After school there was the usual family service, at which I specially noticed how well the organist played. We were afterwards invited to supper with him and his wife, and were interested to find that they used to live at Leeds and had sung at Morecambe Musical Festival. Canadian meals are delicious, and we had a sumptuous supper—bacon and eggs, layer cake and stewed fruit, and strong tea, very acceptable after our sketchy caravan meals. After supper we had some good music, and the organist told us some of his experiences as a prairie choir-master. His choir showed talent, so he felt that they were capable of chanting the psalms, and trained them to do so. He kept this as a pleasant surprise for the congregation, and felt very proud of his pupils when they duly acquitted themselves well. But the real surprise was his. Next day most of the congregation waited upon him in a body and stated that they would not attend church in future if such High Church practices were followed.
We had obtained permission from the trustees of the public school at Loreburn to give religious instruction in school hours, as it was more convenient for us. I took the upper division, children of twelve to eighteen, and Winifred took the lower form, children of six to twelve, it being a two-roomed school. (In these prairie schools the scholars stay from six to eighteen.) The teachers were very nice. They showed interest in our work and listened to our lessons. As I could give them only one lesson, I wanted it to be one of permanent value, sufficiently connected with their everyday experience to recur frequently to their minds, so I spoke on the Union Jack, which floats over almost all of these little schools. I began with the splendid work of Canada in the War, and referred to the men of the widespread British Empire all united under one flag, thus leading on to the unity of Christian soldiers and telling the stories of the three saints whose crosses unite in the British flag. (A further bond of empire now is the photograph of the Prince of Wales, which is found everywhere in this neighbourhood since his visit to Regina.)
After the lesson we gave each child a prayer card and a picture of the "Hope of the World" or "The New Epiphany." It was very distressing to find that only two or three of the thirty children present knew the Lord's Prayer. Apropos of this a clergyman's wife told me how she had asked a child, "Do you know Our Father?" and the child answered, "No, but I know our grandfather."
The children seemed to hang on our words, listening with intense eagerness to the lessons. "They listen to lessons here in this country that they would never dream of attending to in the Old Country," Winifred wrote home. "One has no fear here of possibilities of naughtiness either. They are good without being disciplined, not restless like the children at home."
The intense hunger for knowledge holds these sturdy, open-air little people in a trance of breathless interest. It was their desire rather than our skill which exercised the spell, as we knew well.
CHAPTER X
ADVENTURES AND MISADVENTURES
It rained hard all next day, so I spent the time in making some things for the caravan; in particular, a wire cage for the electric bulb, which was always being knocked against and broken. One could never start directly the rain ceased, the trails were too bad, and when we did take the road on the following day we found a sea of mud. On the second day we arrived at Outlook, and camped above the ferry. There was no resident clergyman here, but a local lady did what she could for the spiritual needs of the children, holding a very successful Sunday School in the church, where she had arranged a beautiful "Children's Corner." A few suitable pictures and simple printed prayers were pinned on the wall within easy reach of kneeling children. They are encouraged to make this spot their special oratory. This particular "Corner" was arranged near the font, which seemed a specially suitable place for it. Unfortunately, we were unable to meet this lady, as she was ill, but we went to see the lay reader who took the services on Sunday.
After we had camped that night a young girl came to talk to us. She explained that she was very unhappy and unsettled with regard to religion. She had gone to the "Pentecostals," poor child, because she was deaf, and could hear their loud declamations; but she had received no sort of help from them. Her parents belonged to the Church of England, but since they had been in Canada the younger children had not been baptized. Presently the girl's mother joined us, and we made friends at once and had "a good crack" when we each found that the other came from Cumberland. She told me that she had been brought up a Baptist, but had joined the Church of England. I urged her to prepare her children for baptism herself, and have them baptized at the earliest opportunity. This she promised to do.
Next day we had to cross the Saskatchewan River, no easy task from all accounts. We had been regaled with hair-raising stories of how a man drove his car too fast down the pier to the ferry boat, which had not been linked up, and the car plunged into the river and was never seen again. The same fate overtook a man who fell out of his boat when mending the ferry cable. I was not quite at my best for this particular undertaking, as I had one eye badly swollen from a mosquito bite through forgetting to put on my net when sitting down to write a letter. There were three ways of getting down the river bank to the ferry pier. One road zig-zagged so sharply that the long caravan could not turn at the bend, and the paling just there was so frail that had we run into it we must have broken through and gone down a bank. The other road was strewn with huge stones, so I eschewed roads altogether, and went down the rough grass bank, swaying and bumping and almost overturning, but it seemed the least perilous passage. I took the car down while Winifred was on in front, looking for a better road, as there was no reason why we should both be upset. A narrow road led on to the pier, which was a long wooden structure built over the sand and mud of the river's edge. The ferry, a wooden barge worked by a cable, was moored to the end of it, and I drove on to it cautiously. The men working the ferry were three Englishmen, who had served with the Canadian contingent, and they hailed the van delightedly as a long-lost friend, at first thinking it was an old motor ambulance from France. We took photos of them, whereupon they begged that we would not exhibit them as "specimens of the white heathen we met out there." "I felt indeed that we must look missionaries of the fiercest type," was Winifred's comment on this incident.