Roughing It In The Bush Page 8

  This was the longest speech I ever heard Tom utter; and, evidently astonished at himself, he sprang abruptly from the table, overset a cup of coffee into my lap, and wishing us good day (it was eleven o’clock at night), he ran out of the house.

  There was more truth in poor Tom’s words than at that moment we were willing to allow; for youth and hope were on our side in those days, and we were most ready to believe the suggestions of the latter.

  My husband finally determined to emigrate to Canada, and in the hurry and bustle of a sudden preparation to depart, Tom and his affairs for a while were forgotten.

  How dark and heavily did that frightful anticipation weigh upon my heart! As the time for our departure drew near, the thought of leaving my friends and native land became so intensely painful that it haunted me even in sleep. I seldom awoke without finding my pillow wet with tears. The glory of May was upon the earth—of an English May. The woods were bursting into leaf, the meadows and hedge-rows were flushed with flowers, and every grove and copsewood echoed to the warblings of birds and the humming of bees. To leave England at all was dreadful—to leave her at such a season was doubly so. I west to take a last look at the old Hall, the beloved home of my childhood and youth; to wander once more beneath the shade of its venerable oaks—to rest once more upon the velvet sward that carpeted their roots. It was while reposing beneath those noble trees that I had first indulged in those delicious dreams which are a foretaste of the enjoyments of the spirit-land. In them the soul breathes forth its aspirations in a language unknown to common minds; and that language is Poetry. Here annually, from year to year, I had renewed my friendship with the first primroses and violets, and listened with the untiring ear of love to the spring roundelay of the blackbird, whistled from among his bower of May blossoms. Here, I had discoursed sweet words to the tinkling brook, and learned from the melody of waters the music of natural sounds. In these beloved solitudes all the holy emotions which stir the human heart in its depths had been freely poured forth, and found a response in the harmonious voice of Nature, bearing aloft the choral song of earth to the throne of the Creator.

  How hard it was to tear myself from scenes endeared to me by the most beautiful and sorrowful recollections, let those who have loved and suffered as I did, say. However the world had frowned upon me, Nature, arrayed in her green loveliness, had ever smiled upon me like an indulgent mother, holding out her loving arms to enfold to her bosom her erring but devoted child.

  Dear, dear England! why was I forced by a stern necessity to leave you? What heinous crime had I committed, that I, who adored you, should be torn from your sacred bosom, to pine out my joyless existence in a foreign clime? Oh, that I might be permitted to return and die upon your wave-encircled shores, and rest my weary head and heart beneath your daisy-covered sod at last! Ah, these are vain outbursts of feeling— melancholy relapses of the spring home-sickness! Canada! thou art a noble, free, and rising country—the great fostering mother of the orphans of civilisation. The offspring of Britain, thou must be great, and I will and do love thee, land of my adoption, and of my children’s birth; and, oh, dearer still to a mother’s heart—land of their graves!

  Whilst talking over our coming separation with my sister C——, we observed Tom Wilson walking slowly up the path that led to the house. He was dressed in a new shooting-jacket, with his gun lying carelessly across his shoulder, and an ugly pointer dog following at a little distance.

  “Well, Mrs. Moodie, I am off,” said Tom, shaking hands with my sister instead of me. “I suppose I shall see Moodie in London. What do you think of my dog?” patting him affectionately.

  “I think him an ugly beast,” said C——. “Do you mean to take him with you?”

  “An ugly beast!—Duchess a beast? Why, she is a perfect beauty!—Beauty and the beast! Ha, ha, ha! I gave two guineas for her last night.” (I thought of the old adage.) “Mrs. Moodie, your sister is no judge of a dog.”

  “Very likely,” returned C——, laughing. “And you go to town to-night, Mr. Wilson? I thought as you came up to the house that you were equipped for shooting.”

  “To be sure; there is capital shooting in Canada.”

  “So I have heard—plenty of bears and wolves; I suppose you take out your dog and gun in anticipation?”

  “True,” said Tom.

  “But you surely are not going to take that dog with you?”

  “Indeed I am. She is a most valuable brute. The very best venture I could take. My brother Charles has engaged our passage in the same vessel.”

  “It would be a pity to part you,” said I. “May you prove as lucky a pair as Whittington and his cat.”

  “Whittington! Whittington!” said Tom, staring at my sister, and beginning to dream, which he invariably did in the company of women. “Who was the gentleman?”

  “A very old friend of mine, one whom I have known since I was a very little girl,” said my sister; “but I have not time to tell you more about him now. If you go to St. Paul’s Churchyard, and inquire for Sir Richard Whittington and his cat, you will get his history for a mere trifle.”

  “Do not mind her, Mr. Wilson, she is quizzing you,” quoth I; “I wish you a safe voyage across the Atlantic; I wish I could add a happy meeting with your friends. But where shall we find friends in a strange land?”

  “All in good time,” said Tom. “I hope to have the pleasure of meeting you in the backwoods of Canada before three months are over. What adventures we shall have to tell one another! It will be capital. Good-bye.”

  “Tom has sailed,” said Captain Charles Wilson, stepping into my little parlour a few days after his eccentric brother’s last visit. “I saw him and Duchess safe on board. Odd as he is, I parted with him with a full heart; I felt as if we never should meet again. Poor Tom! he is the only brother left me now that I can love. Robert and I never agreed very well, and there is little chance of our meeting in this world. He is married, and settled down for life in New South Wales; and the rest, John, Richard, George, are all gone—all!”

  “Was Tom in good spirits when you parted?”

  “Yes. He is a perfect contradiction. He always laughs and cries in the wrong place. ‘Charles,’ he said, with a loud laugh, ‘tell the girls to get some new music against I return: and, hark ye! if I never come back, I leave them my Kangaroo Waltz as a legacy.”

  “What a strange creature!”

  “Strange, indeed; you don’t know half his oddities. He has very little money to take out with him, but he actually paid for two berths in the ship, that he might not chance to have a person who snored sleep near him. Thirty pounds thrown away upon the mere chance of a snoring companion! ‘Besides, Charles,’ quoth he, ‘I cannot endure to share my little cabin with others; they will use my towels, and combs, and brushes, like that confounded rascal who slept in the same berth with me coming from New South Wales, who had the impudence to clean his teeth with my tooth-brush. Here I shall be all alone, happy and comfortable as a prince, and Duchess shall sleep in the after-berth, and be my queen.’

  And so we parted,” continued Captain Charles. “May God take care of him, for he never could take care of himself.”

  “That puts me in mind of the reason he gave for not going with us. He was afraid that my baby would keep him awake of a night. He hates children, and says that he never will marry on that account.”

  We left the British shores on the 1st of July, and cast anchor, as I have already shown, under the Castle of St. Lewis, at Quebec, on the 2nd of September, 1832. Tom Wilson sailed the 1st of May and had a speedy passage, and was, as we heard from his friends, comfortably settled in the bush, had bought a farm, and meant to commence operations in the fall. All this was good news, and as he was settled near my brother’s location, we congratulated ourselves that our eccentric friend had found a home in the wilderness at last, and that we should soon see him again.

  On the 9th of September, the steam-boat William IV. landed us at the then small but rising t
own of ——, on the Ontario. The night was dark and rainy; the boat was crowded with emigrants; and when we arrived at the inn, we learnt that there was no room for us— not a bed to be had; nor was it likely, owing to the number of strangers that had arrived for several weeks, that we could obtain one by searching farther. Moodie requested the use of a sofa for me during the night; but even that produced a demur from the landlord. Whilst I awaited the result in a passage, crowded with strange faces, a pair of eyes glanced upon me through the throng. Was it possible?—could it be Tom Wilson? Did any other human being possess such eyes, or use them in such an eccentric manner? In another second he had pushed his way to my side, whispering in my ear, “We met, ’twas in a crowd.”

  “Tom Wilson, is that you?”

  “Do you doubt it? I flatter myself that there is no likeness of such a handsome fellow to be found in the world. It is I, I swear!—although very little of me is left to swear by. The best part of me I have left to fatten the musquitoes and black flies in that infernal bush. But where is Moodie?”

  “There he is—trying to induce Mr. S——, for love or money, to let me have a bed for the night.”

  “You shall have mine,” said Tom. “I can sleep upon the floor of the parlour in a blanket, Indian fashion. It’s a bargain—I’ll go and settle it with the Yankee directly; he’s the best fellow in the world! In the meanwhile here is a little parlour, which is a joint-stock affair between some of us young hopefuls for the time being. Step in here, and I will go for Moodie; I long to tell him what I think of this confounded country. But you will find it out all in good time;” and, rubbing his hands together with a most lively and mischievous expression, he shouldered his way through trunks, and boxes, and anxious faces, to communicate to my husband the arrangement he had so kindly made for us.

  “Accept this gentleman’s offer, sir, till to-morrow,” said Mr. S——, “I can then make more comfortable arrangements for your family; but we are crowded—crowded to excess. My wife and daughters are obliged to sleep in a little chamber over the stable, to give our guests more room. Hard that, I guess, for decent people to locate over the horses.”

  These matters settled, Moodie returned with Tom Wilson to the little parlour, in which I had already made myself at home.

  “Well, now, is it not funny that I should be the first to welcome you to Canada?” said Tom.

  “But what are you doing here, my dear fellow?”

  “Shaking every day with the ague. But I could laugh in spite of my teeth to hear them make such a confounded rattling; you would think they were all quarrelling which should first get out of my mouth. This shaking mania forms one of the chief attractions of this new country.”

  “I fear,” said I, remarking how thin and pale he had become, “that this climate cannot agree with you.”

  “Nor I with the climate. Well, we shall soon be quits, for, to let you into a secret, I am now on my way to England.”

  “Impossible!”

  “It is true.”

  “And the farm; what have you done with it?”

  “Sold it.”

  “And your outfit?”

  “Sold that too.”

  “To whom?”

  “To one who will take better care of both than I did. Ah! such a country!—such people!—such rogues! It beats Australia hollow; you know your customers there—but here you have to find them out. Such a take-in!—God forgive them! I never could take care of money; and, one way or other, they have cheated me out of all mine. I have scarcely enough left to pay my passage home. But, to provide against the worst, I have bought a young bear, a splendid fellow, to make my peace with my uncle. You must see him; he is close by in the stable.”

  “To-morrow we will pay a visit to Bruin; but to-night do tell us something about yourself, and your residence in the bush.”

  “You will know enough about the bush by-and-bye. I am a bad historian,” he continued, stretching out his legs and yawning horribly, “a worse biographer. I never can find words to relate facts. But I will try what I can do; mind, don’t laugh at my blunders.”

  We promised to be serious—no easy matter while looking at and listening to Tom Wilson, and he gave us, at detached intervals, the following account of himself:—

  “My troubles began at sea. We had a fair voyage, and all that; but my poor dog, my beautiful Duchess!—that beauty in the beast—died. I wanted to read the funeral service over her, but the captain interfered—the brute!—and threatened to throw me into the sea along with the dead bitch, as the unmannerly ruffian persisted in calling my canine friend. I never spoke to him again during the rest of the voyage. Nothing happened worth relating until I got to this place, where I chanced to meet a friend who knew your brother, and I went up with him to the woods.

  Most of the wise men of Gotham we met on the road were bound to the woods; so I felt happy that I was, at least, in the fashion. Mr. —— was very kind, and spoke in raptures of the woods, which formed the theme of conversation during our journey—their beauty, their vastness, the comfort and independence enjoyed by those who had settled in them; and he so inspired me with the subject that I did nothing all day but sing as we rode along—

  “A life in the woods for me;”

  until we came to the woods, and then I soon learned to sing that same, as the Irishman says, on the other side of my mouth.”

  Here succeeded a long pause, during which friend Tom seemed mightily tickled with his reminiscences, for he leaned back in his chair, and from time to time gave way to loud, hollow bursts of laughter.

  “Tom, Tom! are you going mad?” said my husband, shaking him.

  “I never was sane, that I know of,” returned he. “You know that it runs in the family. But do let me have my laugh out. The woods! Ha! ha! When I used to be roaming through those woods, shooting—though not a thing could I ever find to shoot, for birds and beasts are not such fools as our English emigrants—and I chanced to think of you coming to spend the rest of your lives in the woods—I used to stop, and hold my sides, and laugh until the woods rang again. It was the only consolation I had.”

  “Good Heavens!” said I, “let us never go to the woods.”

  “You will repent if you do,” continued Tom. “But let me proceed on my journey. My bones were well-nigh dislocated before we got to D——. The roads for the last twelve miles were nothing but a succession of mud-holes, covered with the most ingenious invention ever thought of for racking the limbs, called corduroy bridges; not breeches, mind you,—for I thought, whilst jolting up and down over them, that I should arrive at my destination minus that indispensable covering. It was night when we got to Mr. —— ’s place. I was tired and hungry, my face disfigured and blistered by the unremitting attentions of the black-flies that rose in swarms from the river. I thought to get a private room to wash and dress in, but there is no such thing as privacy in this country. In the bush, all things are in common; you cannot even get a bed without having to share it with a companion. A bed on the floor in a public sleeping-room! Think of that; a public sleeping-room!—men, women, and children, only divided by a paltry curtain. Oh, ye gods! think of the snoring, squalling, grumbling, puffing; think of the kicking, elbowing, and crowding; the suffocating heat—the musquitoes, with their infernal buzzing—and you will form some idea of the misery I endured the first night of my arrival in the bush.

  “But these are not half the evils with which you have to contend. You are pestered with nocturnal visitants far more disagreeable than even the musquitoes, and must put up with annoyances more disgusting than the crowded, close room. And then, to appease the cravings of hunger, fat pork is served to you three times a-day. No wonder that the Jews eschewed the vile animal; they were people of taste. Pork, morning, noon, and night, swimming in its own grease! The bishop who complained of partridges every day should have been condemned to three months’ feeding upon pork in the bush; and he would have become an anchorite, to escape the horrid sight of swine’s flesh for ever sprea
d before him. No wonder I am thin; I have been starved—starved upon pritters and pork, and that disgusting specimen of unleavened bread, yclept cakes in the pan.

  “I had such a horror of the pork diet, that whenever I saw the dinner in progress I fled to the canoe, in the hope of drowning upon the waters all reminiscences of the hateful banquet; but even here the very fowls of the air and the reptiles of the deep lifted up their voices, and shouted, ‘Pork, pork, pork!”

  M—— remonstrated with his friend for deserting the country for such minor evils as these, which, after all, he said, could easily be borne.

  “Easily borne!” exclaimed the indignant Wilson. “Go and try them; and then tell me that. I did try to bear them with a good grace, but it would not do. I offended everybody with my grumbling. I was constantly reminded by the ladies of the house that gentlemen should not come to this country without they were able to put up with a little inconvenience; that I should make as good a settler as a butterfly in a beehive; that it was impossible to be nice about food and dress in the bush; that people must learn to eat what they could get, and be content to be shabby and dirty, like their neighbours in the bush,— until that horrid word bush became synonymous with all that was hateful and revolting in my mind.