The Quakers were uncompromising in their opposition to the liquor traffic, and could be relied upon to support all measures for the advancement of temperance. They were progressive in educational matters; they established and maintained efficient schools, and generally took a deep interest in all matters directed towards the general improvement of the country. Beneath their quaint garb and solemn faces, there frequently was found a deep sense of humour, all the more effective when expressed in their peculiar form of speech.
CHAPTER VI
PROVISIONS AND PUBLIC HIGHWAYS
The staple articles of food among the pioneers were much the same as in our day. Pork formed the chief item of meat. The hams and shoulders were smoked and the rest of the carcass preserved in a strong brine. The flour was coarser than the article we get from the modern roller mills, but none the less, rather the more, wholesome. Corn meal was used much more extensively than now; it was boiled and used as porridge for breakfast, a thick covering of brown sugar being sprinkled over it; what was left over became quite firm as it cooled, and was eaten for supper with milk, or cut into thin slices and fried. Corn meal griddle-cakes were also in great demand. Johnny-cake was not popular, as it was regarded as a Yankee dish; and it took a good many years for the Loyalists to reconcile themselves to anything in any way associated with their former persecutors.
Wild strawberries, raspberries, plums, and gooseberries were to be had for the picking, and the thrifty housewife always laid in a good supply. The raspberries and plums were dried in the sun and put away for future use, or made into a jam, like the gooseberries and strawberries.
The maple furnished the most of the sugar, but cane sugar was afterwards imported—not the white lump or granulated sugar of to-day, but a moist, dark-brown, unrefined product known as "Muscovado".
Tomatoes were not considered fit for human food until after the middle of the nineteenth century. If grown at all, the fruit was used merely for purposes of ornamentation, suspended from strings in the windows under the name of "love-apples". Many believed that they would cause cancer in those eating them—a notion that is not even yet wholly dead in some places.
Although our fresh waters abounded in fish of a superior quality, the Loyalists were not what we would call a fish-eating people—perhaps no people ever were or are as a matter of choice. Most of us enjoy a fish dinner once in a while; but few, if any, of us would care to accept it as a steady diet, or as a substitute for meat. The rigors of our climate and the outdoor life of hard work seemed to call for something more sustaining. The bays and rivers teemed with maskalunge, bass, salmon, pickerel, and pike, and in the late autumn months the whitefish and herring were very plentiful. The "mascos" were speared at night by the aid of a jack-light; they were even shot from the shore as they were lazily swaggering along in the shallow water. In the early spring, a mess of pike could be secured at any time with very little effort; every inlet and creek seemed to be alive with them. The whitefish always has held first place among our merchantable fish. In the summer season they were caught in nets upon the shoals of the Great Lakes, and in October and November the seines were thrown across their path as they were running up the lesser bodies of water. I have heard an octogenarian, whose truthfulness even in a fish story I had no reason to doubt, declare that he had frequently, when a boy, speared fifty or sixty whitefish in one night.
If we examine the map of any of the first townships, we find that the road allowances are in straight lines, intersected at right angles by cross-roads, also in straight lines. About the only exceptions are the roads along the waterfront, which of necessity must conform to the irregularities in the shores. How few, however, of the roads in actual use are straight! We find them twisting and turning in every direction and intersecting each other at various angles.
During the first few years of the settlements a path through the forest was all that was required. A low piece of ground, a steep precipice, or even a fallen tree, which would present no difficulty to the modern road-builder, might at the time have been deemed a sufficient cause for departing from the blazed trail. Once such a path was laid out and improved from time to time, it became a very easy matter for it to be recognized and adopted as a regular highway. In time the cause for the deviation may have passed away, but the crooked road remained. The writer knows of several "jogs" in public thoroughfares which were so constructed in order to pass around buildings carelessly erected upon the road allowance. Many of the most important highways in Ontario appear to be the shortest practical lines between certain towns or villages, and were unquestionably laid out as a matter of convenience, with an utter disregard for the road allowances reserved by the government surveyors.