How do we know when the turn of the year has come?

How do we know when the turn of the year has come?  The calendar gives March twenty-first as the official birthday of spring, but that has nothing to do with it.  One February day will be all winter, hard frozen and dreary, and on the next, quite suddenly, through some spirit line of sense, a message will reach us that spring, her very self, is on the way.  After that, no matter how many days of sleet and snow may follow, we know that for us the winter is past.

So it was yesterday, here on the island.  With a mind adjusted to the thought of weeks of snow and ice to come, I stepped out of doors and into the spring.  The air was balmy as May, the sky a turquoise and the lake a pearl.  The furry gray buds of the poplars had puffed out in the night.  The three little fingers of the birches were swelling and lengthening.  Suddenly my eyes were dazzled by a flash of bright blue light, and a magnificent jay darted through the air and perched on the bare branch of a basswood.  After the small, drab-hued chickadees and nuthatches, that jay looked as large as an eagle.  Then I looked at little Peter, and lo! he was turning brown.  The white hairs of his winter coat were falling off, his spring jacket was showing through.

The ground under the trees is dusted over with myriads of brown scales, chief among them the bird-shaped pods of the birches, that carry two wee seeds under their pinions.  In the open the snow is gray with patches of briskly hopping snow fleas that move along over the meadows at a lively rate.  The nature books tell me that these are insects that live in the mosses and lichens, and that they come out on warm days for exercise.  They are exercising for dear life to-day.

Here and there on the white carpet are the fairy writings left by the wind last night.  It bent down the dry tips of the sedges, and traced circles, bows, triangles, mystic runes that look as though they meant great news, if one could only read them.

But the snow still covers the ground.  Rufus still tunnels under it, shaking the crust violently when he goes in for some hidden store of food.  The rabbit roads, pressed hard by hundreds of small, skurrying feet, still run crisscross under the cedars, and the heavy woodsleds still travel down the middle of the lake, like giant caterpillars, crawling along.

Behind the opposite island the men are cutting ice.  Uncle Dan stands at the side of a dark pool of open water, and works away with a saw as tall as himself.  The rectangular blocks, two feet thick, slide up the inclined boards to the sleds and are driven off to the icehouses in preparation for the summer’s shipment of fish to the towns.  They are beautiful, those blocks of ice, so clear and clean and blue.

With the fine weather has come the news that the Rector of the English Church and Mrs. Rector are coming to the island for a visit.  The island is in much excitement.  Salt bacon and potatoes do not seem just the right fare to offer guests so important and who are coming from afar.  My mind is set on chicken, and the word has gone forth round the lake that “the English minister is coming and the woman on the island wants a fowl.”

Now, all our turkeys, ducks, and chickens are fattened for the fowl fair, held at Queensport in December, when the poultry dealers from Toronto and Montreal, and even from “The States,” go through the country buying up the stock.  The greater part of the yearly income of some of us depends on the prices paid for the fowl.  My only chance of having chickens through the winter was to engage a neighbor to save me a dozen young cockerels and to pay him for their feed, having them killed as needed.  I had long ago eaten all these chickens and the prospect of getting any more was slight.  Even Rose Beaulac, fertile in resource, could give me no hope.

I never found the chicken, but I had a visit from Rose the day before the party.  She told me that she had given John his gun and had sent him up Loon Bay to shoot me some grouse.  Then the conversation languished.  Rose is a very shy little woman; it took her nearly an hour to come to the real point of her call.  She would not lay aside her coonskin coat, she would not remove her dingy tuque; there she sat, struggling with her errand.

At last it came out:

“Might she bring the baby to be christened when the Rector came?”

Then for another half hour she rambled on about people who never had their babies christened and what a sin that was, and of those who never registered their children’s births, and how those children could never inherit property.  Once in a while she said something about things “not being legal,” until I was quite bewildered and do not know to this day whether, in her opinion, the unbaptized or the unregistered infant is not legal.  But the upshot of it all was that the youngest Beaulac was to be christened next day.

The hour set for service was two o’clock, but such was Mrs. Beaulac’s determination not to be late that she and the baby’s eldest sister arrived at eleven.  There was no sign of the father, John Beaulac.  There I had made my mistake.  I had let him know that a sponsor would be needed and that he was expected to stand.  So when the godfather was demanded none could be found.

“Where was John?”

“Gone to Queensport with a load of wood.”

“Andy Drapeau, the baby’s uncle?”

“Gone to Glen Avon.”

The other uncles were off hunting at Loon Lake; Louis, the eldest brother, had disappeared entirely.  So when the time came for sponsors, the Rector’s wife and I had to stand, and for this poor baby, whose father owns not one rod of ground, and who is sheltered in a hovel built for the cattle, we gravely renounced “the vain pomp and glory of the world.”  And because, in my hurry, I had forgotten to temper the water in the improvised font, the new little soldier and servant of Christ yelled valiantly when the ice water touched him.

It was a scene I shall not forget: the cabin, with its bunk in one corner, its big stove at one end, the pots and pans on the wall behind it; the tools; the fishing tackle and the stores.  The Rector, wearing white surplice and embroidered stole, stood in the center of the room beside the white-covered table that held the bowl of water and the Prayer Book.

Old Mrs. Drapeau, the baby’s grandmother, had crept across the ice to witness the baptism, the first she had seen, she said, in twenty years.

The meeting closed with tea and cake; then the christening party withdrew, the little new Christian sleeping peacefully in the wooden box in which his mother dragged him away over the ice.

We three who were left settled to dinner and a long afternoon’s talk.  At teatime the Rector observed that the Woodchuck School was a mere seven miles away, and that he might as well have a service there while he was so near.  So we dashed away across the lake, used telephones freely to collect a congregation, opened the school house, and, by the light of two guttering candles, said our prayers, sang our hymns, and listened to a simple, direct, and practical sermon.  Back across the ice I drove in the flare of the northern lights, that made the night almost as bright as day.

The Rector is a young man and an energetic one—and he has need to be—for his parish covers much ground.  It extends from the church at Queensport, out to Godfrey’s Mills, fifteen miles away to the south, and back to Fallen Timber, twelve miles to the north.  Besides these three churches he has four or five irregular stations in the schoolhouses dotted about within the radius of his activities.  On Sunday mornings he teaches the Sunday school at Queensport and holds service there; in the afternoon he drives to the Mills, and has Sunday school and Evening Prayer, at night there is service at Fallen Timber.  Up and down the roads he drives, day after day, visiting the sick, baptizing the children, burying the dead.  He consoles, admonishes, encourages; he reproves our negligences, bears with our foolishnesses, and somehow contrives to have patience with our ignorance.

Being a churchman to whom the decency and orthodoxy of services are dear, it is hard for him to excuse our lax ways.  It gives him genuine distress when we know no better than to drape our flags over the cross, and his face is set against the to us very pleasing decoration furnished by house plants growing in tin cans and set upon the altar.  When he marches up the aisle and removes these attempts at ornament, replaces the vases and the cross where they belong, we say nothing.  It is evident that we have made a mistake in our zeal.  We don’t try that again, but something else that proves just as reprehensible.  But we are learning—the Rector sees to that.  If only the Bishop will let him stay, we shall be good churchmen after awhile.  But we say proudly and sorrowfully: “He’s too good for a small parish like this.  He’ll be moved to the city soon.”

The only way the Rector spares himself is in the matter of writing sermons.  He confessed to me that he did not write three new ones a week, but preached the same one at all three churches, thereby reserving, I suppose, a few hours for sleep.

And with all this unceasing effort—and the clergy of all denominations work just as hard—there are families living here round Many Islands that have never entered a church.  They are as veritable heathen as any on the far frontier.  There was a death at a farm on the road to Loon Lake station last week.  The body was put into a rough box, thrust into a shallow grave, and the work of the farm went straight on.  And the English rector, the Roman Catholic priest, the Methodist preacher and the Presbyterian minister all live within a radius of twenty miles.

Strange country, so civilized and so primitive, so close to cities and so inaccessible.  Strange people, at once so old and so young, so instructed in vice and sorrow, and so ignorant of the simplest teachings of life.  Grown men and women in body but children in mind, with children’s virtues and with adults’ sins.

CHAPTER XIII

Since the first of December we have not seen the ground—only a great field of white so dazzling that one understands the Indian’s name for the March moon.  Verily, my own eyes tell me why it is the Moon of Snowblindness.

The ice is still thick and clear, but the sun on its surface and the moving water beneath are both wearing it away, slowly, surely.  There are clear pools on the lake at noon, and then the crows come down and drink, marching to and fro, like files of small, black-clad soldiers.  They meet, and bow politely, speak to each other singly or in groups, then line up and off they go with hoarse caws.  They look so important that they might be plotting all sorts of villainies.

“Look out fer yerself,” laughs Uncle Dan.  “I’ll put the curse of the crows on yer.”

A dire threat!  What use to break one’s back planting the corn if one’s evilly disposed neighbor can call winged battalions of those black thieves to undo all a man’s work and bring him to penury?

The snow is still thick in the woods, but on the hilltops and in the open, bare patches of earth are beginning to show.  Peter’s coat matches the ground exactly, being a sharply mottled brown and white.  Indeed, he never did turn entirely white, like the wild hares in the woods.  Even when his fur was its snowiest there was always a brown, diamond-shaped patch on his forehead, and, so far as I know, he was the only hare so decorated.  No matter how far from home he strayed, I could always recognize him by his brown brand.

This simple life has its inconveniences.  I was eating a belated breakfast the other morning, when bells on the lake and later a sleigh at the door announced a visitor.  It was a perfectly unknown man who informed me that he had been sent by Mrs. Swanson to bring me to her house to spend the day.  He had to wait outside, in the piercing wind, until a hasty glance round the combined sleeping, cooking, and reception room reassured me as to its condition for the entrance of a stranger.  Then he sat beside the stove, pipe in hand, and inspected me gravely while I prepared for the long drive down the lake.

The day was bright and blue and snapping cold.  A point of light flashed from every facet of the roughened ice.  The horse was fresh, the wind at our backs, and we fairly flew past Jackson’s, over the bare roads and out again on beautiful Blue Bay, lying like a sapphire in its setting of silvered shores.

The pony was a broncho, my companion told me, calling my attention to a brand to prove it.  He was all that, and a tree-climbing broncho to boot, for soon we came to a perpendicular bank as high as the side of a barn, and I was given to understand that the pony was going to clamber straight up, with the sleigh dangling at his heels.  I left the vehicle and scrambled up on my own feet, but the animal went up the side of that hill like a cat at a wall, and without one second’s hesitation.

Arrived at the house I inquired of my hostess if my escort was her son.

“Oh, no,” she answered.  “It was only Clarence Nutting, the hired man.”

Evidently, “hired man” means something very different here from what it has hitherto meant to me.  It means friend, protector, helper, and member of the family.  Mrs. Swanson, Susie Dove, the hired girl, Clarence Nutting, and I all dined together; after dinner we played dominoes.  When Clarence brought in the fresh eggs from the barn he suggested: “Better give Miss X some to take home with her.”  Later he invited me to come back, and soon, to spend several days.

Through the long, sunny afternoon, we sat round the stove in the pleasant best room, with its well-starched lace curtains, each with a bunch of artificial roses sewed on its folds, its oak sideboard decorated with rose-bordered crêpe paper napkins, its crayon portraits and wonderful, hand-made hooked rugs.  We women had our crocheting, but little Susie sat very upright, her small, work-roughened hands clasped on her plaid-covered knees, her toes, in their shiny best shoes, just reaching the floor, while Clarence played for us on his new graphophone.

Clarence, in his high boots, patched trousers, and flannel shirt, handled his music box with the tenderness of a lover.  He dusted each record after using it, as carefully as a mother powders a baby.  As he played tune after tune, I saw in that instrument, God knows what of pleasures foregone, and temptations put aside while he saved out of his meager wages the price of that graphophone.  He had discovered a way to use the thorns from a hawthorn tree instead of wooden needles.  They gave a very soft and lovely tone.  His records were the usual collection sold with the machine—a few dances, a few Negro dialects and songs, some good marches and some hymns.  After nearly a year of hearing no tunes at all, I enjoyed them, every one.  When the concert was over, Clarence played: “God be with you till we meet again.”

After tea came the sleigh and we drove home to the island, this time in a blinding snowstorm.  Conversation was not so lively as in the morning.  I was thinking of all the evidences I see here of man’s unquenchable thirst for beauty and music and the pleasant things of life, that not the most incessant toil nor hardest privation can ever wholly destroy.  I was remembering how I had gone over to the Blakes’ to use the telephone one afternoon and had had to wait for an hour because Clarence Nutting’s new instrument had come, and all the receivers on the line were down while he played it for the neighborhood.  I thought of poor Harry Spriggins’s delight in a magazine, of Mary Blake’s habit of keeping a glass of fresh flowers in the center of her table, of the time when Mrs. Drapeau, having no white tablecloth, had spread a clean sheet over her table for company, and of the Beaulacs’ joy in the blossoming of their lilac bush.

Then I began dreaming of a big, comfortable shack somewhere on the shore, to which the people could come, as to a common meeting ground, social differences and local feuds forgotten.  I saw it furnished with a cupboard full of cups and plates, a piano or victrola.  There should be a circulating library there and games, I decided, and I saw the boys and girls dancing, singing, cooking popcorn, candy and fudge, in the evenings.  I imagined a group of women drinking tea and sewing while “teacher” played.

A few days later I went with the Rector and Mrs. Rector to drink tea with the wife of the owner of a big lumber mill, and there I saw what one woman has done amid just such conditions as are here at Many Islands.

There were the pretty little church, the parish house, the Sunday school room, all built by Mrs. Baring, and I heard of the reading circles, the concerts, the cooking classes that she has organized for the people among whom she has had to live.

There too I saw the Canadian mother in war times and marveled at her.  Mrs. Baring has sent the light of her eyes, the pride of her heart, the son who was winning honors at his university and had a great future before him, overseas to the trenches.  I saw picture after picture of him—Harold as a baby, as a child, as a boy, as a man.  He was shown in his little knickers, his first long trousers, his khaki.

“Yes, he is in France now, but of course we do not know where,” the mother said.  “I send him two pairs of socks, some handkerchiefs and shirts every week.  The boys like that better than one large box occasionally—they lose their clothes so.  We hope that things reach him, but we do not know.  We have not heard from him for two months now.”

All this without a tremor of the firm lips, with not the shadow of a cloud over the serene blue eyes.

The Rector told me afterward that not once has that mother alluded to the possibility of her son’s return.  She gave her supreme gift without hope of any reward.  Withal her interest in affairs is as keen, her charities as wide, her hospitality as gracious, as though she had never a care in the world and her boy were safe at her side.

After supper we climbed over the slippery hillside to the church for Evensong.  Our hostess sat at the organ at the side of the chancel and in full view of the congregation.  During the service I watched her calm, clear profile.  She went through the intolerably pathetic petitions of the Litany without wavering, as we prayed for those who are fighting by land and sea and air; for the prisoners, the wounded and the dying, and her sweet, steady voice led our responses.  Only once did I see her falter.  It was during the singing of the hymn.  Her pretty ringed fingers went on pressing the keys; she played, but she could not sing.

“The Son of God goes forth to war,
   A kingly crown to gain,
His blood-red banner streams afar,
   Who follows in his train?”

Her eyes looked past us, straight across the world.  Her lips were parted in a smile sadder than tears.  She was shedding her heart’s blood, drop by drop, for the safety of the empire.

We do not talk much about the Great War here at Many Islands.  Indeed, it is only when I go to the towns that I realize that Canada is at war.  Once in a while one of our boys speaks of going to the front, and only the other day Andy Drapeau was saying, “Ef it comes to drafting, I’ll volunteer.  I’ll fight of me own free will.  No man shall make me go.”

But at that, Andy was merely talking.  He had no idea of enlisting.

No, as always, it is the men of the cities who will go first, and the reason is not far to seek.  It lies in the fact that the bucolic mind is almost totally devoid of imagination—it cannot picture what it has never seen.  It can form no vision of an empire.  It can think of this county as part of the Province and the Province as part of the Dominion, but of Canada as part of a great federation it cannot conceive—the thought is too big.  Our vision is bounded by the limits of our own experience.  We know that Britain, France, and Russia are fighting Germany and Austria, but the fields of Europe lie very far away, while our own fields are very near.

We all know Germans.  We have worked beside them in the hayfields and the mines.  They seem good fellows enough, not companionable because they speak an outlandish sort of lingo that we doubt their being able to understand themselves.  But why should we fight them?  Of the Hun we can form no idea, thank God.  He is outside our experience.

We have a patriotism, but it is local, parochial.  If this war were a baseball game between the rival teams of Sark and Fallen Timber, we could understand it fast enough.  We would “root” for our side and, if need be, fight for it.  But the far-off struggle of nation with nation leaves us cold.  We cannot picture it.

But when the first wounded came back from the trenches, and when the stories of Saint Julien and Festhubert were told at the firesides, then went the men of rural Canada forward gladly to fill the places of those heroes whose deaths are Canada’s undying glory.

CHAPTER XIV

Appropriately enough, on this first day of the calendar spring, I am warned that the ice is unsafe and that I must stay on the island until the lake is open water.  The natives still venture out, but they know the look of the thin spots and even they are very cautious.  Two men started over from mainland this morning, axes on shoulder, hounds at heel, but they turned back at the shore, and the dogs, after stepping daintily on the dark, spongy crust, turned back also.  The middle of the lake is still hard, but there are ditches of water round the edges of the land.  The ice has heaved up into long fissures stretching away from the points, the clear green water showing between their open sides, and from this island to the Blakes’ point there is a great crevasse.

Mary declares that she has known Henry to start off in a sleigh over the lake when the ice was only three inches thick; when he had to drive fast to keep from breaking in and when the water spurted up from the holes made by the horse’s hoofs.  But Henry was going for the mail, and when he has been deprived of news for two or three weeks, the papers become things to risk one’s life for—which is proof that Henry will never be a true Many Islander.  The rest of us are quite willing to wait until spring, if need be.

So I am “denned in” once more, and before I am free all sorts of things will have happened.  There will be hundreds of little new calves and lambs lying beside their mothers in the meadows, and scores of thin-legged colts running beside the mares in the pastures.  I shall also be shut in when the sap buckets hang in the “sugar bush” and the great black kettles steam over the fires in the dooryards, and I can only hope that some of my friends will remember to put my name in the pot, and to save me some syrup and some maple sugar.

Forced to take my exercise on the island, I find new things everywhere, as I tramp round and round the trails.  The snow under the evergreens is covered with last year’s dry needles; the hemlocks, pines and cedars are putting on their new, bright green fringes.  Under the rotting leaves, innumerable little new plants are pushing up, princess fern, wild strawberry, Canada mayflower, and countless other small weeds and herbs, whose names I do not know.  When the leaves and needles are raked away each stalk is seen standing in a tiny pool of clear ice.

The spring peepers are whistling in the lowlands, the hylodes blows his little bagpipe, away in the wood the grouse is “beating his throbbing drum”—no other description fits that thrilling sound—and the first honeybees are buzzing out from a clump of birches and winging away over the lake.  Underneath all the other spring sounds is the measured “tonk-tonk” of the air escaping through the holes in the ice, and the thin, silver sound of trickling streams.

The red-headed woodpecker is here, his crown a spot of splendid crimson against the snow.  “Ker-r-ruck, ker-r-ruck,” he cries as he darts from tree to tree, his white tail coverts flashing in the sunlight.

There has been a deer on the island.  Through my dreams one night I heard sounds of a great commotion, the cries of dogs, the crashing of animals through the underbrush.  In the morning, not ten paces from the kitchen door, the snow was all trampled, soiled and covered with bunches of long brown hair.  Evidently, the place was the scene of the poor animal’s agony, for those hairs were soaked with blood.

I grieved, for I have liked to think that the island was a place of refuge for all hunted things—at least for this one year.  But if the dogs had dragged down the deer and killed him, what had become of the carcass?  I wondered.  They could not have eaten it so clean that no trace of skin or bones remained.  I pondered this as I followed the deer’s small, shapely hoof-prints from the shore and up over the hill and through the bushes all hung with bunches of tell-tale brown hair.  I traced the dogs’ tracks also, as they crossed and recrossed the trail, and following them came to an old mica pit, hidden far back among the cedars a gash in the hillside, ten or twelve feet deep and four or five yards long, ringed round with bushes and with a young birch growing in its depths.  Indeed, I fell headlong into that hidden pitfall, and had time to hope, as I went down, scrambling over the edge and clutching at branches, that I was not going to land full on a wounded deer.

All tracks stopped at this pit, and the mystery remained a mystery until late in the spring, when it leaked out that Andy and George Drapeau had heard the cries of the hounds, had watched their chance, had come over, dragged off the dogs, and skinned and carried away the deer.

Now the season for hunting deer lasts from November first to November fifteenth.  Only one deer may be shot by each hunter.  No hounds may be allowed to run at large during the closed season and any dog found running a deer may be shot on sight, and the person shooting this dog may not be prosecuted.  Thus the month of March is not the time for fresh venison.  Venison out of season is “mountain goat,” to be eaten privately and without boastfulness.  Nor is it safe to display a deer’s spring coat.  But if the Drapeaus had left me that hide, would I have informed on their dogs?  I wonder.

My own stupidity robbed me of the only other deerskin rug that I might have had.  Little John Beaulac offered me a beautiful—and seasonable—one which I bought and sent to the squaw at Maskinonge for tanning.  Some weeks later I mentioned my good fortune to William Foret.

“Are you having the hair left on?” he asked.

“Hair left on!” I echoed.  “Of course.  I never heard of having the hair taken off.  I want the skin for a rug.”

“Well, you’d ought to have said so,” said William.  “Mostly they tans them for leather round here.  They makes fine moccasins and mittens.”

Sure enough, that Indian woman had patiently scraped off all the hair and I received a superfine piece of buckskin, which was presented to Little John, I having no use in the world for moccasins or mittens when I should return to the city.

The Drapeaus live on a long peninsula to the west of this island and half a mile away.  From this dock I see their barns in silhouette against the sunsets.  Their land rises in fold on fold of meadow, with here and there a clump of cedars or maples, then a soft slope and slanting cornfield.  Their house is the typical Canadian log shack, a building about sixteen by twenty feet, divided by a board partition into a kitchen and a tiny bedroom.  A trap door opens into the cellar; a ladder leads up to the loft where the boys sleep.  There is a shed, built at right angles to the south wall, and here Mrs. Drapeau keeps her washtub, churn, and milk separator.  The place is always crowded with lounging men; the dogs are everywhere under foot, and the air is thick with the smoke from many old pipes.

Herring nets hang from the rafters, harness on the walls; drying skins are stretched across the uprights.  In the muskrat season dozens of furry, brown rats are nailed, by their tails, to the outside walls, and inside the house great pails of bloody water, piles of raw skins, and heaps of rats fill the small room.

The Drapeaus believe in the division of labor, and the work of the family seems portioned out in a thoroughly satisfactory way.  Andy, the eldest son, is the farmer, Lewis the hunter and George the fisherman.

Mrs. Drapeau, though not an old woman, goes back to the early days of the settlement and knows all the hardships of pioneer life.

“I mind the time,” she says, “when this land was all wilderness and when the bears and the wildcats come up to the very door.  Once I seen four bear start over across the lake from Blake’s point to your island.  They swum across the narrows, the old he-bear in the lead, the biggest of the young next, then the little cub and the mother behind.  Me an’ the boys was in the boat—we had been a berryin’—and when the boys seen them bear they went wild.  They rowed up along the island after them, but they couldn’t go fast enough with me in the boat, so they landed me and rowed along to head off the bear, an’ blest if they didn’t turn ’em right back along the shore to where I was a sittin’.  I was right in their tracks.

“‘You come back here an’ git me,’ I yelled, ‘an’ don’t you do another trick like that agin, the longest day you live.’

“There was I a-hollerin’ an’ the boys a-laughin’ an’ the bear a comin’.  Why, I might ’a’ been kilt.”

“What became of them?” I asked.

“The bears?  Oh! they got away.  What with me a-screechin’ an’ the boys a shootin’ they was so scared that they climbed off the far side of the island, an’ the last we saw of them they was over to Henderson’s Bay, their heads just out of water.”

Mrs. Drapeau tells of the day when she and her husband came over to their farm in a little flat-bottomed punt, a calf, the beginning of their herd, tied foot to foot and bellowing in the stern.  It was a hard fight to clear the land and bring it to some sort of cultivation, and in a few years Drapeau was killed in a lumber camp, leaving her with four young children to feed.  She describes the long winter nights when she spun, carded, and wove the cloth that kept their shivering little bodies covered against the bitter cold, of the backbreaking days in the fields when she hoed the potatoes and planted the corn, that there might be food for the hungry mouths, and of the long months when she worked at the miners’ boarding house, cooking and washing for a score of men.

“I never could have done it if it hadn’t been for my neighbors,” she said.  “They was awful good to me.  The men cut my wood every winter as come an’ ketched me my fish until the boys was big enough to work.  Eh! but I did have the hardest time the year my man died.  Scarce was he laid in the ground when the two biggest boys come back from the school at Loon Lake with the smallpox.  George and Andy had it and they had it fearful bad.  I thought sure the other two would have it too.  The health doctor come up all the way from Queensport an’ nailed a notice on my door, tellin’ the neighbors to keep away, and he forbid me to cross the lake, on fifty dollars fine.  So there I was, the ice just breakin’ and me shut in with my children that was a dyin’, as you might say.  I didn’t want to go to no one’s house, nor to have them come to mine, but I had little or nothin’ to eat on the place, and I feared lest my children should starve.

“But I done the best I could, and one day, when the ice was all broke, I heard Bill Shelly, the frogger, passin’ in a boat.  I hollered to him the fix I was in and told him to fetch me some goods from the store an’ to tell my father how we was shut in.  Bill brung me the goods and we got along some way, and when all was over an’ the boys was well, here comes Robinson, the health doctor, to ask how we was all gettin’ along.  He stood off, twenty paces from the door with his white handkerchief to his face.  I was minded to set the dogs on him.

“‘Why don’t you come in?’  I says, ‘All’s safe now.  You needn’t to be afraid.  You shut me in here, with my dyin’ children, and not you ner no one else come anear me, not even to the shore, to ask did I have so much as a hundred of flour to keep us alive.  How did you know we wasn’t all starved together?  Get you off this land,’ I says, ‘fer you haven’t got the grace of God in yer heart.’  He got off and I ain’t seen him since, but I ain’t never fergot him.”

All this she tells me, sitting before the fire, her gray woolen petticoat turned back over her knees, a black three-cornered shawl laid over her head and pinned firmly under her pointed chin, She was a beauty once.  She is a pretty old woman still, with her flashing black eyes and silver hair.  Even now, at sixty odd, she milks seven cows, makes all the butter and cheese, cares for the hens, the turkeys and the pigs, works a small garden, cooks for the boys, nurses them when they fall ill, and finds time to make wonderful patchwork quilts.  Mrs. Drapeau can tell the names of all the quilt patterns known to Canada.

I love these patchwork quilts.  They speak of thrift and industry and patience, and of the leisure of a life in which small bits of cloth are of more value than the time it takes to stitch them together.  Who in the cities has time nowadays to sit and make a patchwork quilt?  They bring up pictures of bedfuls of little children, sleeping snug and warm under mother’s handiwork, and of contented women sewing in the firelight.

Their names are poetry—woman’s poetry.  The Log Cabin stands for home, the Churn Dasher is food, the Maple Leaf means Canada.  The Road to Dublin, and the Irish Chain speak of the homesick Irish heart, but I like to imagine that the Prairie Rose was named by some happy woman who loved the wide and blossoming fields of this new land.