But the Ontario squaw shows much delicacy in the use of porcupine quills. These she dyes, or uses au naturel, in combination often with birch-bark, to make a basket that is of Ontario, and one which would hold its own everytime with the Quebec basket “pour Madame’s boudoir.” The Ojibway woman shows an innate taste in design. The “patterns”, as well as the colours employed in her basket, are frequently exquisite in their harmony.
Somewhere on the beach or under trees, clinging to life, yet half decadent, as a thing whose usefulness has been “outclassed”, one happens here and there on the tribal or community-canoes, long, sinuous lines of boathood half bizarre by reason of design, simplicity of material and traditions of the builders; but more than half “bizarre” by reason of things that cannot be classified yet nevertheless are positive in suggestion. Was it in such canoes the Iroquois pursued the Hurons fleeing toward the wilderness and out of it, to the shelter of the French at Quebec? Was it in such canoes that the old explorers, Champlain, Frontenac, the old Jesuit Missionaries, Breboeuf, Carron, pushed along these lakes and water-highways? Was it in such, the coureurs du bois, the trapper, the pioneer, the soldier, all those characters of old—romantic characters of Old France, Old England, Old Scotia—was it in such they took the paddle in hand, metamorphosing it at a stroke into a “quill” wherewith to write “France” and “England” across the page of a continent?
Here, too, among the Ojibways is still in use the hollowed stone with its companion, nicely smooth and rounded for grinding corn. Old squaws of the Ojibways can, and do still, “turn the trick” easily enough. Then there is another form of mortar, with a wooden pestle four or five feet in length, bulky at each end and slender in the middle, so that two hands may grasp it quite easily.
Thus, by these two instruments, comes the grain to the dough of the frying-pan loaf.
CHAPTER XXIII.
ONTARIO CONTINUED.
VIEW FROM HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY, GEORGE III’S
CHAPEL TO THE MOHAWKS, NEAR
BRANTFORD.
FORT MISSISSAUGA, NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE.