Not long after that we came in contact with that other type of early-Ontario house. The one with the low sides made of wood thinly stuccoed with white plaster on the outside—the “Roughcast” houses of Ontario. They of course carry in their now “peeling” plaster an appeal to remember the Old Pioneers and days—the days when the hardships of the wilderness rose up as a wall to deter all but the hardiest spirits from blazing a trail here; here, where the true West had its portal.
Usually a clump of lilac bushes stands by these old doors, the boughs gnarled and thick with age and the increasing struggle for existence—the old lilac that strikes the human interest note and tells plainer than words, of the domesticity that once was the pride of the little family domiciled here so far away from “Home,” in the Old Country. And over against these two old types of Provincial houses are set the really palatial dwellings that represent the newer Ontario. And yet to prove that no hard line separates Old and New, there is a fine, old home down Saint Catharine’s way that claims to be one of the earliest houses in the Province which, under the skilful renovation of a modern architect, still holds itself proudly with “the best”.
If one had time to go into all the old houses of the Province, the real old-timers—I am sure one would still find, as in Quebec, many fruits of the loom. The old, woven carpet and bedspread, the old loom, and here and there, perhaps, a grandmother to weave and many sitting and sewing at squares for “pieced-pattern” bed-quilts.
In Empire Loyalist homes, of the country, there is, of course, still to be found many a handsome and valuable piece of old furniture. Some of the oldest and daintiest chairs we have ever come across, and one of the dearest collections of little, old books, we once encountered in British Columbia, out of Ontario.
Ontario is a sweeping Province of magnificent lakes and waterways. Her coastline is almost as extensive as that of any Province. If it were not that certain Atlantic Provinces have almost a monopoly of the word, she might even be called “Maritime”.
Toronto is even now entering upon an era of a new waterfront with docking accommodations of the best. For the Lake trade? Yes. And presently for the Ocean’s.
So, in Ontario the trail of Romance, we soon discovered, led almost as surely “By the ’longshore road” as down Nova Scotia way.
Ontario being a land of lakes, is, in consequence, a land of campers and camp-fires; a land of the canoe; a land of fishing and hunting. And in the North a land of logging, with the picturesque figures of the lumbermen on snow-shoes.
Out there in the Georgian Bay is the romance of thirty thousand islands. There are the picturesque figures of the Ojibways in canoes, still taking the same old fishing and “trade” routes as in the days before the coming of Champlain. Still there is Manitoulin.
The craft in greatest favour everywhere on lake, river and bay of Ontario, is the canoe. I do not think anyone can know what an extensive cult is the “canoe” till they see it in Ontario. In season it creeps on the bosom of the lake like a leaf dropped silently from the tree. And Romance rides in more or less every canoe, so that, if anything, the Romantic may be said to be more difficult to keep up with in Ontario than any of the Provinces. The trail of the Romantic invariably leads to a tent somewhere by a stream. And