I inquired concerning the extent of his parish, and the morals and condition of his parishioners.
He said that on two sides the district under his charge might be considered as without bounds, for, in fact, there was no parish boundary line between him and the North Pole. He has frequently ridden from sixteen to thirty miles to officiate at a marriage or a funeral, or baptize a child, or preach a sermon, wherever a small congregation could be collected together; but latterly his increasing age rendered such exertion difficult. His parish church is in Springfield. When he first took the living, to which he was appointed on his arrival in the country, the salary—for here there are no tithes—was two hundred a year: some late measure, fathered by Mr. Hume, had reduced it to one hundred. He spoke of this without bitterness as regarded himself, observing that he was old, and had other means of subsistence; but he considered it as a great injustice both to himself and to his successors—"For," said he, "it is clear that no man could take charge of this extensive district without keeping a good horse, and a boy to rub him down. Now, in this country, where wages are high, he could not keep a horse and a servant, and wear a whole coat, for less than one hundred a year. No man, therefore, who had not other resources, could live upon this sum; and no man who had other resources, and had received a fitting education, would be likely to come here. I say nothing of the toil, the fatigue, the deep responsibility—these belong to his vocation, in which, though a man must labour, he need not surely starve:—yet starve he must, unless he takes a farm or a store in addition to his clerical duties. A clergyman in such circumstances could hardly command the respect of his parishioners: what do you think, madam?"
When the question was thus put, I could only think the same: it seems to me that there must be something wrong in the whole of this Canadian church system, from beginning to end.
With regard to the morals of the population around him, he spoke of two things as especially lamentable, the prevalence of drunkenness, and the early severing of parental and family ties; the first, partly owing to the low price of whisky, the latter to the high price of labour, which rendered it the interest of the young of both sexes to leave their home, and look out and provide for themselves as soon as possible. This fact, and its consequences, struck him the more painfully, from the contrast it exhibited to the strong family affections, and respect for parental authority, which even in the midst of squalid, reckless misery and ruin, he had been accustomed to in poor Ireland. The general morals of the women he considered infinitely superior to those of the men; and in the midst of the horrid example and temptation, and one may add, provocation, round them, their habits were generally sober. He knew himself but two females abandoned to habits of intoxication, and in both instances the cause had been the same—an unhappy home and a brutal husband.
He told me many other interesting circumstances and anecdotes, but being of a personal nature, and his permission not expressly given, I do not note them down here.
On the whole, I shall never forget the few days spent with this excellent family. We bade farewell, after many a cordial entreaty on their part, many a promise on mine, to visit them again. Charles M. drove me over to the Credit, where we met the steam-boat, and I returned to Toronto with my heart full of kindly feelings, my fancy full of delightful images, and my lap full of flowers, which Charles had gathered for me along the margin of the forest: flowers such as we transplant and nurture with care in our gardens and green-houses, most dazzling and lovely in colour, strange and new to me in their forms, and names, and uses: unluckily I am no botanist, so will not venture to particularize farther; but one plant struck me particularly, growing everywhere in thousands: the stalk is about two feet in height, and at the top are two large fan-like leaves, one being always larger than the other; from between the two springs a single flower, in size and shape somewhat resembling a large wild rose, the petal white, just tinted with a pale blush. The flower is succeeded by an oval-shaped fruit, which is eaten, and makes an excellent preserve. They call it here the May-apple.
LAKE ONTARIO.
June 8.
We have already exchanged "the bloom and ravishment of spring" for all the glowing maturity of summer; we gasp with heat, we long for ices, and are planning venetian blinds; and three weeks ago there was snow lying beneath our garden fences, and not a leaf on the trees! In England, when Nature wakes up from her long winter, it is like a sluggard in the morning,—she opens one eye and then another, and shivers and draws her snow coverlet over her face again, and turns round to slumber more than once, before she emerges at last lazily and slowly, from her winter chamber; but here, no sooner has the sun peeped through her curtains, than up she springs, like a huntress for the chase, and dons her kirtle of green, and walks abroad in full-blown life and beauty. I am basking in her smile like an insect or a bird!—Apropos to birds, we have, alas! no singing birds in Canada. There is, indeed, a little creature of the ouzel kind, which haunts my garden, and has a low, sweet warble, to which I listen with pleasure; but we have nothing like the rich, continuous song of the nightingale or lark, or even the linnet. We have no music in our groves but that of the frogs, which set up such a shrill and perpetual chorus every evening, that we can scarce hear each other speak. The regular manner in which the bass and treble voices respond to each other is perfectly ludicrous, so that in the midst of my impatience I have caught myself laughing. Then we have every possible variety of note, from the piping squeak of the tree-frog, to the deep, guttural croak, almost roar, of the bull-frog.