Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

The commutation of pensions was an experiment of the most benevolent intention. It was thought that the married pensioner would purchase stock for a small farm, and set himself down to provide for his children with a sum of money in hand which he could never have obtained in any other way. Many did so, and are now independent; but the majority, helpless in their habits, and giving way to drink, soon got cheated of their dollars and became beggars; so that the government was actually obliged at length to restore a small portion of the pension to keep them from starvation. They died out, would not work at the Penetanguishene settlement, and have vanished from the things that be. Poor fellows! many a tale have they told me of flood and field, of being sabred by the cuirassiers at Waterloo, of being impaled on a Polish lance, and of their wanderings and sufferings.

The military settlement, however, of the Penetanguishene road is a different affair. It was effected by pensioned non-commissioned officers and soldiers, who had grants of a hundred acres and sometimes more; and it will please the benevolent founder, should these pages meet his eye, to know that many of them are now prosperous, and almost all well to do in the world.

But we must retrace our steps, and waggon back again by their doors to Barrie.

I left the village at half-past six in the morning, raining still, with the wind in the south-east, and very cold. We arrived at the Widow Marlow's, nineteen miles, at mid-day; the weather having changed to fine and blowing hard—certainly not pleasant in the forest-road, on account of the danger of falling trees, to which this pass is so liable that a party of axemen have sometimes to go ahead to cut out a way for the horses.

We passed through the twelve mile woods by a new road, which reduces the extent of actual forest to five, and avoids altogether the Trees of the Two Brothers, noted in Penetanguishene history for the fatal accident, narrated in a former volume, by which one soldier died, and his brother was, it is supposed, frightened to death, in the solemn depths of the primeval and then endless woods.

Near the end of the five mile Bush, about a mile from the first clearance, Jeffrey, the landlord of the inn at the village, has built a small cottage for the refreshment of the traveller, and in it he intends to place his son. In the mean time, until quite completed, for money is scarce and things not to be done at railroad pace so near the North Pole, he has located here an old well known black gentleman, called Mr. Davenport, who was once better to do in the world, and kept a tavern himself.

Having had the honour of his acquaintance for many years, I stopped to see how my old friend was getting on, particularly as I heard that he was now very old, and that his white consort had left him alone in the narrow world of the house in the woods. He received me with grinning delight, and told me that he had just left the new jail at Barrie for selling liquor without a license, which, I opine, is rather hard law against a poor old nigger, who had literally no other means of support, and was most usefully stationed, like the monks of St. Bernard, in a dangerous pass.

But the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, and the woolly head of old Davenport had matter of satisfaction in it from a source that he never dreamed of.

Alone—far away from the whole human world, in the depth of a hideous forest, with a road nearly impassable one half of the year,—he found an unexpected friend.

For fear of the visits of two-footed and four-footed brutes during the long nights of his Robinson Crusoe solitude, old Davenport always shut up his log castle early, and retired to rest as soon as daylight departed; for it did so very early in the evening there, as the solemn pines, with their gray trunks and far-spreading moss-grown arms and dismal evergreen foliage, if it can be called foliage, stood close to his dwelling—nay, brushed with the breath of the wind his very roof.