The night, the cold, the storm, the dark and cheerless abode, were too much to bear; the delicate young wife threw herself upon a settle and burst into a flood of tears. This was but a momentary weakness. Rising above the depression produced by the dreary scene, the woman's genius for creating comfort out of the slenderest materials and bringing sunshine into darkness, soon began to manifest itself.
We will not detail the various trials and cares by which that forlorn cabin was transformed into a comfortable home, nor how fared Mrs. Dalton the first rather uneventful year of her life in the woods. The second spring saw her a mother, and the following autumn she became again a homeless westward wanderer. Her husband had sold the cabin and clearing in New York, and having purchased an extensive tract of forest-land a few miles south of Georgian Bay in Upper Canada, decided to move thither.
The family with their household goods took sloop on Lake Ontario late in October, and sailed to Toronto; from this place on the 15th day of November, they proceeded across the peninsula in sleighs. Their party consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Dalton and their child, and John McMurray, their hired man, and his wife.
The first forty miles of their journey lay over a well-beaten road, and through a succession of clearings, which soon began to diminish until they reached a dense forest, which rose in solemn stillness around them and cast across their path a shadow which seemed to the imagination of Mrs. Dalton an omen of coming evil.
The sun had now set, but the party still drove on through the forest-shadows; the moon having risen giving a new and strange beauty to the scenery. The infant had fallen asleep. A deep silence fell upon the party; night was above them with her mysterious stars; the ancient forest stretched around them on every side; nature lay wrapped in a snowy winding sheet; the wind was rising, and a drifting scud of clouds from the northeast passed across the moon, and gave a still more weird and somber character to the scene. A boding sadness sank into the heart of Mrs. Dalton as the sleighs drove up to the cabin in the clearing where they were to pass the night. It was occupied by an old negro and his wife, who had found in the Canadian woods a safe refuge from servitude.
Hardly had they and their horses been safely bestowed under shelter when the sky became entirely overcast, the wind rose to a gale, and a driving storm of snow and sleet filled the air. All night, and the following day the tempest raged without intermission, and on the morning of the second day the sun struggling through the clouds looked down on the vast drifts of snow, some of them nearly twenty feet in depth, completely blocking their farther passage, and enforcing a sojourn of some days in their present quarters.
During this time the babe fell ill, and grew worse so rapidly that Mr. Dalton determined to push through the snow-drifts on horseback to the nearest settlement, which lay eight miles south of them, and procure the services of a physician. He started early in the morning, expecting to return in the afternoon. But afternoon and evening passed, and still Mr. Dalton did not return. His course was a difficult one through forest and thicket, and when evening came, and night passed with its bitter cold, Mrs. Dalton's anxiety was increased to torture. Her only hope was that her husband had reached the settlement in safety, and had been induced to remain there till the following morning before undertaking to return.
Soon after the sun rose that morning, Mrs. Dalton and the hired man set out on horseback in search of the missing one. Tracing his course through the snow for four miles they at length caught sight of him standing up to his waist in a deep drift, beside his horse. His face was turned toward them. So lifelike and natural was his position that it was only when his wife grasped his cold rigid fingers that she knew the terrible truth. Her husband and the horse were statues of ice thus transformed by the deadly cold as they were endeavoring to force a passage through those immense drifts.
From the speechless, tearless trance of grief into which Mrs. Dalton was thrown by the shock of her awful loss, she was roused only by the recollection of the still critical condition of her child and the necessity that she should administer to its wants. Its recovery from illness a few days after, enabled the desolate widow to cast about her in grief and doubt, and decide what course she should pursue.
As her own marriage portion as well as the entire fortune of her late husband was embarked in the purchase of the forest tract, she concluded to continue her journey twenty miles farther to the point of her original destination, and there establish herself in the new house which had been provided for her in the almost unbroken wilderness.