CHAPTER XVII.BUBBLE, BUBBLE, BUBBLE.

“Jiggity jog, jiggity jog!”

Bad roads, or no roads at all, never betray the ox or Dobbin into the ditch. “Get out and get under” is a song not in the two-wheeler’s repertoire. Yet of course the slow-coach misses, as by a great gulf, the thrills which are the auto’s and aeroplane’s very own. So, between two or four, for the time being, honours are easy.

Yet to the two-wheeler must go the honour of pioneering transportation. With it began all life in Canada. And there are parts of the Dominion where two-wheels are still a people’s dependence. All Eastern Canada still pins faith to the two-wheel cart, whether it be Quebec or dear old Nova Scotia or the far-away Islands of the Gulf. Big wheel or little wheel, or whether “cheval,chienorle boeuf” produces the motor power, Romance, in the East, still rides in the two-wheel cart.

It appears on every road. Where there are no roads it must go along as if there were one. Unless a forest obstructs no lesser obstacle can ever hope to turn one of these old carts from its objective.

One may tramp a country road in Quebec without seeing a sign of life. Then presently a speck heaves in sight on the distant horizon. Long before it can be “made out” intuition says, “It is a two-wheel cart”.

As it comes towards you, its own individuality becomes more and more evident. You can distinguish it perhaps for the cart ofthe old woman from Saint Feréol who comes down once or twice a week to sell her pickings of wildframboiseor mountain raspberries to berry-hungry Pilgrims-to-the-shrine-of-bonne-Saint Anne. For, shrewd old woman that she is, she knows that even “pilgrims” must eat.

This old weather-beaten French-woman and her cart from the hill country are well-known characters of the Beaupré road; and every woman having anything from a farm to sell, hails madame as she drives along, so that when this particular cart arrives in the town every village housewife is agog at her door to see what madame has brought them to-day “pour diner”. And as for the cart itself, it overflows with beets and carrots, potatoes, maple sugar, a jar or two of honey; and, from the mass, struggling chickens gasping for breath. But “des oeufs et framboise” are all carefully protected under layers of cool leaves. Some morning we engage to ride back with madame when she has sold all her berries and what-not. We sit, one on the board beside the fat figure of madame, the other, on a box among the empty berry pails in the body of the cart. We ask madame how she got so many tins? “Du lard, mesdames, du lard”, she responds quickly. Looking about on the heap of lard tins, it seems to us as if the mountain folk must buy lard just to get the tins for their berries.

At first the springless cart is a little too much of a good thing, but we soon get used to the jolting and then forget it in speculating on the sights and sounds of the road. That whirr and buzz is not bees but a spinning wheel at work. We look in at an open door and there is madame at the wheel. She and the market woman exchange a heartybon jour. The houses are fairly close on this road. Scarcely one is passed before another heaves in sight.

In some yards the hay-cart goes into the barn with a full load. In another there is heard the heavy thud, thud of the loom. From our high seat we can see right into the room where madame is at work, shuttle in hand, bobbins in basket, balls of yarn on the floor.

Then behind us comes the honk of an automobile. Neither Dobbin nor madame seems to have heard. Their sang froid is in no wise disturbed by the speeding motorist or the cloud of dust in which he envelops our cart as he flies past. It is not until we turn off the main highway, where the catcher-up-of-dust motor

MANY OF THE SEATS IN THESE TINYCARTS ARE BUILT UP, SO THAT THEDRIVER SITS ABOVE HIS “HORSE”.

BAD ROADS, OR NO ROADS AT ALL,NEVER BETRAY THE OXINTO THE DITCH.

meant little more to madame than a summer whirlwind, that she and Dobbin rouse themselves to an interest in the road.

The road here does two things. It goes off into deep woods and it begins to climb up and up. Madame gets down on her side of the cart. Simultaneously we fall out of it behind. Dobbin gets a drink at a cool spring. We wash hands and faces.

The old woman cries “Allez, allez”, and Dobbin once more takes to the road, now leafy and sylvan but steep and winding, urged along with many an admonitory “marche donc” from madame. This shade is very grateful to both Dobbin and his mistress after the hot morning in town vending berries.

It is such a road as the motorist down there would never think of attempting. There is now a look about Dobbin at one end and madame at the other of the worn leather harness and reins, and a something about the lines of the old weathered cart which bespeak the satisfaction of the master. Down there, the Ford had the road to himself. He flew over it. But up here, this perpendicularity belongs to this trio of the old, belongs to the two-wheel cart and the old French market woman.

Just for a moment down there, our heart went back on our conveyance. Our allegiance weakened. We said, “Oh, for a car!” But up here in this “land of the sky”, where the road comes out on the mountainous brow of ’Tite de Cap and the gray St. Lawrence lies far below like a silver ribbon, the blue mountains of Northern New England against the southern sky, and away behind to the West, a smoke in the sky that is Quebec, our faith in the cart returns with smashing convincingness. The two-wheel cart’s the thing!

When madame begins to stop in front of cottage gates to pay out of her deep pocket the proceeds of each morning sale and we hand out to eager hands the right number of lard tins going to repeat their mission as berry containers, to our minds nothing is wanting in the Romance which weaves itself about the scene and the figure of the old cart and its mistress.

But we must not ride forever in this mountain-climbing and thrifty “hope of the hills”. Other carts are calling. Let us drift down stream on the bosom of the St. Lawrence, far out where it is “The Gulf”, away past Prince Edward Island to the Magdalens. In this corner of Quebec the two-wheel cart is practically the only means of land transportation. These Island carts, like the islands themselves, overflow with originality and character. They are soft and full of the sea’s wetness as they come toward us along the treeless, island-landscape. We notice, too, a difference in the horse. The Magdalens cart is drawn by an island pony. Mares are accompanied by shaggy colts, all legs, running beside the mothers, or following behind the cart, noses over the tail-board. When the load is a long mackerel boat going into winter quarters, after a season’s fishing on a distant beach, it is indeed a strange procession, the up-hill-and-down road causing it now to heave in sight and now to disappear as if the boat still rode the mobile crests and valleys of the Gulf.

But the most romantic of all the carts is the procession across the long barachois, a winding procession crossing the sands—cart after cart—a Canadian caravan of the desert. All sorts of weird and bizarre shapes of dusk and distance and creeping sea-fog add to the romance of this strange train.

What takes the caravan into the desert? Not the trade in rich silks and carpets of far eastern looms or the bringing of precious stones from one mart to another, but a trade just the same—an individual and romantic trade peculiar to the Magdalens—the culling of the clam, the tiny, hard, white mollusc with as pretty lights in it as the pearl when it comes wet from the underseas sand-home out there where the wet sea-fog begins in the eye of the wind.

One may think the path-finding lead-cart of this caravan has nothing to do. But try to find your own way across these sands and you will soon be glad to follow along behind any old cart that heaves in sight, even if it is navigated by an old cow in harness. Out here the sea-wind licks up the sand and fills in and levels off landmarks just as the Scirocco levels off the shifting dunes of old Egypt.

Over there, there is the instinct of the camel, the desert knowledge of the man, and the light of the stars to guide—but out here on the sands of the Magdalens it is a woman’s hand that holds the reins of the lead horse. Her cart may be made of bits of driftwood and in the half-barrel tub, in the waist of this semi-sea craft, a rusty three-pronged homemade digging fork, and a lantern by her side, may be the only gauges to a rising tide.

Could your eye follow the long caravan winding its way across the sands at night, lantern after lantern, a Will o’ the wispline of light and black figures in whose path lies the sinister quicksand, you must easily fall under the spell of this wet and mystical wraith of the night which, coming nearer, resolves itself into a succession of carts coming from or bound to the clamming.

Like light comedy, sunny and bright and tenderly human by contrast with the night caravan of the barachois is the scene of children of the Islands playing in the two-wheel cart next morning in the home yard. Elder brother plays Dobbin. Two garcons and a habitant maid occupy the driver’s seat. Mother in Breton cap and ample apron gives confidence to the baby who fain would ride too, but fears the big adventure. Another year, however, and he will ride with the boldest....

At Percé the two-wheel cart is a beach character. Sometimes “le cheval”, but just as often “le boeuf”, comes swinging along over the beach shingles and sand with the cart for codfish heads. Nowhere but among coastal folk is the codfish head either available or prized as garden fertilizer. Tradition says that our forefathers learned the value of the buried codfish as fertilizer from the Indians. The fish-guano of trade is ground into a powder. But old-timers of the seacoast let nature do her own pulverizing. They bury or half bury the heads which are now the only part of the fish spared to the land. Every old woman’s turnip or potato bed hereabouts rests on a but partly concealed foundation of heads. Every afternoon when the boats come in from sea with fish you can watch the old men and boys coming with their carts to spear up with pitchforks the residue of the splitting-tables. And when it is not heads that are up, it is a load of seaweed they are after. The sea can always contribute something with which to make or enrich a garden.

Between the Government pier and the renowned Percé Rock, after a heavy bit of weather from the North, the beach is strewn with a carpet of algae rich in the chemicals “good for the garden”. Truly there are “subjects” galore awaiting the artist in Canada!

All these carts mentioned are big and are found anywhere on the coast. The dog-cart is tiny and is especially of Quebec. For three hundred years the dog-cart has been reigning in Quebec. When one hears the habitant talk of “le chien”, one may be quite sure the subject is the dog which draws a cart. There is no other dog known thus generally to the whole countryside. Most of these little carts are homemade affairs, and, strange to say, unlike thelarger carts, usually have springs. Many of the seats in these tiny carts are built up, so that the driver sits above his “horse”. Many of the carts are fitted with iron foot-rests which fall below the body of the cart. This arrangement is handy when the driver happens to be a tall man. The driver and rider in a dogcart is not always a child as might be supposed. In Quebec labourers ride to their work of a morning in a dog-cart. Sometimes the load is as much as the dog can navigate, but having deposited his master at mill or factory he is free to roam all day until closing time, when he must be on hand to carry his master home again. For many miles they come, these little carts and but for the dog how would the workman get to his work? The dogcart is by no means a toy. It serves a phase of Canadian life and helps along Canadian business.

Another phase of the dogcart life is seen at noon when from all around the countryside dogcarts foregather bringing to the workmen hot dinners the wives have cooked. It is a sight to behold when thirty or forty of these little wagons dash along the Saint Gregoire highway at noon bound for the cotton mill at Montmorenci Falls. The driver in each cart is now a small boy and, dinner or no dinner, there is sure to be a race as to who gets there first. The dogs look as if they enjoyed the sport as much as the boys. Coming back, the children take their time, there being no hurry to get back to home and play with the empty pail.

In many parts of Quebec the dogcart is often enough the perambulator of the smallest member of the “grande famille”. Older children, in these cases, usually go ahead of the dog which follows drawing in his tiny cart the little monarch of the household and the road. On all boyish adventures the dog comes in, with the cart. Of course, there are dogs and dogs, even here. Some are finer and sturdier than others and none are thoroughbred but all are suitable for their work in the little cart. And it is surprising what loads they can pull. All the carts are constructed so that little weight comes on the dog.

Such scenes along the Quebec highway where dogcarts may even be seen taking a bag of mail from train to post office, carry one back to similar scenes in old France and Belgium. But in the outlying districts the dogcart’s chief use is for bringing in firewood, in some instances from the handy pile in the yard, but usually in the form of boughs from the scrub of the sea-coast, or the distant hills.

The highest form of the two-wheeler, however, though perhaps not any more picturesque than its humbler brethren, is of course the caleche. The caleche was the earliest voiture of seigneury times. It had a period of great popularity. Jaunty in line, it swayed with every rut, in the day of the bad road. Then the more elaborate four-wheeler was brought in from both England and France and the caleche fell into disuse, soon almost entirely disappearing from the Quebec highway. A few lone remnants of former glory now appear daily before the Hotel Frontenac, picking up an occasional “fare”. Someone with enough of the romantic spirit left will wish to see Quebec, city of the Intendents, revert to the vehicle used in that day. Nevertheless, though the caleche has practically died out, even at this moment, darkest in its history, there comes word that it is to have its renaissance; one more proof that Romance still lives in the hearts of modern life; one more proof that the two-wheel cart of Romance is still a prime favourite with this old world, which is more than ever a-wheel.

From early spring....

FROM early spring until late in the fall, by every highway and by-path of rural Quebec, and almost as generally in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, the visitor happens upon many a housewife turning into multitudinous service a great iron pot or cauldron, neatly suspended from a log, or perched skilfully between two heaps of field-stones.

These wayside cauldrons of eastern Canada, with their constant fires, and their contents always “a-bubble, bubble, bubble”, unlike the witches’ pot on the heath of auld Scotia with its song of “trouble”, are to the countryside emblematical not of disaster but of a wonderful domestic prowess that is far-reaching indeed in its scope and effect upon national life.

For although many of these wayside pots look common-place affairs in themselves, the crudest and least artistic of them represents the individuality and the effort of some man or woman who stands behind it, who fathers the thought of it and the work it is intended to aid in accomplishing.

Even when you pass one of these out-of-doors pots, whose fires are extinct until wash-day or dyeing day comes round again, you unconsciously feel at once through the pot’s suggestion that in that little farm-house, over there by the barn, dwells a woman with initiative; some strong capable soul—some mother of invention—who turns every simple object at her command into a tool of service.

Investigation of the pots in active service reveals a long list of different works which this one utensil is able to accomplish. The Quebec habitant woman graciously informs madame, that by means of the pot she accomplishes the great wash for her “grande famille”, and that in it she dyes her home-grown wool clipped from the sheep grazing over there on the Laurentian hillsides. After every operation she scrubs the interior of the pot thoroughly, so that though one day it accomplishes the dyeing, the next it may be used to heat the water for M’sieu to convert the big porker into winter meat for the family, etc.

Madame’s faith in the great pot is expressed in her tones. To her mind the pot is indispensable on every well-regulated farm, an absolute necessity in every household. The very children takeit for granted. The wood-pile and the pot-by-the-running-brook are to them as natural objects of the landscape as the blue mountains orLa Chute de Montmorenci.

Moreover, the pots are more than this in theirenfantdays. The youngest child of Old Quebec looks upon workavec plaisir. To little French Canadian children, what we are pleased to call “work”, is the highest form of play. Every child, and nearly every grown-up, loves to build and keep going, a wood-fire out-of-doors. The great pots of Quebec and Nova Scotia give children an opportunity to serve at a fire and to serve with pleasure. They run about and gather the chips and the flotsam and jetsam yielded by the nearby stream, or fallen branches from the trees, while an older girl pushes the various contributions of wood into the bright and cheery bonfire under the pot that, with the strange faculty of inanimate things, often takes on a look of enjoying it all as much as the children. Thus, wash-day or soap-making day becomes to these eastern households a sort of picnic. Many hands make light work, and madame of thegrande familleof sixteen or eighteen children accomplishes her wash of seventy-five to a hundred pieces with signal ease and entirely without complaint through the pot’s assistance—the pot that hangs under the blue skies above the glowing coals—the out-of-door pot that magnetizes the willing hands of normal children.

Dye-pots, wash-pots, soap-pots are essentially and quite naturally enough presided over by women. These things come under “women’s work”. Such pots, as I have hinted above, have their positions determined by the presence of some small brook that runs through the farm. The place of the pot, of necessity, follows the vagaries of the brook. (“If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain”.) Thus it follows that the eastern Canadian wayside pot may be situated near the house or several hundred yards away, in some pasture through which the brook flows. The pot is carried to the water, but the water is never brought to the pot, which is a thing to remember. Canadian women are canny! And, the farther away from home the pot stands, the more of a picnic soap-making day becomes for both mother and children. The ways of these wayside pots are past finding out to the casual man or woman driving over these rural ribbon-roads of the Laurentides, unless this is remembered. For one pot may be so close to the road as to cause his horse to shy, while the next may be off in a field with no house

A WAYSIDE POT.

in sight, and still another may be lost to sight down some stony river-gorge, the ascending smoke alone telling the tale. But, apart from the dye-pots and their sisters, there is yet another class of pot found near the coast regions, pots that play an equally important part in the upbuilding of Canadian life. These are the tar-pots, the lead-pots, the seal-oil pots, etc., necessary to the fishing industry of our extensive Gulf of St. Lawrence and Atlantic coast. These pots differ, too, from the first class, in that these are presided over by men and boys. From Percé to Digby, the shore-road throughout its many hundreds of miles via Cape North and Halifax is “the way of the out-of-door pot” no less than “the road of fish”.

When the magnitude and the significance of this is realized, it is easily seen that these out-of-doors pots hold in their iron sides considerable power over national industries and national life.

The sea-side pot is a sort of freelance. It is a man’s affair, often wearing a sort of devil-may-care expression, no doubt produced by environment. When the Nor’easter freshens to a gale it may strike the old pot abeam, just as at sea it strikes his master’s schooner. But the pot never capsizes any more than the schooner’s seams, which the tar-pot tarred, open. So the old pot squints an eye to windward and laughs in the face of the dun cloud and the freezing spume, knowing the dory will come again to him for tar.

What fisherman can go after King Cod or any other fish without “a sinker,” and a heavy one, for his deep-water lines?

So the beach-pot is also a lead-pot. Any bit of lead, sheet-lead that lines tea-boxes, any old scrap however small, the old-timer saves and consigns to the magic pot.

The king of the sea-board pots, in point of size is the dye-pot, in use for cooking the concoction of spruce-bark employed to dye the seines the pretty art-brown, which coast-fishermen consider the perfection of camouflage against the piercing “submarine eye” of the silver herring—so necessary as bait.

A pot of net a-soak, or men and boys spreading the wet net from the pot on the beach-stones to dry, is a common sight on any fishing-beach of the Maritime Provinces.

These pots presided over by the men are never kept as neat as the inland out-of-door pot presided over by the women and children of the family, but their usefulness is by no means inferior.

Up in the Bay of Fundy, nature in the great tides of that region aids the work of the tar-pot. When the tide goes out,leaving the bottoms of the plaster-carriers bound New Yorkward hard-and-dry, then the tar-pot, aiding the indispensable oakum of the caulker, closes once for all and to a certainty, the seams that open, insuring the delivery of the cargo, aiding in its humble way the success of Canadian trade, no less than the tar-pot of the Atlantic coast and its brother-worker the lead-pot aid Canadian production.

The seal-oil pot ofLes Iles des Madeleinesapproaches nearest to our idea of the witches’ cauldron. Standing on a narrow sandpit by the road to Havre Aubert, the black-smoke and the dancing figure of the man stirring the oil, the odour, and the gray sea, a stone’s throw away on either hand, make a dramatic picture such as, I am sure, would be encountered on no other highway in the world.

Making things out....

“MAKING things out of wood” seems to be a “gift” with the Quebecquois. But wood-carving is not confined to Quebec, although possibly it occurs more generally in that Province than in any other.

All Canada sponsors “woodcarving” in her sons, because of the generous supply of wood everywhere, with the exception of the Prairie Provinces. And even these may easily obtain it from their generous sister Provinces East and West.

Down Nova Scotia way a man seems to concentrate better if he has a bit of wood in hand to whittle. And as his thoughts are concerned more or less with the sea; almost without thinking the bit of wood in his hand becomes a little model of a boat or a schooner, an oar, or a miniature mast. The wooden-ship was cradled in the fingers of these old-timers. Her spars may have been contributed by British Columbia, but what of that. Is not British Columbia, Canada’s Maritimer, too? So it is, from coast to coast.

Quebec’s carving is of a more domestic nature. M’sieu builds a house, a little maison with “lines”,mais oui. In his conception and execution, there is a certain deftness purely French. He carves some original design in the piece of wood over window and door-frame, pointing and panelling it to fancy, and afterwards painting it some pretty colour—strong reds, blues and yellows—striking a bizarre harmony, attractive enough; especially when Madame puts a piece of Royal-blue wall-paper, sprinkled with gold fleur-de-lys inside the windows as shade.

Down the north shore of the Saint Lawrence one meets little girls hugging in their arms long sticks of firewood, which ingenious grandpere has carved into “dolls”, life-size; and to which he has nailed shapely arms, terminating in rather wooden hands.

The face has been made more life-like with a touch of paint, carried out in the hands too, if there happened to be enough to go round. There are no elbow-joints, but the arms turn at the shoulders most ingeniously on the old nail. And the child who possesses such as one among dolls, always wears a happy smile on the little, frank, French face of her, as she totes the heavy stick across the grain-field-path, the waving ears almost higher than her head and she the envy of every other child in the village.

For the boy, there is the toy-boat, or the miniature warship, from the same source—the rough log from the woodpile.... When M’sieu throws the axe over his shoulder and goes off into the woods to cut firewood invariably he returns with some old root that has struck his fancy and in which he sees a latent “figure” of some sort. So, up on the highland road to Murray Bay one happens on many a farmer who whittles pipe-bowls from thelittleroots; and on the Lowland road before it becomes highland the big root resembling a moose’s head, is the prop of many a stack of firewood.

Everywhere there is the universal, homemade, wooden Cross and the handcarved symbol of the Crucifixion standing by all roads.

Every graveyard in Quebec, whether it be in the Laurentides section, clear against the sky with the Saint Lawrence a panorama at its feet, or whether it be some Indian graveyard, boasts its handcarved wooden head-and-foot pieces and, of course, the big central wooden cross.

These wooden memorials of the graveyard are frequently very artistic. The figure of an Angel in silhouette and life-size, with shoes and stockings, encountered in one cemetery, appears especially adapted to theParadisit would have the passing world remember. Somewhere in that district there lives a man with the instinct of the sculptor; yet he works in wood. And the pity of wood is that it is so very perishable. In a year or two at most, the elements take these wooden memorials in hand to their destruction, and that is the reason stone is now almost universally taking the place of these old-timers.

But to return to the houses! Much of the furniture of the farmhouse is handmade. Tables, with sliding tops, which allow the table to be converted into a comfortable chair, are the pride of many a habitant housewife. And, of course, there are the loom and the spinning-wheel, with its accompanying shuttles and bobbins, all handmade.

But this woodcarving is an art that, though so common in Quebec, recognizes no Provincial limitations; and so for the climax of profane carving as against the religious subjects, say, of Monsieur Jobin, we must go down into New Brunswick and interview Rogerson the master Figure-head carver of Saint John.

Rogerson is a Scotchman. As you look into his keen blue eyes it is difficult to realize that eighty-three years have intervened since

CALL OF THE SEA.

THE FIGURE ON THE BOW.

he first saw the light of day. He came to Canada in one of the old sailing ships that held the Atlantic passenger trade ’tween-decks seventy years ago. One of the sweetest word-pictures ever listened to, Rogerson sketched, of his old mother cooking their meals on deck in the brick fire-place included in the culinary appointments of the Atlantic trip in those days. Soon after his arrival in Canada his father died, and he was apprenticed to an uncle, a master figurehead carver of Saint John, about 1850. Figuring it out, it would seem that for a hundred years at least, there have been figurehead carvers of this one family in the old city of Saint John, that, with Halifax, is Canada’s Twin-Gate to the Atlantic.

When Rogerson had completed his time as an apprentice and worked awhile with his uncle, “he felt”, to use his own words, “that he was repeating himself.” So he gathered up his tools and went off with them over his shoulder to Boston, much as any ambitious art-student, whatever his chosen medium, hies him to Paris. Boston, in those days, was the centre of the sailing-ship trade in America. “Out o’ Boston” sailed the “clippers” in the China trade. Rogerson tells how at evening, after his day’s work was done, he used to go along the docks from ship to ship studying “The Figure on the Bow.” And he tells, too, how he worked for first one leading firm and then another of the master figurehead carvers of old Boston till he himself presently stood in the first ranks, able to turn out any figure on demand in red-hot time. “Skippers couldn’t wait in those days”, he adds. And even as he talks you see that his memory has reverted to the time when “sails” must needjumpwhen winds and tide beckoned. Then having learned all that he could in Boston, he returned with high hopes and the skill and confidence of the “Master-Carver” in his fingers, to the business-opening he recognized in Saint John, with all the new ships a-building on Bay of Fundy “ways”, at Parrsboro, Windsor, Hantsport and, who knows how many more of the old bay’s outports.

And now he follows with such a list of Figureheads, as seems incredible, until one recalls Rogerson’s long span of life, and that he worked “in red-hot time.” Among those standing to the credit of this Saint John carver “The Highland Laddie”, “The British Lion”, “Ingomar”, “Governor Tilley”, “The Sailor Boy”, “Honolulu”, and “Lalla Rookh,” held high place. About each, Rogerson relates some interesting legend. Of his “Sailor Boy” he tellshow a man came into his shop some years after it was carved and told him he had a rival carver somewhere—that “there was a ship out in the harbour with the finest figurehead on it he had ever seen!” This haunted him so, that next day he closed the shop, got a boat and rowed out to the vessel. On coming round her bow, there, above the waves and himself, stood hisownfigurehead!

Of “The British Lion”, he says, “It was a rouser!”

The ship that bore Governor Tilley at the bow had a long and successful career, but was at last wrecked on the Norwegian coast. Through one of those mysterious channels of Marine Intelligence, that sailors on the waterfront know, Mr. Rogerson learned that though the ship was a total wreck the figurehead was salvaged, and that his “Governor Tilley” now stands in a Museum in Norway; and Rogerson thinks that it should be brought back to Saint John.

The “Lalla Rookh” he had not seen since it left his hand to sail forth upon the high seas till we showed him a photograph of it obtained while the ship, at whose bow it stood, loaded deal at West Bay, near Parrsboro, for the trenches of France. To think it was so near and yet this old carver did not see it! Yet it pleased his old heart to know that “she” was still afloat and carrying-on in the hazardous runs across the Atlantic, with only sails and the courageous spirit symbolized by the figure on the bow to aid her against enemy submarines—submarines, the last word in sea-craft. It was on the “Lalla Rookh” that Frank T. Bullen served his apprenticeship as sailor.

Of the “Ingomar” Rogerson says: “I always think it was my finest piece of work. Strange to say,” he continues “I have no photograph or even rough sketch of it. It was to be, I suppose, for the ship that bore it was wrecked near here in the Bay. I went out to see the figurehead and found it had escaped damage and I made every arrangement to return and take it off; but the very next day a gale of wind came up and when the gale abated not a vestige of my figurehead remained.”

“Old-timers among ship-owners had fads for names”, Rogerson says. “Sometimes it ran to Indians, sometimes to mythological figures, sometimes to reigning sovereigns; at other times to their own wives or daughters, or to some popular man about town, or to a popular governor, etc.” Among his Indian figureheads he recalled “The Indian Chief”, “The Indian Queen”, “Pocahontas”, “Hiawatha”.

When fancy ran to the name of the ship-owner’s wife or to those of well-known persons, the figurehead carver worked from a favourite photograph, so that some old figureheads of this type are in fact sculptured figures of the people themselves, people who in most instances have long since passed away. The “Governor Tilley” figurehead is a case in point and Rogerson is right in saying it belongs to New Brunswick rather than to Norway.

Rogerson’s last piece of work was a labour of love. Not many years ago he took a trip to Scotland to see the place of his birth and to revisit the scenes of his early childhood. While in Scotland he collected, here and there, a number of pieces of fine woods from old historic buildings, etc., and these he brought back to Saint John, where in his leisure moments he designed and carved therefrom a beautiful chair, which he presented to the Saint Andrew’s Society, in whose assembly-rooms it now stands.

Slish—squish!...

SLISH—squish!

Who is it comes so swiftly down the snowy highway? Who is it cuts “eights”, “eighty-eights” and Paisley patterns, among the snowbound trees of the northern Canadian forests? Who tames the wild, free, northern country into proper service? Who follows the fur-bearing animals to the death far in these same northern wilds? Who but the man on snow-shoes? And who makes snowshoes?

Dropping down for a week at Indian Lorette in the Province of Quebec we found “rooms” in a very quaint, steep-roofed, old house in the Indian village by the Falls of Lorette where dwell the last of the Hurons.

There we came and went—idling the mid-summer days—down the little lanes in slow and friendly fashion; coming upon children at their games; women in door-yards sewing or embroidering moccasins, ornamenting them with fancy designs in dyed moose-hair and porcupine quills; stepping into rooms where small groups of men, and occasionally a woman, were building canoes; chancing into still other rooms where men were at work making—snow-shoes.

“Oui, oui, m’sieu, madame, the Hurons of Indian Lorette ’tis they who make the snow-shoes.”

And, who are these Hurons—makers of the moccasin, the canoe, the snow-shoe?

“Oh, m’sieu, madame, what will you in one leetle week?”

But at the same time, a week in Loretteisa long time if one gives every moment to it, as we did, scarcely stealing a moment fordéjeunerordiner.

The Indian Village that proves itself only partly French, despite its French name, since it utterly refuses to follow one long street, is neither all French nor all Indian, but resembles some little escaped English garden romancing as the capital city of the Hurons—nine miles by the Lake St. John Road out of the city of Quebec.

The English lanes of Indian Lorette all seem to convene at the old church. And that too, strangely enough, gives one the impression of an English village church. Perhaps it is the green in front, with the old George III. cannon, that village tradition says“came here after the Crimea”. At any rate “the English atmosphere” is there. But the resemblance blends into old Jesuit, once we cross the threshold. If Angleterre speaks in the cannon without,m’sieu, the dulcet voice of France charms as sweetly within. First, we must see “the little house of the Angels”, let into the wall, high above the altar. It is not very big but great significance attaches to it, for this little house was used as an object lesson by diplomatic missionary priests of the early days to drive home to the Indian mind the sanctity of the home and the value of the centralizing agency of a house as against the tepee.

“It is a little figure of the house of our Saviour and Mary, his mother,” an elderly Huron woman told us in a half-whisper, “and some bad men stole it, one time, and the people prayed and prayed; and one morning, they got up, and the little house was back. The Angels had brought it in the night.”

It is a dear little house in old dull blues; and somewhere about it, lines of ashes-of-roses melt in with the blue, and there’s a little touch of real old gold to give values. A bit of art in its simplicity, is this little house from France, the “house of the Angels”, that won a tribe to architecture and—higher things.

I think the Angels did bring it!

I think, too, they tempered the wind to the shorn lamb in sending “Louis D’Ailleboust, Chevalier,troisième gouverneur de la Nouvelle France” to be, as the crested tablet on the opposite walls says, “Ami et protecteur des Hurons”.

Born at Ancy in 1612, “the friend and protector of the Hurons” died at Ville Marie “en la Nouvelle France, en mai, 1660”. So reads the third Governor’s life history as here quaintly but all too briefly written.

One could spend hours in this little church, so French within, so English without; weaving with its souvenirs pages of history! For there are many treasures locked up carefully in the sacristy—anciennes piècesof hand-wrought church-silver from France, and many rich embroideries and a priest-robe wrought by the hand of court ladies and presented by the queen of Louis Quatorze. “Ah, oui, oui, madame, c’est magnifique!” In detail—but who cares for detail? It is sufficient that these valuable relics of olden days areherefor our modern eyes to look upon on a summer day, greatly enriching our experience. Nevertheless, who would expect this sort of treasure in Indian Lorette?

FAMILY GRAVES.

THE SNOWSHOE.

To the left of the little “international” church lies the old burying ground where at dusk one parching summer evening we came upon the graceful figure of little Marie watering the precious flowers growing on her “family” graves—graves with the curious “wooden” head-stones—so popular all through rural Quebec—made by the local carpenter or some member of the family who is also something in the way of a woodcarver.

As all Lorette roads lead tol’eglise, so they ramble their lane-like ways away from it, wandering first by the little village grocery occupying a cottage—once an old homestead and neat as a new pin—picking a tree-lined way between little whitewashedmaisonsin yards, flower-filled, up to agrande maisonwith steep pretentious French roof, vine-covered porch and dormer windows—a house that was once an H. B. C. Post, according to village tradition. One can readily believe it. To speak briefly, it shows the “hall-mark”. Nevertheless its pretentious dimensions are as much of a surprise here in Indian Lorette as the exquisite embroideries ofl’eglise, to which all that this house suggests of frontier life, when this was the frontier, appears so entirely opposed, and yet, of course, was not.

For in the “olde days” a strange unity often existed between phases of life apparently wide apart, giving zest and ambition to adventure and investing commerce and the early church with the halo of a dramatic interest that still clings.

All over the British Empire are nooks with these touches—the union of the truly great of time and circumstance with little places. Canada appears especially rich and happy in the possession of innumerable villages and towns of this description. One has but to follow “the trail” to discover them everywhere.

The atmosphere of Indian Lorette is not all of the dead and gone variety. “Non, m’sieu, Lorette is still—a stage in the limelight.”

It is “a stage” that has moved forward its appointments in a truly marvellous and skilful fashion so as to link up “the Canada of all time”. For nothing we could name so bespeaks the true spirit of Canada in one breath as do the things found here in Indian Lorette in the full swing of production—the snowshoe, the moccasin and—the canoe.

The canoe, especially is a motif—a giant pattern gliding powerfully through the very warp and woof of the land. To go back—modifications of the canoe were here long before theNorsemen or Cabot or Columbus. To go forward—who can foresee the canoeless day?

So, stepping up to a Lorette door and over the threshold, to happen upon a bright, berry-eyed, deft-fingered woman with sure and certain strokes tacking a canvas over the frame of a canoe, the boat that typifies Canada, was like coming unannounced upon the spirit personality of the land itself.

Ma’am’selle was all graciousness; at the same time artist enough not to lay down her tools but kept at work as she talked—tapping punctuations with her little hammer that had a character of its own, taken on by age and much use.

“Mais oui.” Many years she had worked at the canoe-making “avec mon père.” “Mais certainement” she liked it.

“Difficile? Mais non.”

The canvas went on as we watched—then the stem-bands. Ma’am’selle worked quickly but without haste, after the manner of an old hand. The stem-bands in place ma’am’selle rested and began to talk again.

“Would we not see the beginnings?”

“Oui?Then upstairs, mesdames.” This invitation was accompanied by a slight bow and a sweep with the hammer in hand towards a little pine-board stairs. And up we went to make the acquaintance ofle bateauitself in its “beginnings”.

Have you seen a canoe in the making—the swift manipulations, the decided, skilful movements, in which every stroke counts? Have you seen the surety of the French-Huron hand at work at this inherited trade, how fingers, guided as if by magic, lay the thin, slim boards in place; how the knives swish through the wood at the desired length; how the little plane disappears in the maze of shavings it has created? A tap here, a nail there and the last plank is on.—A moment ago, it was a board lying on a bench. Now, it is—a canoe!

If you have thus watched, then you know the sensation, as we do, of having beheld a clever trick performed without knowing how it is done. For to say the least, canoe-making at Indian Lorette is a fascinating bit of sleight of hand! Ma’am’selle says it takes two days to build a canoe. But the preparations—oh yes, that takes much longer.

We inquired as to the market, where they were sold. At this ma’am’selle contracted her shoulders in a French shrug, threwout her hands—still holding the hammer in the right—and cried, “Mais oui—all over Canada.”

Hand-and-glove with canoes and snowshoes goes the moccasin. The moccasin in Indian Lorette is an old, old story—as well as an elaborate one—real and flourishing to-day. It was a surprise to us to find that the Hurons still wear them, in lieu of shoes, about their daily business. Men and women pass silently up and down these little lanes, with no need of rubber heels, where the sole is like velvet.

The tannery lies across the bridge above the famous “Falls of Lorette”. In the tannery yards moose-hides from the Canadian northland flap in the wind, side by side with “hides” from Singapore. (For moccasin making here is a business big enough to call for imported skins.) And yet “the factory” is small, because most of the moccasin making is done in the homes. The cutting, cutters and machines are at “the shop” but the artistic embroideries in coloured beads and porcupine quills grow under the skillful touch of women and girls sitting on their vine-clad, tree-shaded balconies or making purchases from the butcher’s or baker’s cart in the shady lanes, moccasin in hand.

In this way moccasins enter into the home life of this “remnant of the Hurons” in a most intimate fashion. Even in the days of their prosperity as a tribe the number of moccasins made never equalled the trade of to-day. Nor was the market so large or so far-flung. One hears half a million pairs spoken of with equanimity. One is surprised that so many moccasins find their way to the woods and boudoirs of Canada and the United States; surprised, too, that the Indians have made good to such an extent from the commercial angle, creating, as it were, their own market.

Followed through all its quills and fancies, it is a pretty, homely story. But after all it is a story that brings one back to the people themselves. The chief is Monsieur Picard, residing in the old Hudson’s Bay Company house. He is a young man who saw service in France. The ex-grand chief—M. Maurice Bastien of maturer years—is actually the ruling power. Chief Bastien belongs to “the old school”, is very dignified, quiet, stands on ceremony, is the real head of the moccasin industry and has the gift of entertaining. He has an exceedingly pleasing personality and can carry solemn functions through to a successful issue. All the responsibility of doing the honours of the tribe to distinguished visitors falls to him. It is he who owns the precious wampum andthe invaluable silver medals, gifts of distinguished sovereigns to himself and predecessors in office—one medal from King George III, one from Louis Quinze of France, one from King George IV, two from the late Queen Victoria.

Monsieur Bastien lives in a fine house tastefully furnished. On the table in the parlour stands a photograph of Philippe, Comte de Paris, in a blue vellum frame, a simple gold fleur-de-lys at the top. The Comte presented his photograph to Chief Bastien’s father who was the grandchief on the occasion of the Comte’s visit to Lorette.

There are many other valuable souvenirs but we liked best an old oil painting of the pioneer days, showing Hurons approaching, as visitors, the Ursuline Convent in Quebec. As a work of art it is probably of little value, but its theme—its theme,m’sieu, il parle.

As Monsieur Bastien talks of the past while graciously showing his visitors all these souvenirs, including his own feathered head-dress and the blue coat with its time-faded brocade which he wears on state occasions, he has the true story-teller’s art of making the times and occasions live again, so that through the ages you see the long procession of great families—Siouis, Vincents, Picards, Bastiens—from the earliest time down to the present—hunters, makers of the moccasin, the canoe, the snowshoe.

You see them off in the northern wilds of the Laurentides hunting the skins that enabled them to fill British Government contracts every fall for several years after 1759 for several thousand pairs of snowshoes, caribou moccasins and mittens for the English regiments garrisoning the citadel of Quebec.

A Sioui is still the central figure in the making of snowshoe frames. Siouis and Vincents are still keen on the chase. ’Tis they who in season guide the sportsman from over the border to the haunts of the moose andtruite rouge, ensuring plenty of sport.

But at this season of the year the Huron of Indian Lorette is off on his homemade snowshoes far in the silences of the great fur country and the timber lands of Northern Quebec working for a living—“hunting the fur and the big log, m’sieu”.

It is the proud boast....

IT is the proud boast of the people of Pierreville on the St. Francois river, on the south side of the St. Lawrence, that there is no bridge other than the railroad bridges over any river between Pierreville and Montreal, and that if you desire to cross any of these rivers you must do so on the picturesque ferry-scow which m’sieu the ferryman, guides over the calm water, mirroring reflections on every hand, on a wire-cable cleverly seized by him in the snapping jaw of a sort of a wooden monkey-wrench.

We “called the ferry” at this Twickenham of Canada for the first time in August and set up house-keeping in a cottage on the main street of the village of Odanak just at the point where the street comes out on the high bank overlooking the river St. Francois. So that to watch the upper ferry from our front porch became a daily amusement.

Pierreville and Odanak adjoin each other but enjoy separate post-offices. Pierreville is the French-Canadian town and Odanak the village of the Abenakis. Our “maison” was a sort of boundary line, I believe. Odanak when translated, we were told by the Episcopal clergyman, means “Our Village”, so what with the picturesque ferry and literary suggestions of Miss Mitford in “Our Village” name, our August camping-ground became atmospheric at once.

But wherever there are Indians they take the centre of the stage and hold it. Odanak is “Our Village” to the Abenakis. And as far as I know it is the only home-village in the possession of what is left of these people.

The Abenakis were the “original Yankees”. They came to the banks of the St. Francois from Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts. If you wish to know more about their interesting past read “Histoire d’Abenakis, depuis 1605 jusqu’a nos jours, par L’Abbe J. A. Maurault”. It is a thick volume and makes a pleasant tale to read by a roaring fireside of a winter evening. But this present sketch deals with the living present—the Abenakis of “our day” from the human interest angle.

Just as the Hurons of Lorette are snowshoe, canoe and moccasin-makers, the Abenakis are sweet-grass basket-makers. And their market?Mais oui—all over Canada—east and west—,north and south, and the United States. Rumour says that the turnover to the village and region from the baskets is in the neighbourhood of $250,000 a year. Men, women and children work at this basket industry. There is no factory. It is all pleasant homework. Women at work sit on their porches. Housewives ply their fingers in the kitchen, picking up the basket, as other women pick up knitting. Little children braid the grass over backs of chairs in the door of the little play-tent on the lawn. Schoolgirls make pin-money at it. Neighbours gossip in dooryards, basket in hand.

Baskets talk in the grocery and dry-goods shops in Pierreville as successfully as money. If a man or a woman needs a little change, he or she takes a basket in hand and comes back with the silver. It was a happy discovery when the founders of this people trekking it to Canada came by chance on the original grass growing on islands in the river. It was a still luckier turn of fate that prompted some old squaw to dry it as a simple herb and in so doing—though she must have been disappointed from the herbal point of view—to learn the astounding fact that dried,the grass gave forth a pleasing odour—that it was—in her simple language—“sweet”.

So simple a discovery as this, and determination to put it to use, is the Abenaki’s stock-in-trade. Out of it he has built up a quarter-of-a-million dollar business. And he now farms the grass as do more or less all the French farmers of this neighbourhood, because the business has grown to such an extent that the natural supply is not enough. The only part of the basket taken in hand by the men is the preparation of the splint from the big log. The only factory (?) for this work stood across the street from our door. It was merely a neat yard with a board top for shade. Here every morning two big ash logs were pounded with the head of a wood-axe until the layers or rings of the tree’s growth could be stripped off. Little by little these strips were made thinner by a man who separated the ends of each strip and tore them asunder, through their entire length, by means of two small boards held between his knees.

Other men ran the strips through a planing machine. Two keen steel teeth in a board, paralleled the required width, and the wooden ribbon rolled into a bolt was ready for both the market and the dye-pot of madame. I should not be surprised if this is the only factory of its kind on this continent. Certainly it is

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