“He once came to us for flour and lost his way after he left, got into a brush-heap where he had to remain all night, and was so tormented by mosquitoes that in a frenzy, to protect himself, he emptied the flour and drew the sack over his head. He presented himself at the breakfast table next morning—and my father said he never saw such a show as the man was when he reached the house,”—“covered, if not with glory, yet with meal.”
Another visitor, of very different calibre, was the famous Tiger Dunlop, who would ride the saucy child upon his massive shoulder—which, she said, ought to have a saddle. He pronounced his admiration of egg-nog as made under her father’s supervision, “Ah, your coo gives good milk!” There was the usual greed in this neighbourhood for the liquid which made the egg-nog so uncommonly good, and the expedients to get the desired article were sometimes ingenious. One toper, impecunious and resourceful, provided himself with a keg partitioned down the centre, each side seemingly tight; one contained water only. He would arrive at the general store with the water side half-full, get the whiskey side filled, and then say payment would be made on his next visit. If prompt payment were demanded he would wax indignant; “Well, if you won’t trust me, take your old whiskey.” Out would come the water cork and the water would gurgle into the whiskey barrel; the owner, showing outraged virtue, would then march home with the whiskey side comfortably full.
As to the oft-repeated slander that Methodist preachers were the root of disaffection, scattering the seed of gospel and rebellion together, these ultra-loyal ladies are dubious. One says, “It is seldom you find one of them a real staunch Tory and a good man”—a remark, by the way, which admits of two meanings. Three loyal dames, one of them a foreigner, once upon a time attended a revival; no doubt the three minds were prejudiced as to the politics of the preacher. The latter finally came down the aisle, addressing his questions right and left: “And now, my good woman,” to the foreigner, “what has the Lord done for you?” “By Job alive,” said the lady, “I do not tell my family affairs to everybody!”
It is hard, even yet, to convince these dames of fixed feeling that good could come out of certain quarters. “They call them Reformers,—but what were they else? He” (a person above general suspicion) “may not have carried two heads in one hat, but he was not the true thing.”
“I would rather be killed by a good Tory bullet than be singed by rebel gunpowder,” said this fire-eating slip of a girl to a crying friend. “What are you crying for—because you have no more brothers to send?” “No, I’m afraid they’ll be brought back dead.” “I don’t care, provided mine are not shot in the back.”
Of the said brothers, one was in a troop of cavalry and another met his death, as many did, through the sudden change from home comforts to campaigning. “Getting up out of a down bed and sleeping under waggons or on frozen ground with a carpet-bag for a pillow was a great change, and he died before he could be got home.”
But another brother seems to have kept his health and spirits in a marked degree. The absences of the husband and father were now as long and trying as they had been in 1812, and the mother, whose name was the good old-fashioned Betsy, gave voluble tokens of her grief. This boy imitated his father’s handwriting and wrote a long and sympathetic letter, ending, “Do the best you can, Betsy, I don’t expect to be back till spring.” She threw down the letter,—“If you don’t come back till then, you need not come home at all.” The boys were delighted, but the mother discovered the forgery, and the scribe suffered severely. It was a custom with the father to give his daughter a birthday present of a roast of beef, every added year marked by an added pound of meat. In those days spinsterhood was not as fashionable a state of life as nowadays, and the father waxed annoyed: “Now, my dear,” he said, when the roast tipped considerably more than twenty pounds, “if you are not gone off within the year I shall have to drive in the whole beast.”
Arnold somewhere says that according as the New or Old Testament takes hold of a nation, so do what he terms the religious humours in it differ. It would be hard to determine from the data procurable just what the influence in this case was. Some had anxious thoughts as to how things had “sped” and the division of spoil which old and new dispensations always allow as lawful. One old lady sent off her son with a blessing to join his corps, but called him back again to give him a large shawl. “Now, Willie, take this with you, and when you get to Toronto be sure to get it filled with the best Young Hyson tea. Don’t forget now, and bring the best. By the time you get there you’ll find plenty of it for the taking.”
An old farmer ascribed the degeneracy of the times not to influences broad as Arnold’s, but to the “flattery” understood in the difference of manner toward farmers’ wives. “When ’twere dame and porridge, it were rale good times; when ’twere mistress and broth, ’twere worser a great deal; but when it comes to be ma’am and soup, it be werry bad indeed,” and no wonder the country went to the dogs. He preferred the days when U. E. Loyalist ladies speared salmon with pitchforks. If dress had aught to do with it, the change there was great indeed. In the early days to which he alluded many a U. E. Loyalist belle had only one garment to her name, a deerskin slip, and men’s buckskin trousers sometimes brought a dollar and a half after twelve years’ wear; by ’37 the following is a description of an evening dress, thought worthy to be sent to Canada—“Gros royale black ground with flowing pattern, wide flounces and short tight sleeves, long gloves of peau rosée, English lace cap with pompous (?) roses, English lace handkerchief, black satin shoes, and one bracelet.” During the good old days so bemoaned by the farmer, one U. E. Loyalist girl unfortunately made a neighbourly visit where she saw the mysteries of the laundry for the first time. The lesson sank deep in her mind, and at the first opportunity after her return home, when the rest of the family had left her in undisturbed possession of the house, she made her maiden attempt as blanchiseuse on her own deerskin garment. But as this adaptation from Godiva laboured, the garment grew less and less. Any woman who has attempted to wash a glove wrung into a wisp can appreciate her horror. There was no Peeping Tom, but the sounds of the returning family precipitated her into the generous shadow of the potato-hole, whence she interviewed them—if, indeed, the attenuated bit of chamois was not the more eloquent of the two. I’ll find a thousand shifts to get away, has been written; alas, she could find not one. She was packed in a barrel and conveyed upon an ox-sled to a neighbour’s where clothes were more common, and the distressed and shiftless maiden could truly have said she was in her right mind when again clothed. The last of the English and the first of the Canadians were in some points uncommonly alike.