[FOREST LIFE IN CANADA WEST.][19]
Ladies of Britain, deftly embroidering in carpeted saloon, gracefully bending over easel or harp, pressing, with nimble finger, your piano's ivory, or joyously tripping in Cellarian circles, suspend, for a moment, your silken pursuits, and look forth into the desert at a sister's sufferings! May you never, from stern experience, learn fully to appreciate them. But, should fate have otherwise decreed, may you equal her in fortitude and courage. Meanwhile, transport yourselves, in imagination's car, to Canada's backwoods, and behold one, gently nurtured as yourselves, cheerfully condescending to rudest toils, unrepiningly enduring hardships you never dreamed of. Not to such hardships was she born, nor educated for them. The comforts of an English home, the endearments of sisterly affection, the refinement of literary tastes, but ill prepared the emigrant's wife to work, in the rugged and inclement wilderness, harder than the meanest of the domestics, whom, in her own country, she was used to command. But where are the obstacles and difficulties that shall not be overcome by a strong will, a warm heart, a trusting and cheerful spirit?—precious qualities, strikingly combined by the lady of whose countless trials and troubles we have here an affecting and remarkable record.
The Far West of Canada is so remote a residence, and there is so much oblivion in a lapse of twenty years, that it may be necessary to mention who the authoress is who now appeals (successfully, or we are much mistaken) to the favour of her countrymen, and more especially of her countrywomen. Of a family well known in literature, Mrs Moodie is a sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the popular and accomplished historical biographer. In 1831, Miss Susanna Strickland published a volume of poems. Had she remained in England, she in time, perhaps, might have rivalled her sister's fame as one of the most distinguished female writers of the day. But it was otherwise ordained. In 1832 she sailed, as Mrs Moodie, an emigrant to Canada. Under most unfavourable circumstances, she still from time to time took up the pen. The anxieties and accidents of her forest life, her regrets for the country she loved so well, and had left perhaps for ever, and, subsequently, the rebellion in Canada, suggested many charming songs and poems, some of which are still extremely popular in our North American colony. Years passed amidst hardships and sufferings. At last a brighter day dawned, and it is from a tranquil and happy home, as we gladly understand, that the settler's brave wife has transmitted this narrative of seven years' exertion and adventure.
Inevitable hardships, some ill luck, some little want of judgment and deliberation, make up the history of Captain and Mrs Moodie's early days in Canada. "I give you just three years to spend your money and ruin yourself," said an old Yankee hag with whom the Captain was concluding the purchase of a wretched log-hut. It scarcely took so long. Borrowing our colours from Mrs Moodie's pages, we may broadly sketch the discomforts of the emigrant's first few months in Canada. These were passed near the village of C——, on the north shore of Lake Ontario. A farm of one hundred and fifty acres, about fifty of which were cleared, was purchased by Captain Moodie, for £300, of a certain Q——, a landjobber.
"Q——," says the Captain, who has contributed two or three chapters to his wife's book, "held a mortgage for £150, on a farm belonging to a certain Yankee settler, named Joe H——, as security for a debt incurred for goods at his store. The idea instantly struck him that he would compel Joe H—— to sell him his farm, by threatening to foreclose the mortgage. I drove out with Mr Q—— next day to see the farm in question. It was situated in a pretty retired valley, surrounded by hills, about eight miles from C——, and about a mile from the great road leading to Toronto. There was an extensive orchard upon the farm, and two log-houses, and a large frame-barn. A considerable portion of the cleared land was light and sandy; and the uncleared part of the farm, situated on the flat rocky summit of a high hill, was reserved for 'a sugar bush,' and for supplying fuel."
Pleased with the place, Captain Moodie bought it, and, having done so, had leisure to repent his bargain. Of the land he got possession in the month of September; but it was not till the following summer that the occupants of the house could be prevailed upon to depart. Until then the new comers dwelt in the wretched hut already mentioned. Even to this hovel Mrs Moodie's English habits of order and neatness imparted something like comfort; but a still greater evil, beyond her power to remedy, was connected with her residence. Her nearest neighbours were disreputable Yankee settlers.
"These people regarded British settlers with an intense feeling of dislike, and found a pleasure in annoying and insulting them when any occasion offered. They did not understand us, nor did we them, and they generally mistook the reserve which is common with the British towards strangers, for pride and superciliousness.
"'You Britishers are too superstitious,' one of them told me on a particular occasion.
"It was some time before I found out what he meant by the term 'superstitious,' and that it was generally used by them for 'supercilious.'"
All that poor Mrs Moodie endured from her reprobate neighbours, could not be told in detail within the compass of a much larger work than hers. But we may glean a tolerable idea of her constant vexations and annoyance from her first volume, which contains sketches, at once painful and humorous, of the persecutions to which she was subjected. Impudent intrusion and unscrupulous borrowings were of daily occurrence, varied occasionally by some gross act of unneighbourliness and aggression. Although evidently a person of abundant energy and spirit, Mrs Moodie, partly through terror of these semi-savages, and partly from a wish to conciliate and make friends, long submitted to insolence and extortion. The wives and daughters of the Yankee settlers—some of whom had "squatted," without leave or license, on ground to which they had no right, made a regular property of her. Every article of domestic use, kettles and pans, eatables, drinkables, and wearables, did these insatiable wretches borrow—and never return. They would walk into her house and carry off the very things she at the moment needed, or come in her absence and take her gown from the peg, or the pot from the fire. The three families from which she had most to endure were those of a red-headed American squatter, who had fled his own country for some crime; of "Uncle Joe," the former proprietor of her farm, and still the occupant of her house; and of "Old Satan," a disgusting and brutal Yankee, who had had one eye gouged out in a fight, and whose face was horribly disfigured by the scars of wounds inflicted by his adversary's teeth. A pertinacious tormentor, too, was old Betty Fye, who lived in the log shanty across the creek. Having made Mrs Moodie's acquaintance, under pretence of selling her a "rooster," she became a constant and most unwelcome visitor, borrowing everything she could think of, returning nothing, and interlarding her discourse with oaths, which greatly shocked the good-tempered English lady.
"'Everybody swears in this country,' quoth Betty Fye. 'My boys (she was a widow with twelve sons) all swear like Sam Hill; and I used to swear mighty big oaths, till about a month ago, when the Methody parson told me that if I did not leave it off I should go to a tarnation bad place; so I dropped some of the worst of them.'
"'You would do well to drop the rest; women never swear in my country.'
"'Well, you don't say! I always hear'd they were very ignorant. Will you lend me the tea?'"
Tea to-day—it was something else to-morrow. Mrs Moodie tried every means of affronting her, but long without success. The most natural and effectual plan would have been to refuse all her demands; but to this Mrs Moodie, perhaps from unwillingness to disoblige, was tardy in having recourse. At last she got rid of her by quoting Scripture.