The Grand Trunk Railway, in the first instance, was built by British capital and the loans (which afterwards became gifts) of the millions of the Government of Canada. The great Canadian Pacific Railway, too, was built by capitalists, with generous aid from the Government, but the branch lines asked for bonuses from the different municipalities which they touched. Townships, villages and cities issued bonds, borrowed the money, and gradually provided a sinking fund from the taxes received, by which in time to pay off the bonds.
In the abstract it seems unfair and uncalled for that a township had to pay for the railway in advance in order to get it to touch that township, and then, when it came, be charged stiff freight and passenger rates by the same grateful railway. It was “a bitter pill to swallow,” but it had to be taken. Those municipalities which did not “swallow the pill” are to-day “in the lurch,” as we say in Canada. I paid one of them a visit a little time ago, and I give herewith a sketch of my experiences:
The long, uninterrupted winter was dragging its slow length along without a break. Even the January thaw, as always foretold by the oldest inhabitant, had not come to the hamlet during that winter. Snow fell once or twice during the week with unerring regularity. Roadways had been beaten and tracked in the snow, and the faithful villagers had tramped through it from day to day. Nothing, in fact, had happened to break the monotony of this quiet village hamlet for the entire winter season. Perhaps the last noted occurrence was just as the snow came, when the deacon’s horse ran away and came bounding back into the village without the deacon or anyone else holding the lines, and the robes partly in and partly out of the cutter. That occurrence for a time had been food for gossip among the quiet villagers, some stoutly averring that the deacon was drunk, while others, putting it mildly, said, “The deacon was took bad in his head suddenly, as he sometimes was wont to be, and couldn’t guide his horse.” Just how it was was still a mooted point, even as late as the dreaded Ides of March—the time of my visit to this quiet place. It seems no one had died, there were but few births, and only one or two young fellows had spunk enough to do any right-down earnest courting for the whole live-long stormy winter. Happenings there were none. Well, business called me to this little rural hamlet in the gusty month of March—this peaceful village, removed from the path of the iron horse, an out-of-the way place altogether. During the general upheaval of things in Ontario, when most towns and villages were up and about to secure railway communication, the deacon of this little place and a few other fore-handed citizens strongly objected to giving “any bonus for any number of railways, be they one or more,” so the village has gone without a railway. Excellent people they are indeed, and they change so very slowly and deliberately that old Rip Van Winkle could not possibly have found a better place wherein or whereabout to take that long memorable nap of his.
Even were Rip to change, his neighbors would not, for in the twenty years, while he calmly slumbered, the weekly “sewing circles” would infallibly be held; and around and about the sewing circles everything in this wayside, or rather out-of-the-way-side, hamlet revolved. When Mrs. Dobson put on her new striped stuff dress for the first time, and came down to the “circle,” every eye was upon her, and she had no rest until she told where she obtained it, how much it cost per yard, and how many yards it took for the dress. Particularly is this worthy of mention to enable those remote from this village of snow-trodden paths to realize fully its unchangeableness, and its hunger for something out of the ordinary to give food for talk and thought. A boy of fourteen had driven me from the railway station, twelve miles away, as he carried the meagre leather bag, denominated by grace Her Majesty’s Mail, in a square-boxed sleigh drawn by one horse—such a sleigh as in New England they term a “pung.”
At the village hostelry I am domiciled within four wooden-sided, clap-boarded, white-painted walls, where I am “ated and slaped,” and all for $1.00 per day. After the ample evening tea, and over a quiet pipe in the corner of the bar, while conning a paper two days old, the voluble and voluminous landlady asks if I will not “go and hear the professor to-night?”
Not having been at the weekly sewing circle for that week, I am not posted, and in my innocence ask of the professor, “And what’s to be heard from him?”
“He’s a psychologist, sir, and they all say he can make people do just what he chooses to make them do. He’s going to speak to-night in the Temperance
AUTHOR’S FATHER LOADING HIS SCHOONERS WITH LUMBER BY RAFTING, ON LAKE ONTARIO.
BARCLAY, CLARK & CO. LITHO. TORONTO