I fully realised during this summer, that solitude in the Bush is not privacy. Though in case of any accident I was out of reach of all human help, yet I was liable at any moment of the day to have some passing settler walk coolly in, and sit down in my very chair if I had vacated it for a moment. I got one fright which I shall not easily forget. I had given your two brothers their breakfast, and they had started for their hay-making in the distant beaver meadow. I had washed up the breakfast-things, cleared everything away, and was arranging my hair in the glass hanging in the bed-place, the curtain of which was undrawn on account of the heat. My parting look in the glass disclosed a not very prepossessing face in the doorway behind, belonging to a man who stood there immovable as a statue, and evidently enjoying my discomfiture.
I greeted him with a scream, which was almost a yell, and advanced pale as a ghost, having the agreeable sensation of all the blood in my body running down to my toes! His salutation was:
“Wall, I guess I’ve skeered you some!”
“Yes!” I replied, “you startled me very much.”
He then came in and sat down. I sat down too, and we fell into quite an easy flow of talk about the weather, the crops, etc.
How devoutly I wished him anywhere else, and how ill I felt after my fright, I need not say, but I flatter myself that nothing of this appeared on the surface; all was courtesy and politeness.
At length he went way, and finding your brother in the beaver meadow, took care to inform him that he “had had quite a pleasant chat with his old woman!”
I knew this man by sight, for once in the early part of the summer he came to inquire where Charles lived? On my pointing out the path, and saying in my politest manner,
“You will have no difficulty, sir, in finding Mr. C. K.’s clearing,” he coolly replied:
“I guess I shall find it; I knows your son well; we always calls him Charlie!”