Letters from Muskoka

by Mrs. Charles Gerrard King

I had visitors during the summer, who were much more welcome. Two nice intelligent little boys with bare feet and shining faces, the children of an American from the “States,” settled in the Muskoka Road, used to come twice a week with milk, eggs, and baskets of the delicious wild raspberry at five cents a quart. While they were resting and refreshing themselves with cold tea and bread-and-butter we used to have quite pleasant conversations. They were very confidential, told me how anxiously they were expecting a grandmother, of whom they were very fond, and who was coming to live with them; of their progress and prizes in the Sunday-school some miles from here, which they regularly attended; of their garden and of many other little family matters; and when I gave them some story-books for children, and little tracts, they informed me that they would be kept for Sunday reading. They never failed, with the things they brought for sale, to bring me as a present a bunch of beautiful sweet-peas and mignonette, and occasionally a scarlet gladiolus.

When they were gone I used to sit down to my letter-writing; and after all my grubbing and house-work, I felt quite elevated in the social scale to have a beautiful bouquet on my writing-table, which I took care to arrange with a background of delicate fern leaves and dark, slender sprigs of the ground-hemlock. The very smell of the flowers reminded me of my beloved transatlantic home, with its wealth of beautiful plants and flowering shrubs, and every room decorated with vases of lovely flowers which I passed some delicious morning hours in collecting and arranging.

When the fruit season had passed, I lost my little visitors, but was painfully reminded of them at the beginning of the winter. Your brother-in-law was called upon, in the absence of the clergyman, to read the burial service over an old lady who had died suddenly in the settlement. This was the grandmother of my poor little friends. She had always expressed a wish to spend her last days with her daughter in Muskoka, but put off her journey from the “States” till the weather was so severe that she suffered much while travelling, and arrived with a very bad cold. The second morning after her arrival she was found dead in her bed.

I remained all the summer strictly a prisoner at home. The not being able to shut up the log-house for want of the second door of course prevented my leaving home, even for an hour; for the Bush is not Arcadia, and however primitive the manners and customs may be, I have failed to recognise primitive innocence among its inhabitants.

As to the berry-picking, which is the favourite summer amusement here, I would sooner have gone without fruit than have ventured into the swamps and beaver meadows, where the raspberries, huckleberries, and cranberries abound. My fear of snakes was too overpowering. Charles killed this summer no less than seven; and though we are told that in this part of Canada they are perfectly innocuous, yet your brother pointed out that three out of the seven he killed had the flat conformation of head which betokens a venomous species.

In the meantime our news from B——e was not too good. After a residence in the lodgings of five weeks, your sister-in-law had been confined of a dear little boy, and at first all had gone well, but after a week she became very ill, and also the baby; and as he had to be brought up by hand, and there was great difficulty in getting pure, unmixed milk in B——e, it was thought better, when he was five weeks old, to bring the whole party back. That memorable journey must be reserved for another letter.

I noticed this summer many times the curious appearance of our clearing by moonlight. In the day the stumps stood out in all their naked deformity, as we had no “crops of golden grain” to hide them; but at night I never beheld anything more weird and ghostly. The trees being mostly chopped in the winter, with deep snow on the ground, the stumps are left quite tall, varying from five to seven feet in height. When these are blackened by the burning, which runs all over the clearing, they present in the dim light the appearance of so many spectres. I could almost fancy myself in the cemetery in the Dunkirk Road, near Calais, and that the blackened stumps were hideous black crosses which the French are so fond of erecting in their churchyards.

They have in America a machine called a “stump-extractor;” but this is very expensive. By the decay of nature, it is possible, in two or three years, to drag out the stumps of trees with oxen; but the pine stumps never decay under seven or eight years, and during all that time are a perpetual blot on the beauty of the landscape.

I was much interested in a sight, novel to me, namely, the fire-flies flitting about in the tops of the tall trees. They seemed like so many glittering stars, moving so fast that the sight became quite dazzled. In the cold weather, too, the aurora borealis is most beautiful; and it is well worth being a little chilly to stand out and watch the soft tints melting one into the other, and slowly vanishing away. But for these occasional glimpses of beauty and sublimity, I should indeed have found existence in the Bush intolerably prosaic.

I very much missed the flocks of birds I was accustomed to in Europe; but as I always forbade any gun being fired off in my clearing, I soon made acquaintance with some. It was a treat to me to watch two audacious woodpeckers, who would come and nibble at my stumps, and let me stand within a few feet of them without the least fear. There was also a pretty snow-bird, which knew me so well that it would wait till I threw out crumbs and bits of potato for it; and once, when we had some meat hanging in a bag on the side of the house, which your brother tied up tightly to prevent depredation, this sagacious creature perched on the shed near, and actually looked me into untying the bag, and pulling partly out a piece of the pork, upon which it set to work with such goodwill, that in a few days some ounces of fat had disappeared.