Romantic Canada

by Victoria Hayward

In addition to this room, on the first floor, were a large parlour, a smaller room used as an office, and the family bedroom. There were three bedrooms upstairs. In our room, in addition to the bed with its heavy homemade all-wool comforters, a large Russian chest with black, iron handles, occupied one side.

I speak of the room on the ground floor as a winter-kitchen because the summer-kitchen is a dear little white cabin in the yard, under the Manitoba maples. A Mennonite custom which went at once to our hearts is this of outside-kitchens for summer use, we having seen so many in the West Indies and the South. The little summer-kitchen here was a house of magic from the cooking angle. There Mrs. de Fehr prepared all her long list of Mennonite dishes, and at her large stove with her kitchen apron about her, she was the typical housewife—an example to her sisters scattered far and wide all over Canada.

Every Mennonite gate had its family group at night standing inside or sitting on the fence to watch the cows come home. Evidently it is an event of which, in all these years, they’ve never grown tired. And a little variety creeps into it every night in watching how the cows will carry their tails, for on this hangs the weather for the next twenty-four hours according to Mennonite lore. “If the cows run with their tails straight out behind them when they come home in the evening, it is a sign of rain, and if they come with their tails down it is a sign of fair weather.” The manner of their going in the morning apparently doesn’t count, probably because the cows are then too sleepy to know more than that their tails are behind them.

The Mennonites, though primarily grain-growers, are generally interested in stock. They keep horses, cows, pigs, chickens, geese. A few own automobiles, but these are not “old kirk” folk. The de Fehrs are Old Church people, and were to us even more interesting on that account, as we felt that our visit was with the real old-timers. The Old Church folk have little points of dress which aim at simplicity. Men of the Old Church do not wear a tie or a white collar, and the married women wear black caps. Otherwise the house-life seemed little different from any other prosperous farmer’s, believing in the simple, old-time rural life. One aim of Mennonite life, it seems, is to keep its people loyal to the soil. And this is a fundamental thing in these days of farm-need.

Madam de Fehr is a great spinner. Indeed, in the winter the spinning wheel fills in much of the time in every home. But in summer there’s the cooking and the horses and other live stock to attend to. The Mennonite women in all the villages lend a hand with the horses, grooming them and getting them harnessed, ready to go in the wagon or to draw plough or harvester. We had not noted this work so much among other foreign women. The women work very capably and easily with the horses and it doesn’t seem hard work to them. They are at their best, however, in the little kitchen, before the door of which the wind was strewing the golden leaves when we went for afternoon—no, not tea—coffee! It is a Mennonite custom to have coffee and bread-and-butter and perhaps jam, every afternoon at four o’clock. The men leave off ploughing and come in from the fields for their cup of this refreshing hot drink. Mr. de Fehr said the Mennonites think coffee very stimulating and good for a man that works. I fear that all our Canadian farmers are not so well looked after by their wives in the cold autumn afternoons at the ploughing! The coffee is ground fresh in the little mill over the stove at every making—a pointer for any who wish to adopt this custom.

At dusk the cows come home—two hundred and twenty-two of them—in the village of Ostervick. Supper is at seven. And at night while we were at table the herdsman came to make his report to Mr. de Fehr, who this year holds the office of head overseer of all the herd. The holder of this office is elected for one year. He keeps the books, knows just how many cows each villager has, and pays the herdsman out of the several kinds of grain—so much of each—and the money that each owner pays per head. The arrival of the herdsman disclosed the fact that the cows are assembled each morning at the blowing of a horn after six o’clock. We were up betimes that first morning and every morning after to watch a scene of old-world life which we believe can be witnessed nowhere else in Canada.

The piper starts from one end of the village, blowing the horn or bugle, as he goes, down the whole length of the street—carpeted at that time with the golden autumn leaves! When he has passed the entire length he turns around, and the cows come out of the first gate, the second, the third, as fast as the rats followed the piper of Hamelin. Our gate happened to be near the centre of the village so we had a box-seat at this strange performance.

Of course before the cows come out of each picturesque lane it means that an army of milkmaids have been up betimes getting them milked and ready to come upon the stage at the psychological moment of the herder’s arrival at that point. It spoke well for the girls that few cows were late. Unless one has witnessed this strange foreign sight and heard the bugler coming on, with the bugle in one hand and cracking his heavy whip with the other, driving those two hundred beasts to pasture, one cannot imagine how dramatic an event it is. But I think perhaps that, except as the early morning is always the hour of charm and witchery, the manner of the herd’s arrival home in the evening, though different, is equally dramatic. For then the cows come in a hurry to be milked.

All the Mennonite women are good cooks. Some of them still hold to the out-of-door ovens as do the habitants of Quebec. For heating these ovens the women cleverly make use of the straw-pile, and many are the loaves of homemade bread and the pies that find their way in and out of these ovens!

Marking the progress of this people, in some of the yards, stand the log houses of the pioneers, mute witnesses of the wilderness life to which these people came nearly fifty years ago.