make us long for the russet fall season, with its golden grains, and red-cheeked fruits, and{267} delightful sombre days, when our atmosphere becomes veritable champagne in itself, followed by the forest pictures of bright colors as the frost touches the foliage. Our bright, crisp, clear, cold and jolly sleighing is life-giving to the uttermost human extremity, and we would not have a warm, muddy, rainy winter if we could. Then comes our spring season, just the interlude, as it were, between winter and summer, when the old drifted snowbanks are disappearing, and this is the season which gives us the “sugaring-off,” which cannot be duplicated anywhere out of our North American continent.

Ontarians have a glorious heritage in climate, soil, seasons, government, and pleasures, and we do not need to be casting about for anything better in this world, for it is not to be found. Any one of us who does not love our beautiful country is recreant to his best interests. Indeed, if he does not, I boldly assert it is only because of his want of knowledge of other lands to enable him to make comparisons with his own. Let us stick to our country and place it far to the fore, as it is now quickly attaining to that position.{268}

CHAPTER XXII.

In my readings from time to time I come across many remarks by foreign and other authors, that I feel are belittling to our country. If we only took to the self-laudation practised by our Yankee neighbors, such arguments, or, rather, want of arguments—but rather noises—would at least make us better known. I feel that we as a people are far too modest. Remaining at home, or at least within our own boundaries, one does not so keenly feel how little our country amounts to or is known abroad. On travelling on the continent of Europe, now and then in company with some Americans, and once getting away from the seaport towns, I could not make the people understand that I was anything but a Yankee. Since I came from America du nord, I must, of course, be a Yankee, and no amount of explanation in the best French I could command would make them understand that I was a British subject. One day particularly, in Florence, Italy, I recollect buying a postage stamp, to send a letter home, on which was{269} the plain address, Canada. Being somewhat in doubt if I had placed sufficient postage on the letter, I asked “if that was enough for Canada.” “’Tis all the same. All America, all United States.” “But this is not for the United States.” “Oh, yes, it’s all United States, all America, du nord.” And so my country counted for nothing. The great Republic completely swamps us away from home, disguise the fact as we may, and we may as well acknowledge it.

Even in Liverpool, I recollect when walking down the landing-stage, valise in hand, about to board the steamer to sail for home two summers ago, a little newsboy ran up before me and said, “Sir, don’t you want to buy the New York Herald?” Of course I bought the paper for the little urchin’s shrewdness in picking me out as being from America. I only mention this simple anecdote to show that across the Atlantic it’s all America and all the United States, almost without a discrimination. In the matter of passports, now happily not nearly so necessary in Europe as formerly, I have found at different times it is always better to be provided with one for emergencies which may at any time arise. Going down into Italy by the Monte Cenis route, the officials dumped us all out at Modaire, through which town and depot the line between France and Italy passed. I had to enter a door and pass a drawn-up guard of soldiers and through a passage for the examination of passports. Ahead of us were a number of Americans, who simply showed the eagle on the seal of their passports, and who were allowed to pass unchallenged.{270} My turn came, and I showed the lion on my Canadian passport, and then my trouble came. It was not British, the examiner said, but from America, and did not bear an eagle like the Americans’ passports. I felt humiliated and disgusted, that my own country with its five millions, and the third naval (commercial) power of the world, was literally unknown. Fortunately for me the examination was not very strict, and I passed by parting with a small coin or two.

I would surely obtain a British passport if I were again travelling in regions where passports are needed in order to get along easily and without detentions.

Americans when abroad on the Continent very frequently call upon their consul, and would return to the hotel, telling us of the delightful hour spent in genial talk with their consul, and the information obtained from him, and letters of admission to galleries, museums, etc. Consistently I cannot pass myself off as a Yankee and go with them, but determine to visit the British consul, who ought perforce to be my own; and I call on him, and he looks at my passport, which he deliberately folds, and hands back to me. He is too well bred to treat me positively rudely, but the general air of his demeanor instantly makes me feel that he considers me “only a colonist” and a person of no account in particular, and not really worth very much of his consideration. One experience of this kind suffices usually, and hereafter I let the consuls alone. To be “only a colonist” at home does not seem to weigh one down{271} very much, but abroad to be told that a few times makes it beyond human nature to not feel a spirit of resentment. As to being a colonist it is quite right, and I am proud of the fact and do not wish to change my position. If they would leave off the small word “only” before “a colonist” it would take away all the sting, and make the Canadian traveller feel that he is just as good as our British brothers at home, our forefathers and relatives. When this “only a colonist” was said to me, I generally felt it like the greeting accorded a son of some obscure man; the son being exceedingly worthy, and having risen by his talents, but “he’s only old Jones’s son,” and of course he can’t be anybody. Canada is usually spoken of by foreign writers as a part of the “frozen north.” This is really too bad when Ontario, which contains very nearly one-half of the entire population of the Dominion, possesses a climate far milder than the New England States, and quite as mild as that of the great State of New York, just south of us. In an article on “Acclimatization,” in the Popular Science Monthly, by so eminent an author as Professor Virchow, is this sentence, “No one has, for example, seen a people of the white race become black under the tropics, or negroes transplanted to the polar regions, or to Canada, metamorphosed into whites.” This coupling of us by implication with the frozen north, coming from so eminent a man as Virchow, cuts. It is true that Canada runs far to the north, but at the same time it would be just as fair to speak of the United States as in the polar regions, since it has{272} Alaska, which is veritably in the Arctic zone, but at the same time, and just the same as with us, but a very small part of their population is there. Writers never speak of the United States as in the polar regions.

When we are not spoken of as inhabitants of the polar regions we are described as French. Now, the inhabitants of Quebec have always contended that they are the Canadians, and what the rest of us, the great majority, are I can scarcely make out.

Once I was in an office in Broadway, New York, and happened to state that I was a Canadian. The Yankee manager of that office remarked “that he as yet hardly knew how to classify Canadians—whether as Englishmen or Americans—and, in fact, that the world had not yet made up its mind what we were.” If we were all French (and I am not for a moment speaking disparagingly of our habitants), we could then be easily classified. But to be called “only a colonist” in Europe, and in New York neither an Englishman nor an American, makes one’s position as a genuine Canadian a little foggy. The effort to distinguish by the spelling “Canadians” for the English-speaking, and “Canadiens” for the French-speaking, is all very well, and will no doubt work well enough at home. But abroad the average Englishman, if you spell Canadian with an “e,” will simply put you down as an ignorant fellow and a poor speller. And now can you wonder what the people of continental Europe will think of us, if they think of us at all, as apart from the United States? The plain truth of{273} the case is that we are far too modest, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, and do not “blow” enough about our own country to cause it to be better known abroad. The great west of the United States was surely made and settled by the Yankee “blowing.” Their papers are ever full of “spread eagle,” and always telling about their boundless country, always praising their own institutions, and pulling down those of the “oppressed monarchy of Great Britain,” and always representing their country as the earthly paradise.

Dr. Lyman Abbott, in the course of a visit to Ontario, frankly admitted—privately, of course—that our free school system, and likewise its management, were superior to those of the American States. Then let us wake up, and since it seems to be absolutely necessary to “blow” about ourselves, let us copy the apt example of the Yankees and do it—and do it so strongly as to make up for past deficiencies.

Guide books of travel, published both in America and Europe, for travel in Canada, send the tourist invariably from New York City up the Hudson by steamer to Albany; then by the New York Central Railway to Niagara Falls. They do admit that the Falls are worth seeing. Then they send the tourist by steamer to Toronto, and tell him to take the Richelieu steamers, down the St. Lawrence from there, and run the rapids to Montreal. From Montreal he is to take the night boat for Quebec and come back again to Montreal by the day boat, and then go south to Lake George, and this is all the{274} tourist is to see of Canada. Thousands of American and British tourists form their opinions of us from what they see on this water tour through Canada. Of course, going down Lake Ontario they see next to nothing of us or our country, because the lake is too big to see much on the shore. Entering the St. Lawrence, they view shores studded with rocks, and have not the faintest idea of our fertile lands and rich farms, which give to Ontario its wealth. The wealth of Ontario is certainly in her comfortable homesteads and fertile fields. Of this the tourist knows nothing, and he goes down to Quebec city to see, as best he may in America to-day, the best example of a city in the eighteenth century style; and he passes out of our borders, having come almost wholly in contact with our French population, and goes away considering our land a land of stones peopled by Frenchmen.

The tourist travels too quickly to get proper impressions of a country, I think I hear many readers say. Granted, but still many impressions are got of countries by tourists by such rapid travelling, and we cannot help the fact. The only way we can help the matter appears to me to be for our railways to join and offer a general tourist ticket, taking the tourist all over our country at a reasonable rate, and allowing him to stop off when and where he will. Such tickets ought to be advertised in Great Britain and the United States, and be on sale there. If once bought they would be used. While using such tickets the tourist could scarcely fail to get consider{275}able knowledge of us and of our country. Tourists, as a rule, are persons of means and of influence at home. Many of them might thus be induced to bring capital to our country and make it their home, to our and their advantage.

Ontario would make a grand State, the Americans tell us, when they look with coveting eyes over this way. Yes, indeed, she would, and any other one of the States would not keep pace with us; but they are not going to get us. Give our people a reciprocity treaty, so that we can trade with our American cousins, and leave Ontario to manage Ontario’s affairs, and she will remain content. If a vote of Ontario farm-owners were taken to-day on the reciprocity question, nine out of every ten would vote for it, and we should have it. Our people are loyal and attached to the Mother Country, and have no thought of severing the tie, but Britain is 3,000 miles away, and the United States is beside us. It is obvious that we can more easily trade with the United States than Britain; hence, to us, a treaty is to-day the greatest element in our politics. Even with all the restrictions now imposed by the United States and ourselves, our trade with the United States is enormous.

Politicians may wrangle and fritter away our money at Ottawa, and cause us to many times feel well-nigh disgusted at them; still, so long as they do not resort to direct taxation at Ottawa our country people will stand an almost untold amount of fraud without much complaint. If the Mother Country{276} desires us to be joined into the talked-of universal confederation, we would first like to know how we are to be benefited thereby. For, as we now feel, we think that Ontario bears nearly all the burdens of our Dominion, and we do not want to have tacked on to us any more burdens or some other poor relatives of colonies. If the Mother Country would put on a tariff against all the world except her own colonies, and allow us free trade with her, we could see some use to us for such a gigantic union. Just now, as it is, we do not want to join any such scheme for an idea, although we reverently love and honor our common Mother Country.{277}

CHAPTER XXIII.

It has occurred to many of our young Canadians that there are very few positions attainable to us as Canadians really worth striving for. We are so peculiarly situated, that we seem to be in a large measure debarred from obtaining positions which would ordinarily fall to the lot of those attaining eminence among five millions of people. To become a member of a Provincial Legislature is, perhaps, the first position ambitious young men ordinarily aspire to; and while the position itself is really honorable, and also one of usefulness, yet it is not wholly satisfactory. As to becoming an M.P., and spending three dreary months or so in Ottawa, it is not a desirable situation. In fact, most aspiring young Canadians, who come from good homes, do not take kindly to the idea of being forcibly banished for three months out of the twelve. In Washington, on the other hand, since consuls and charges d’affaires of all civilized nations are resident there, it naturally follows that that capital must be the place of social activity{278} and the like, and a place where one can meet persons worth knowing, and who are wholly different from ourselves.

To become a judge, no doubt, is the aspiration of many young Canadians, and not for a moment would any one attempt to decry the desirableness of that honorable position. Yet the fact is, that we have altogether too many young men aspiring for legal positions. “Too many lawyers in Canada by three-fourths” is heard among us as common everyday talk. Since Canada has no foreign consular service, all consularships are squarely and flatly out of our reach. Bayard Taylor began as a boy tramping over Europe on foot, and gave the world his boyish volume of “Views Afloat,” which is quite as readable to-day as when first penned. And he kept on travelling until he became quite familiar with most of the languages of modern Europe. Then a consulship was given him, and he really obtained a position worth working for. At different courts he became the representative of the great American nation, and enjoyed social advantages which can fall only to the lot of persons thrown in contact, as he necessarily was, with people from every quarter of the globe. Finally he became ambassador at Berlin, and enjoyed the highest honors there. There he died, and his body was sent back to his American home, having been accorded especial honors by the German court. Here was a career, it appears to the writer, which was really worth striving for. He was not a lawyer, nor in any wise specially educated in any particular{279} specialty, but yet with the career open to him, by dint of his own push and good common-sense, he really rivalled in position any of those among us who make political fights to get to Ottawa, or pore over the midnight oil to become eminent in law. And what is true in Mr. Taylor’s case is equally true in the case of many representatives who to-day are the accredited representatives of the American Government at the court of St. James. Take, for instance, the case of S. S. Cox, who was American representative at Constantinople. Mr. Cox was, no doubt, a tolerably clever man, but not a lawyer, though generously educated. Like Taylor, he travelled and gave to the world the result of his observations in his “Arctic Sunbeams” and “Orient Sunbeams.” True, he had been a member of Congress, but even if one were to become an M.P. in Canada that would not further him in any way for foreign preferments. No one will for a moment doubt but that Cox’s position as charge d’affaires at Constantinople was far preferable to that of any M.C. at Washington, or an M.P. at Ottawa.

We have a High Commissioner, some one reminds me. Yes, and we may instance Sir Charles Tupper at London; but the social status of that gentleman over there must have been so doubtful that one can hardly jump to the conclusion that his position was desirable after all. Of course, his salary would be desirable, but of that I am not speaking. Do not for a moment suppose that Sir Charles would be very graciously received by the representative of the Czar,{280} for instance. Obviously not, for he was not a real ambassador, or even a consul, and he had no particular powers, anyhow. The representative of the little kingdom of Greece, as the representative of three millions of people, would have far more social status in London than our Sir Charles, who ought to represent over five millions, and half a continent. So I think I might as well give over this matter of consulship, for there’s really nothing to be attained in that direction.

We educate a young man at home in one of our universities, and then to give him a good finish send him off to Oxford, or perhaps to Heidelberg, and our young man comes home the representative of one of our best Canadian families. He has not been educated for a profession particularly, for his parents as well as himself realize that the professions are already quite full enough, and also that there’s no éclat to be gained from the hardest drudgery in any one of them. Now, I ask, what position is open to him at all commensurate with his careful education and his talents? Really among us, as Canadians, there is none. No doubt, at Oxford or Heidelberg, he has studied the laws of nations and many matters of civil polity, and ought to be as well qualified, after a little apprenticeship, as any one anywhere to be the foreign representative of his own country at St. James, St. Cloud, or St. Petersburg. But he cannot, and must either lead the life of a gentleman of leisure among his people or go in for sordid money-getting. If he leads the life of a gentleman of leisure he does not fully fill{281} the sphere of usefulness his countrymen are by right of common citizenship obviously justly entitled to. As to common money-getting, we hope never to see the day when the most cultivated in our young country will give themselves over wholly to that sordid life.

An aristocracy in Canada is not what I am aiming at. But we do certainly need some peer among us to leaven the mass, and keep us refined and up to the social standard. The United States is already possessing such persons. The case of Charles Sumner, for instance. He could have made money as a lawyer, no doubt. But with his great talents and careful education, he spent his life among his New England kin, except when travelling or at Washington, and no one will for a moment deny but that he leavened his fellows during his whole life. Political preferments or legal standing he never sought after, but he, with his culture and pure life, did real good to his fellows.

It would be easy to elaborate and speak of many more such examples, both in the United States and Britain. But having illustrated the point, I have said sufficient to prove that such a cultured few among us are desirable and to be commended. They do not call them aristocrats in the United States, and I do not see why they should be so termed here. In the future, as our country grows, and our old families become stable with the steady growth of our country, their sons must be educated broadly and generously, and will no doubt be a benefit to us by leavening{282} the lump; and we certainly do not want to cast our ringers at them, even if they do not get down to sordid money-getting, but seek for something higher. Yet, as I set out to prove, there are really few positions among us worth their striving for. If they would rise among us and make themselves known, I fail to know where or how they are to do it. Is a clerk or head of a department needed at Ottawa? Canadians, we are led to know, do not as a rule get the preference. In very many instances some one must be imported from the British Isles and given that position right over the heads of our own fellows. Now, we all love honor, and respect our common Mother Country, but this is carrying the matter too far, without a doubt. Do not for a moment suppose any Canadian will be exported from Canada to London to fill any one of the clerkships or offices over there. Such an instance is not within my knowledge, and I am at a loss to know why we need do it for the young English, Scotch or Irish man. The remedy for the want of a goal for Canadians I am not going to speak of. Let those who can, and wish, take the matter up and tell us. Yet we do not want independence just now that we may have foreign consuls and the like, and thus open careers for our young men of abilities, for we are too poor yet to do all that. Nor do we want annexation to the United States, for our people are unmistakably British, disguise the fact as one may. Our people are really British in thought and feeling, and are not disposed to throw off the Mother Country. If Imperial federation ever takes place, it{283} is probable that the different colonies will then have a resident charge d’affaires at each sister colony, and our chosen members would assemble at the central parliament at London. In this there would be a help to our ambitious young men, and perhaps some remedies will thus come about. But it is absurd to think that our rising young men will always be content to go on as we are, finding no goal in our midst worth striving for. These young men see, perhaps, their college-mates in the United States away ahead of them in positions of trust, while they cannot possibly get higher as Canadians, and are apt to become in a measure disgusted with home. The writer can recall instances of his fellow college-mates in the United States whom he thinks were no cleverer than himself, nor had they any special advantage over him in any wise. Yet to-day in his memory he can fix upon a number of such American college-mates who are now foreign consuls of the United States Government, M.C’s, senators, and others who occupy high positions in the army and navy of that Government. In drawing the comparison between them and himself it is quite natural for him to ask himself why his college associates so signally succeeded. The answer must be because success could be obtained in their own country, and such success led to preferments worth striving for, to the contra-distinction of our own lot as Canadians, where there is no career open to us.

That we all love Canada, and are all satisfied with {284}our form of government, goes without saying, yet somehow we are not developing a national spirit in any wise whatever. It appears to me that we can and ought to develop a spirit of patriotic pride among us, and I see nothing incompatible with our position as provinces to hinder fostering such a spirit. One great difficulty is that our flag and that of Britain are exactly alike. Go away from home, and meet a Canadian vessel up in the Mediterranean, for instance, and I defy you to tell if she be not an ordinary British ship. The same ensign is at the peak, and there is really nothing outwardly visible to make a Canadian’s heart swell with pride on beholding a Canadian ship away from home. It seems to me that we might have a flag of our own, not incompatible with the Union Jack, which would cause us to cling to it and feel that it was really our own.

In the way of a national ode there positively is nothing at all. Moore’s boat song is the best thing we have by far, and is really a gem. But gem as it is, recollect it was written by an Irishman, and is mainly about boat life on our great river. Perhaps we are not old enough yet to produce a genius capable of giving us a national ode, and yet we have had some very good poems by Canadians, and I wish quickly to see the day when some of our poets will give us a national ode which shall be a gem for us to rally round. Let those who possess the proper poetic genius ponder on this subject.

Ask a Canadian young lady who sits down to the piano in Britain before a drawing-room full of Britons{285} of both sexes to play something Canadian, as I have heard asked there. Now just let our young lady musicians think the matter over and make up their minds what they would play and sing under such conditions. If our young ladies go over there, they must know they will be asked for such songs, and I really hope, for the credit of our country, they will not be compelled to fall back upon American songs to represent Canada. Such songs may represent America, but the part Canada plays on this continent will in such songs be sadly deficient.{286}

CHAPTER XXIV.

No one can look back over the years covered by this volume of reminiscences and observations of Canadian history and life without being struck by the changes that have already taken place, and also by the great possibilities of the future. At the close of the American Revolution of 1776 there were not more than 80,000 white persons in all of what we now call Canada with its confederated provinces. When Roger Conant came to Upper Canada, on the termination of that lamentable struggle, he found only 12,000 inhabitants in that province. At the time of the War of 1812 there were in all Canada about one-fifth of a million inhabitants, and in Upper Canada (Ontario) 55,000. It is only ninety years since that war, and the increase has been a marvellous one. We have nearly 3,000,000 inhabitants in what was formerly Upper Canada, and 5,000,000 in the whole Dominion. Let another period of ninety years revolve around our land, and the millions that will then inhabit our provinces will make our present{287} enumeration seem insignificant, as well as those of our forefathers in 1792 and 1812.

We know, of course, that the War of 1812 was Britain’s war. Canada was really not a party to its origin. But it would be a bold person to-day who would dare to assert that our forefathers did not do their duty in that struggle. The world at large, as well as ourselves, recognizes that they did all that a few poor but brave men could do.

There dwells no Canadian on his native soil whose heart does not swell with pride at the valor of our forefathers in that war. For although it was Britain’s quarrel, and we honestly felt that Britain had been rather overbearing in her conduct to the United States, and had claimed too much in indiscriminately searching American ships and removing any men from them she chose, our people showed their valor, hardihood, and that Anglo-Saxon pluck which is the common attribute of the white man on this continent north of the Rio Grande River.

If, then, we are proud of our sires, let us mark the places of their deeds. Already the site of the famous battle between Wolfe and Montcalm in Quebec, which sealed the fate of a continent, is in doubt. How much more so, then, will be the sites of the deeds of our forefathers in the War of 1812, and{288} the more recent struggle of the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38. The author submits that it is the duty of those who know these historic spots to mark them by monuments or tablets. Very soon those who know them to-day will be off the scene, and information as to the whereabouts of these spots will be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. We are making history so very fast that it behoves us to bestir ourselves with regard to these matters. Future historians will glean every word we say, and view with eager interest every spot we mark.

Truly we are laying the bricks and stones of the superstructure of this great country of ours. Our 5,000,000 may seem insignificant to our children’s 125,000,000 by and by, but our children will search most diligently for all we did and said while in our adolescence.

Canada to-day is a young sleeping giant which has not yet felt its power, nor yet risen to consciousness of its own importance, wealth, power and grandeur. Our future no one can read. While we are proud to be a part of the great British Empire, and glory in it, we are none the less Canadians first, and we must never forget it. Some deep political thinkers and far-seeing statesmen have said that the white man’s governments and the flags of Anglo-Saxondom will some day be unified and made to wave over all the continent of North America north of the Rio Grande. How that may be accomplished no one will have the hardihood to predict. Our United States cousins may join us and a united flag may be evolved.{289} That such an amalgamation would most materially add to our advancement is self-evident. We would like to see that gigantic stride made and still remain members of the great Empire, if that be possible. A treaty of commerce between us and the United States, be it reciprocity or what not, would so very materially tend to our benefit that we would risk much and give much to obtain it. There is such an abundance of food for man and beast in Canada, and always has been, without a single general failure of crops, that we cannot realize what such a failure really means. Nor can we make comparisons between times of abundance and years of want. No general failures have ever come to Canada, and while it has never been uniformly productive, the past two seasons have surpassed all previous records. We have seen harvests of 60,000,000 bushels of grain in Manitoba, Alberta, Assiniboia and Saskatchewan, seeking an outlet to Europe through the railways and canals of Ontario.

Verily, Canada is a young sleeping giant which has not yet awakened to its power. Our resources of all kinds are enormous. Take, for instance, our vast supplies of pulp-wood spruce, the raw material of paper. Explorers have found hundreds of square miles of this timber as yet untouched by the hand of man, between the northerly boundary of Ontario and James’ Bay. These forests may be cut off, but in twelve years will again have grown ready for another cutting. It is freely asserted that Canada has more spruce wood for pulp than all the world besides.{290} The resources of commercial white pine are also within Canadian borders. The United States have almost exhausted theirs, and are coming for ours, but they most ungenerously mulct us in $4.00 per 1,000 feet for duty on this pine. This example very forcibly again reminds us that we particularly want a treaty of commerce with our nearest neighbors. Canada’s resources in pulp-wood and pine alone are sufficient to make her rich, and all nations must yet pay tribute to us on this account. To these we may add nickel, of which only New Caledonia besides has any quantity. Nickel the nations must and will have, regardless of price. In extent of fertile lands no nation can make a comparison with us. All these considerations point to a marvellous development in the future. With the increase of population and the spread of education we may take it for granted that the history of our early days will become more and more interesting to future generations, and that every genuine contribution to it will be highly valued.

The End.

{291}

With 21 full-page illustrations by E. S. Shrapnel, lithographed in colors. Printed on superior paper, with gilt top, and bound in buckram, with cover design in green and gold.

PRICE, $3.50 net, postpaid

..Press Comments..

The Journal of the Royal Colonial Institute, London, England, reviewing the book, gives the following admirable summary of its scope and contents:

“Stories regarding the early settlement of Canada always possess a certain amount of fascination, and the book under notice is no exception to the rule. It is of more than ordinary interest, as it is written by one who is a descendant of the first Governor of Massachusetts, and the grandson of one of the earliest settlers in Canadian territory. Mr. Conant gives us many old settlers’ stories, as well as legends and traditions of the past, and presents glimpses of the rude, free life that obtained in the earlier years of settlement, whilst at the same time he depicts many of the phases of present-day life in Canada, as compared with the past. His personal experiences, which extend over many years, are full of interesting details regarding life in Canada. Mr. Conant not only describes the country and its advantages for settlement, but supplies numerous anecdotes regarding its administration, both politically and from a municipal point of view. He describes various events in its history so graphically as to enable the reader to follow him with interest through the many pages of the work, and to gain an insight into the mode of life which existed in Canada long before the railways opened up the country.”

The Toronto Globe:

The value of such unadorned records as those contained in Mr. Conant’s book will be fully appreciated by the future historian. With many of his contemporaries, the incidents he relates and the customs he describes are a common memory, and will be vouched for as not only accurately set forth in these pages, but with not a little incidental interest. Mr. Conant is well known to a large constituency of Canadian readers as a writer of some descriptive talent and with a pleasant colloquial style.

Toronto Mail and Empire:

“Mr. Conant has not only written a book that those interested in Canadian history will want to read, but he has set a good example to those who have the material for a family history.{292}”

...Some Personal Commendations ...

The Right Hon. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, G.C.M.G., writes the author: “I have received your book, ‘Upper Canada Sketches,’ and I can assure you with perfect sincerity that I enjoyed it very much.”

“A friend called my attention to your ‘Upper Canada Sketches, and, though I was only able to skim through it, yet I want to write and tell you how much I enjoyed it.... It seems to be the most readable book in that line that I have come across.”—Miss Minnie Jean Nesbit, Hamilton.

“I have read, ‘Sketches’ with great pleasure. It is very good and does you credit.”—Dr. H. Wheeler, Windsor, Eng.

“I have read it [‘Upper Canada Sketches’] with great pleasure and interest. It is, in paper, print, engravings, and margin, a pleasure to look at, and you have brought together very valuable sketches of life.”—Miss Janet Carnochan, Secretary Historical Society, Niagara.

“I got for my own library, as soon as it appeared, a copy of your book, and read it through with a great deal of interest and enjoyment.”—C. C. James, Deputy Minister of Agriculture for Ontario.

“I have greatly enjoyed Mr. Conant’s charming book, having read it from cover to cover. While I don’t suppose it appeals to a down-east Yankee like myself, as it must to a Canadian ‘to the manor born,’ I fully appreciate its fine literary finish, stirring incident, and flavor of ‘ye olden time.’”—Ada Chadwick Williams, Chicago.

“Am glad you found something of interest in my book. I could say the same thing, many times emphasized, regarding your own fine volume.”—Frank H. Severance, Esq., Author of “Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier.”

“Your ‘Upper Canada Sketches’ are unique, and more references are made to this book than to any other we have on Colonial history.”—David Boyle, Esq., Secretary Canadian Historical Society.

“I read your ‘Upper Canada Sketches,’ and I must pay you the compliment of saying that I could not get away from the atmosphere of that book for a long time after reading it. I have seldom had scenes cling to me as they did. I shall be greatly interested in anything further that you may do along that line.”—C. N. Johnston, L.D.S., D.D.S., Chicago.

Mr. Fred Odell Conant, author of “The Conant Genealogy,” writes: “I have waited for an opportunity to look it over carefully before replying. It is first-rate, and, so far as I can judge, gives a very good representation of life in the early days in the wilds of Upper Canada. I have been much interested in its perusal, and shall send for two or three more copies at once. You have the gift of making interesting reading.”

WILLIAM BRIGGS, Publisher,
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