THE RAG MAT.
SPINNING.
It was down here, in houses looking like rookeries under the great cliff, and facing the watered-ribbon of a street, that in the great day of Quebec’s wooden shipbuilding, lived with their families the shipwrights, Hibernians and others, who came out from the Old Country to engage in the shipbuilding trade.
But the life of this street was paralyzed when the industry declined; and now many of the old, home-roofs are caving in and the old sides bulging, and only here and there an octogenarian stands in her doorway knitting in hand. Such an old orphan of a dead-and-gone industry is Mary Ann Grogan. You stop to speak with her. Her knitting needles click faster on the sock in her old hand, a-tremble with excitement that anyone should care to “hear about old times”.
At first her story is an epic of wooden hulls. Through her spectacles, as it were, you look out there to the edge of the River, the River where now rides the visiting fleet of the North American squadron, and you see the low-lying keel, the up-standing ribs, and men everywhere. And the picture calls up other craft a-building at Levis, and on the banks of the Saint Charles. And so great is the power of suggestion, that you even include in the vision the three long ships of Jacques Cartier putting in that “first winter”. “Surely, this is a wonderful old face,” you think.
From the ships, she goes on to the street itself, the picturesque little church, the Sisters’ little school, where the youngsters of the remaining families struggle with the three R’s. But her story becomes more dramatic, when she tells of the great landslide of the cliff itself, the historic landslide that carried such loss of life and destruction of property in its wake. One might read about it forever and yet not visualize it as one does when Mary Ann tells you that “the noise of it”, still lives in her old ears; “that she was born here and lived here, but never before nor since, has she heard or seen the likes of that morning.”
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