Near Peterborough, about a hundred and fifty miles from Toronto, I found another far-famed Canadian authoress, Mrs. Traill, whose ‘Backwoods of Canada,’ published when I was a lad by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, and now, I believe, by Messrs. Routledge and Sons, was a delight to me in my young days. I remember her well as a young woman, tall and stately, with a wonderful flow of talk—enthusiastic as a worshipper of nature—ever ready to write of Suffolk lanes, with all their richness of floral and animal life; of Suffolk copses, where the birds sang, and the partridge and the pheasant and the timid hare found shelter; of farmers, then merry, and of peasants, then contented with their humble lot.
In person she was attractive, the most so, to my mind, of all the Strickland family, and she was very stately in manner, for was not her maiden name Katherine Parr Strickland, and had she not some of the blood of that family allied to royalty in her veins? The Stricklands came of an ancient and honoured line, and besides that, there is a great deal in names, as the reader of ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘Kenelm Chillingly’ perfectly understands. What could you expect of a Katherine Parr Strickland but queenly manner, as assuredly the young lady who bore that name had?
When I was a lad, she married a Major Traill, and accompanied her sister, Mrs. Moodie, to Canada. I cannot think how ladies thus tenderly nursed could have done anything of the kind—or, having done it, how they could have survived the hardships they were called to endure. The lot in their case was by no means cast in pleasant places. Mrs. Moodie, in her delightful book, ‘Roughing It in the Bush,’ says: ‘A large number of the immigrants were officers of the army and navy, with their families—a class perfectly unfitted by their previous habits and standing in society for contending with the stern realities of emigrant life in the backwoods. A class formed mainly from the younger scions of great families, naturally proud, and not only accustomed to command, but to receive implicit obedience from the people under them, are not men adapted to the hard toil of the woodman’s life.’
Yet it was to such a life Major Traill took his handsome and accomplished wife; but Mrs. Traill in her backwoods settlement was not forgetful of the literary vocation to which she had dedicated her early youth. I have already referred to her ‘Backwoods of Canada’; that was in due time followed by a volume equally worthy of public favour, under the title of ‘Ramblings in a Canadian Forest.’ Indeed, she and her sister may claim to have been the pioneers of Canadian literature; and their brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Strickland, may also claim to be placed in that category by his work, ‘Twenty-seven Years in Canada West,’ a record of his own experiences, abounding with numerous realistic touches. He settled his family near his sister; and at Lakefield, near Peterborough, the residence of Mrs. Traill, there is quite a colony of Stricklands, who have all done well, so people tell me, at the lumber trade.
I am glad I paid Mrs. Traill a visit. It was a long and wearisome ride, but I was well repaid by a short interview with one with whom I was familiar half a century back. Lakefield is a charming spot, and Mrs. Traill’s wooden but picturesque cottage overlooks a lovely scene of trees and hills, and water and grass. At any rate, in the early spring it has a neat little garden; in new countries neat little gardens are rare.
Mrs. Traill has seen great changes in her time. When she came there, there were only one or two houses in Peterborough; all was forest, and now it has a mayor and a town-hall, and is one of the nicest towns in that part of Canada. Mrs. Traill’s cottage is fitted up with English comfort and taste. She has around her books and photographs of loving relatives. She showed me a book of hers recently published by Messrs. Nelson and Sons. As a Canadian authoress, she has done much to commemorate the beauty of Canadian forests, and writes of their floral charms with all the tenderness and grace with which I remember her sketches of East Anglian rural life were richly adorned. She is now hard at work with a new volume on Canadian lichens and flowers.
As we stood talking at the window—the sunbeams played gaily on the blue waters of the lake or river beneath (in Canada there are so many rivers and lakes that you can scarcely tell which is which, or where the one ends or the other begins)—fairy flowers were beginning to gem her lawn; and the American robin redbreast, a far larger bird than ours, and other birds, still more graceful, flew among the trees—I felt how, in such a spot, one weary of the world could lead a tranquil life.
Mrs. Traill must be an advanced octogenarian—she is older than Mrs. Moodie, and Mrs. Moodie claims to be far over eighty. Yet Mrs. Traill retains her conversational power intact, and is full as ever of ‘the lore that nature brings,’ and is as enthusiastic as ever in its pursuit. As much as ever her manners are queenlike. They have never left her, in spite of all the hardships she has had to undergo as wife and mother in the wilderness, and her face still retains something of the freshness and fairness of her youth. She is a wonderful old lady, and Canada must be a wonderful country for such.
CHAPTER VI.
OFF TO THE NORTH-WEST—NIAGARA—LAKE SUPERIOR—THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY—AT WINNIPEG.