Roughing It In The Bush

by Susanna Moodie

  “How do you get your money? Do you draw it from the old country, or have you it with you in cash?”

  Provoked by her pertinacity, and seeing no end to her cross-questioning, I replied, very impatiently, “Mrs. H——, is it the custom in your country to catechise strangers whenever you meet with them?”

  “What do you mean?” she said, colouring, I believe, for the first time in her life.

  “I mean,” quoth I, “an evil habit of asking impertinent questions.”

  The old woman got up, and left the house without speaking another word.

  The Sleigh-Bells*

  ’Tis merry to hear, at evening time,

  By the blazing hearth the sleigh-bells chime;

  uncle joe and his family

  To know the bounding steeds bring near

  The loved one to our bosoms dear.

  Ah, lightly we spring the fire to raise,

  Till the rafters glow with the ruddy blaze;

  Those merry sleigh-bells, our hearts keep time

  Responsive to their fairy chime.

  Ding-dong, ding-dong o’er vale and hill,

  Their welcome notes are trembling still.

  ’Tis he, and blithely the gay bells sound,

  As glides his sleigh o’er the frozen ground;

  Hark! he has pass’d the dark pine wood,

  He crosses now the ice-bound flood,

  And hails the light at the open door

  That tells his toilsome journey’s o’er.

  The merry sleigh-bells! My fond heart swells

  And throbs to hear the welcome bells;

  Ding-dong, ding-dong, o’er ice and snow,

  A voice of gladness, on they go.

  Our hut is small, and rude our cheer,

  But love has spread the banquet here;

  And childhood springs to be caress’d

  By our beloved and welcome guest.

  With a smiling brow his tale he tells,

  The urchins ring the merry sleigh-bells;

  The merry sleigh-bells, with shout and song

  They drag the noisy string along;

  Ding-dong, ding-dong, the father’s come

  The gay bells ring his welcome home.

  From the cedar swamp the gaunt wolves howl,

  From the oak loud whoops the felon owl;

  The snow-storm sweeps in thunder past,

  The forest creaks beneath the blast;

  No more I list, with boding fear,

  The sleigh-bells’ distant chime to hear.

  The merry-sleigh bells, with soothing power

  Shed gladness on the evening hour.

  Ding-dong, ding-dong, what rapture swells

  The music of those joyous bells!

  EIGHT

  JOHN MONAGHAN

  “Dear mother Nature! on thy ample breast

  Hast thou not room for thy neglected son?

  A stern necessity has driven him forth

  Alone and friendless. He has naught but thee,

  And the strong hand and stronger heart thou gavest,

  To win with patient toil his daily bread.”

  A few days after the old woman’s visit to the cottage, our servant James absented himself for a week, without asking leave, or giving any intimation of his intention. He had under his care a fine pair of horses, a yoke of oxen, three cows, and a numerous family of pigs, besides having to chop all the fire wood required for our use. His unexpected departure caused no small trouble in the family; and when the truant at last made his appearance, Moodie discharged him altogether.

  The winter had now fairly set in—the iron winter of 1833. The snow was unusually deep, and it being our first winter in Canada, and passed in such a miserable dwelling, we felt it very severely. In spite of all my boasted fortitude—and I think my powers of endurance have been tried to the uttermost since my sojourn in this country—the rigour of the climate subdued my proud, independent English spirit, and I actually shamed my womanhood, and cried with the cold. Yes, I ought to blush at evincing such unpardonable weakness; but I was foolish and inexperienced, and unaccustomed to the yoke.

  My husband did not much relish performing the menial duties of a servant in such weather, but he did not complain, and in the meantime commenced an active inquiry for a man to supply the place of the one we had lost; but at that season of the year no one was to be had.

  It was a bitter, freezing night. A sharp wind howled without, and drove the fine snow through the chinks in the door, almost to the hearth-stone, on which two immense blocks of maple shed forth a cheering glow, brightening the narrow window-panes, and making the blackened rafters ruddy with the heart-invigorating blaze.

  The toils of the day were over, the supper things cleared away, and the door closed for the night. Moodie had taken up his flute, the sweet companion of happier days, at the earnest request of our home-sick Scotch servant-girl, to cheer her drooping spirits by playing some of the touching national airs of the glorious mountain land, the land of chivalry and song, the heroic North. Before retiring to rest, Bell, who had an exquisite ear for music, kept time with foot and hand, while large tears gathered in her soft blue eyes.

  “Ay, ’tis bonnie thae songs; but they mak’ me greet, an’ my puir heart is sair, sair when I think on the bonnie braes and the days o’ lang syne.”

  Poor Bell! Her heart was among the hills, and mine had wandered far, far away to the green groves and meadows of my own fair land. The music and our reveries were alike abruptly banished by a sharp blow upon the door. Bell rose and opened it, when a strange, wild-looking lad, barefooted, and with no other covering to his head than the thick matted locks of raven blackness that hung like a cloud over his swarthy, sunburnt visage, bunt into the room.

  “Guidness defend us! Wha ha’e we here?” screamed Bell, retreating into a corner. “The puir callant’s no cannie.”

  My husband turned hastily round to meet the intruder, and I raised the candle from the table the better to distinguish his face; while Bell, from her hiding-place, regarded him with unequivocal glances of fear and mistrust, waving her hands to me, and pointing significantly to the open door, as if silently beseeching me to tell her master to turn him out.

  “Shut the door, man,” said Moodie, whose long scrutiny of the strange being before us seemed upon the whole satisfactory; “we shall be frozen.”

  “Thin, faith, sir, that’s what I am,” said the lad, in a rich brogue, which told, without asking, the country to which he belonged. Then stretching his bare hands to the fire, he continued, “By Jove, sir, I was never so near gone in my life!”

  “Where do you come from, and what is your business here? You must be aware that this is a very late hour to take a house by storm in this way.”

  “Thrue for you, sir. But necessity knows no law; and the condition you see me in must plade for me. First, thin, sir, I came from the township of D——, and want a masther; and next to that, bedad! I want something to ate. As I’m alive, and ’tis a thousand pities that I’m alive at all at all, for shure God Almighty never made sich a misfortunate crather afore nor since; I have had nothing to put in my head since I ran away from my ould masther, Mr. F——, yesterday at noon. Money I have none, sir; the divil a cent. I have neither a shoe to my foot nor a hat to my head, and if you refuse to shelter me the night, I must be contint to perish in the snow, for I have not a frind in the wide wurld.”

  The lad covered his face with his hands, and sobbed aloud.

  “Bell,” I whispered; “go to the cupboard and get the poor fellow something to eat. The boy is starving.”

  “Dinna heed him, mistress, dinna credit his lees. He is ane o’ those wicked Papists wha ha’ just stepped in to rob and murder us.”

  “Nonsense! Do as I bid you.”

  “I winna be fashed aboot him. An’ if he bides here, I’ll e’en flit by the first blink o’ the morn.”

  “Isabel, for shame! Is this acting like a Christian, or doing as you would be done by?”
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  Bell was as obstinate as a rock, not only refusing to put down any food for the famished lad, but reiterating her threat of leaving the house if he were suffered to remain. My husband, no longer able to endure her selfish and absurd conduct, got angry in good earnest, and told her that she might please herself; that he did not mean to ask her leave as to whom he received into his house. I, for my part, had no idea that she would realise her threat. She was an excellent servant, clean, honest, and industrious, and loved the dear baby.

  “You will think better of it in the morning,” said I, as I rose and placed before the lad some cold beef and bread, and a bowl of milk, to which the runaway did ample justice.

  “Why did you quit your master, my lad?” said Moodie.

  “Because I could live wid him no longer. You see, sir, I’m a poor foundling from the Belfast Asylum, shoved out by the mother that bore me, upon the wide wurld, long before I knew that I was in it. As I was too young to spake for myself intirely, she put me into a basket, wid a label round my neck, to tell the folks that my name was John Monaghan. This was all I ever got from my parents; and who or what they were, I never knew, not I, for they never claimed me; bad cess to them! But I’ve no doubt it’s a fine illigant gintlemen he was, and herself a handsome rich young lady, who dared not own me for fear of affronting the rich jintry, her father and mother. Poor folk, sir, are never ashamed of their children; ’tis all the threasure they have, sir; but my parents were ashamed of me, and they thrust me out to the stranger and the hard bread of depindence.” The poor lad sighed deeply, and I began to feel a growing interest in his sad history.

  “Have you been in the country long?”

  “Four years, madam. You know my master, Mr. F——; he brought me out wid him as his apprentice, and during the voyage he trated me well. But the young men, his sons, are tyrants, and full of durty pride; and I could not agree wid them at all at all. Yesterday, I forgot to take the oxen out of the yoke, and Musther William tied me up to a stump, and bate me with the raw hide. Shure the marks are on my showlthers yet. I left the oxen and the yoke, and turned my back upon them all, for the hot blood was bilin’ widin me; and I felt that if I stayed it would be him that would get the worst of it. No one had ever cared for me since I was born, so I thought it was high time to take care of myself. I had heard your name, sir, and I thought I would find you out; and if you want a lad, I will work for you for my kape, and a few dacent clothes.”

  A bargain was soon made. Moodie agreed to give Monaghan six dollars a month, which be thankfully accepted; and I told Bell to prepare his bed in a corner of the kitchen. But mistress Bell thought fit to rebel. Having been guilty of one act of insubordination, she determined to be consistent, and throw off the yoke altogether. She declared that she would do no such thing; that her life and that all our lives were in danger; and that she would never stay another night under the same roof with that Papist vagabond.

  “Papist!” cried the indignant lad, his dark eyes flashing fire, “I’m no Papist, but a Protestant like yourself; and I hope a deuced dale better Christian. You take me for a thief; yet shure a thief would have waited till you were all in bed and asleep, and not stepped in forenint you all in this fashion.”

  There was both truth and nature in the lad’s argument; but Bell like an obstinate woman as she was, chose to adhere to her own opinion. Nay, she even carried her absurd prejudices so far that she brought her mattress and laid it down on the floor in my room, for fear that the Irish vagabond should murder her during the night. By the break of day she was off; leaving me for the rest of the winter without a servant. Monaghan did all in his power to supply her place; he lighted the fires, swept the house, milked the cows, nursed the baby, and often cooked the dinner for me, and endeavoured by a thousand little attentions to show the gratitude he really felt for our kindness. To little Katie he attached himself in an extraordinary manner. All his spare time he spent in making little sleighs and toys for her, or in dragging her in the said sleighs up and down the steep hills in front of the house, wrapped up in a blanket. Of a night, he cooked her mess of bread and milk, as she sat by the fire, and his greatest delight was to feed her himself. After this operation was over, he would carry her round the floor on his back, and sing her songs in native Irish. Katie always greeted his return from the woods with a scream of joy, holding up her fair arms to clasp the neck of her dark favourite.

  “Now the Lord love you for a darlint!” he would cry, as he caught her to his heart. “Shure you are the only one of the crathers he ever made who can love poor John Monaghan. Brothers and sisters I have none—I stand alone in the wurld, and your bonny wee face is the sweetest thing it contains for me. Och, jewil! I could lay down my life for you, and be proud to do that same.”

  Though careless and reckless about everything that concerned himself, John was honest and true. He loved us for the compassion we had shown him; and he would have resented any injury offered to our persons with his best blood.

  But if we were pleased with our new servant, Uncle Joe and his family were not, and they commenced a series of petty persecutions that annoyed him greatly, and kindled into a flame all the fiery particles of his irritable nature.

  Moodie had purchased several tons of hay of a neighbouring farmer, for the use of his cattle, and it had to be stowed into the same barn with some flax and straw that belonged to Uncle Joe. Going early one morning to fodder the cattle, John found Uncle Joe feeding his cows with his master’s hay, and as it had diminished greatly in a very short time, he accused him in no measured terms of being the thief. The other very coolly replied that he had taken a little of the hay in order to repay himself for his flax, that Monaghan had stolen for the oxen. “Now by the powers!” quoth John, kindling into wrath, “that is adding a big lie to a dirthy petty larceny. I take your flax, you ould villain! Shure I know that flax is grown to make linen wid, not to feed oxen. God Almighty has give the crathers a good warm coat of their own; they neither require shifts nor shirts.”

  “I saw you take it, you ragged Irish vagabond, with my own eyes.”

  “Thin yer two eyes showed you a wicked illusion. You had betther shut up yer head, or I’ll give you that for an eye-salve that shall make you see thrue for the time to come.”

  Relying upon his great size, and thinking that the slight stripling, who, by-the-by, was all bones and sinews, was no match for him, Uncle Joe struck Monaghan over the head with the pitchfork. In a moment the active lad was upon him like a wild cat, and in spite of the difference of his age and weight, gave the big man such a thorough dressing that he was fain to roar aloud for mercy.

  “Own that you are a thief and a liar, or I’ll murder you!”

  “I’ll own to anything whilst your knee is pressing me into a pancake. Come now—there’s a good lad—let me get up.” Monaghan felt irresolute, but after extorting from Uncle Joe a promise never to purloin any of the hay again, he let him rise.

  “For shure,” he said, “he began to turn so black in the face, I thought he’d burst intirely.”

  The fat man neither forgot nor forgave this injury; and though he dared not attack John personally, he set the children to insult and affront him upon all occasions. The boy was without socks, and I sent him to old Mrs. H——, to inquire of her what she would charge for knitting him two pairs of socks. The reply was, a dollar. This was agreed to, and dear enough they were; but the weather was very cold, and the lad was barefooted, and there was no other alternative than either to accept her offer, or for him to go without.

  In a few days, Monaghan brought them home; but I found upon inspecting them that they were old socks new-footed. This was rather too glaring a cheat, and I sent the lad back with them, and told him to inform Mrs. H—— that as he had agreed to give the price for new socks, he expected them to be new altogether.

  The avaricious old woman did not deny the fact, but she fell to cursing and swearing in an awful manner, and wished so much evil to the lad, that, with the superstitious
fear so common to the natives of his country, he left her under the impression that she was gifted with the evil eye, and was an “owld witch.” He never went out of the yard with the waggon and horses, but she rushed to the door, and cursed him for a bare-heeled Irish blackguard, and wished that he might overturn the waggon, kill the horses, and break his own worthless neck.

  “Ma’arm,” said John to me one day, after returning from C—— with the team, “it would be betther for me to lave the masther intirely; for shure if I do not, some mischief will befall me or the crathers. That wicked owled wretch! I cannot thole her curses. Shure it’s in purgatory I am all the while.”

  “Nonsense, Monaghan! you are not a Catholic, and need not fear purgatory. The next time the old woman commences her reprobate conduct, tell her to hold her tongue, and mind her own business, for curses, like chickens, come home to roost.”

  The boy laughed heartily at the old Turkish proverb, but did not reckon much on its efficacy to still the clamorous tongue of the ill-natured old jade. The next day he had to pass her door with the horse. No sooner did she hear the sound of the wheels, than out she hobbled, and commenced her usual anathemas.

  “Bad luck to yer croaking, yer ill-conditioned owld raven. It is not me you are desthroying shure, but yer own poor miserable sinful sowl. The owld one has the grief of ye already, for ‘curses, like chickens, come home to roost;’ so get in wid ye, and hatch them to yerself in the chimley corner. They’ll all be roosting wid ye by-and-by; and a nice warm nest they’ll make for you, considering the brave brood that belongs to you.”

  Whether the old woman was as superstitious as John, I know not; or whether she was impressed with the moral truth of the proverb—for, as I have before stated, she was no fool—is difficult to tell; but she shrunk back into her den, and never attacked the lad again.