Letters from Muskoka

by Mrs. Charles Gerrard King

One well-meaning, but especially noisy and vulgar individual was a continual terror to me. She more than once said to my eldest son:

“Your pore ma must be that lonesome and dull, that if it warn’t for the children I would often go and cheer her up a bit.”

My dear boy did his best to save his “pore ma” from such an infliction, and was thankful that the children presented an obstacle which fortunately for me was never got over.

In my estimation of the merits and agreeable conversation of our neighbours I made one great exception. Our nearest neighbour was an intelligent, well-conducted Englishman, who lived a lonely bachelor life, which in his rare intervals of rest from hard work he greatly solaced by reading. We lent him all our best books and English newspapers, and should have been glad to see him oftener, but he was so afraid of intruding that he seldom came except to return or change his books; at such times we had much really pleasant conversation, and often a stirring discussion on some public topic of the day, or it might be a particular reign in Cassell’s “English History,” or one of Shakespeare’s plays, both of which voluminous works he was reading through.

He had been head clerk in a large shop in Yorkshire, and was slightly democratic in his opinions, my tendencies being in the opposite direction; we just differed sufficiently to prevent conversation being dull. A more intelligent, hard-working, abstemious and trustworthy man I have seldom known, and we got to consider him quite in the light of a friend. For three winters, whether we had much or little, Mr. A——g was our honoured guest on Christmas Day.

One great solace of our lives was the number of letters we received from the “old country,” but even these were at times the cause of slight annoyance to my ever-sensitive feelings. All my dear friends and relations, after warm condolences on the disappointments we at first met with, would persist in assuring me that the worst being over, we were sure to gain ground, and meet with more success for the future. From whence they gathered their consolatory hopes on our behalf it is impossible for me to say, certainly not from my letters home, which, in spite of all my efforts, invariably fell into a melancholy, not to say a grumbling tone. I knew too well that, however bad things might be, the worst was yet to come, and with a pardonable exaggeration of feeling under peculiar circumstances, often said to myself:

“And in the lowest deep, a lower deep,

Still threatening to devour me, opens wide.”

The autumn and winter of 1873 passed away with no more remarkable event than our first patch of fall wheat being sown, from which, in a burst of temporary enthusiasm, we actually expected to have sufficient flour for the wants of at least one winter. 1874 having dawned upon us, we by no means slackened in our efforts to improve the land and make it profitable; but we found that although our expenses increased, our means did not. The more land we cleared, the more the want of money became apparent to crop and cultivate it, the labour of one individual being quite insufficient for the purpose.