AN OLD ONTARIO HOMESTEAD.
ONTARIO, A LAND OF CAMPERS AND
CAMP-FIRES.
a camper may be just as romantic a figure as one who mows the hay, or lists to the Angelus out of the Percé fishboat. What can be more Romantic than a group around a campfire? Here seems to be situated the very source and fountain-head of “pipe-dreams”, stories of the forest, legends of the Indians—all interwoven and crossed with traditions of pioneer explorers.
And these old tales are always having new chapters added, every time an angler catches a fish; everytime a hunter takes a gun under arm.
Go out anywhere with an Ojibway of the Georgian Bay region, and you will happen upon a black pot a-sling over a log upheld by two other logs, and a roaring fire under the pot. Across the log may be several bits of branches with a forked branch cut to give “beard” to the hook from which swing a number of smoky tea-kettles and lard-pails, all hard a-boil with tea, potatoes, or fish, or maybe just pork, suspended in the flame and the smoke, or above the live coals, toward which a frying-pan is tilted to bake the dough it holds into a cake of bread.
Do not these pots and kettles call to the cauldrons of Quebec, the Madeleines and far Newfoundland, as to sisters? Ethnology of people! Sometimes, it would seem, there is an ethnology of inanimate things.
Here in Ontario, among the Indians, one finds skilful workers of sweetgrass, though apparently there is nowhere such a concentration into a trade as in Pierreville.