The Boy I Left Behind Me

He was buried, with many of his men, in Halifax. The Chesapeake , refitted as might be, was sailed across to Portsmouth. There history loses her with the false lead that the Royal Navy recommissioned [pg 37] the ship. This is not so, nor can I find any definite authority to say that she ever sailed again. She was bought as she stood for five hundred pounds by a Mr. He broke up the vessel, sold several tons of copper from the sheeting with all fittings and timber, and doubled his money.

The main timbers were pitch pine, new and sound, and some of them were sold for housebuilding in Portsmouth but the best of them were bought by a Mr. John Prior for two hundred pounds to build a mill. This he duly erected in the hamlet of Wickham. The main timbers of the deck, built into the structure intact, were and are thirty-two feet long and eighteen inches square. The purloins were used, just as they were, for joists.

With that the Chesapeake was forgotten, and Wickham—it antedates the Norman Conquest—fell asleep again.

THE BOY I LEFT BEHIND ME

Forty years later a descendant, or relation I cannot trace him , of Captain Broke of the Shannon got interested in gathering information. In a memoir which he wrote he quotes a letter from the Vicar of Fareham, date of , with the information given above and the statement that the [pg 38] timbers of the Chesapeake in fact, the whole mill seemed "good for centuries yet. Then a Hampshire Gazetteer and Guide of reports that the mill at Wickham made of the timbers of the Chesapeake is still intact and in active operation.

Then followed another sleep of the topic till in I woke it again by writing to the present Vicar of Fareham. I hadn't written sooner because, although I knew the Chesapeake was in a mill, I was looking for the mill to be on the Isle of Wight. So I wrote to the Vicar of Fareham, who referred me to Mr. George Orwell of Fareham, who has done a lot of antiquarian work, especially in things concerning the Navy, and whose writings under the name of historian are well known to all people who love British antiquities very fine people.

Orwell wrote me to say that the mill is still April 4, quite as it was, timbers and all, going strong and likely to see a long while yet. What ought to be done about it? These timbers of the deck of the Chesapeake —rebuilt into their earlier semblance—should have something of the sacred memory of the deck of the Victory. Why not buy them and give them to the United States? They should be a gift to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Those who know that place will recall its trophies—the proudest part of the establishment.

There swings still afloat the schooner America that won the cup in something, never recaptured; there is the old Constitution and the Reina Mercedes , and there in the great hall is Perry's flag with his " Don't give up the ship ," and much else. The Chesapeake would build into a fine platform, the old deck reproduced, for Mr.

Churchill to lecture from. When I look back on this mid-Victorian England into which I was born and which first stamped itself on my mind, it gives me many things to think about. How deeply set it was in the mould [pg 40] in which England was cast and in which, to a great extent, it still remains. Side by side with all that is splendid in history and in character is that everlasting division that separates people from one another with the heavy ridges and barriers of class distinction.

Here are people born to be poor, and how poor they were! I can remember that when we had done with our tea leaves old women the place seemed full of them would come and take them away to use over again. There were the poor and there were the half poor, and there were the respectable people and the genteel people, and the gentry and above them the great people, all the way to the queen. And they all knew their places.

There was an elementary school called a national school, where the children of the poor and of the respectable went at a fee of one penny a week. I can see now that it must have been one of the schools set up under the new Act, as it was then, of , the first statute that ever gave England general primary education.

England had got afraid that an illiterate population might mean danger to the nation. They had had the object lesson of the armies of the Civil War in America. The loud [pg 41] laughter of the London Times and the haw! It had become plain enough that England had to do what one of its statesmen of the moment called "educate its masters," if only for the masters' sake. That was seventy-five years ago. And strangely enough the wheel has turned a full circle and a similar discussion runs in the current journals of All through the present controversy over the schools and how to make the public schools public runs the note of anxiety, Are we really finding all the brains of the nation?

All, we need them all! National brains are the first line of public safety for everybody. There must be no gifted children left too poor for their gifts to give service to the nation. We must have them. It is a wonderful change. Compare it with the sentiment of Gray's Elegy , in which the poet sorrows for the lack of opportunity that kept people down to the level of the poor and buried them in a country churchyard, but sorrows only for their own sakes.

With Gray the sentiment is as of a wishful luxurious pity and has nothing to do with any keen, anxious fear that the nation needs these men and must not bury them unknown. His very phrases show it: But, as I say, there was the national school functioning at a penny a week for the poor and the respectable.

But for the genteel, no, not if they could reach a little higher, and of course not under any circumstances for the gentry. So two older brothers and I—aged nine and eight and six—went therefore [pg 43] to a dame's school, with which my academic education began in , not to be completed till with a Chicago Ph. I recall but little of the dame school except the first lesson in geography, in which the dame held up a map and we children recited in chorus, "The top of the map is always the north, the bottom south, the right hand east, the left hand west!

Cracks with a ruler were as easy to get in a dame's school as scratches down on the Rio Grande. So, as I say, it was an England all of class and caste, with everybody doing his duty in the state of life into which it had pleased God to call him. But of this later. I enjoy the distinction, until very recently a sort of recognized title of nobility in Canada and the United States, of having been "raised on the old farm. The biographies of virtually all our great men for three or four generations show them as coming from the farm. The location of the "old home farm" was anywhere from Nova Scotia to out beyond Iowa, but in its essence and idea it was always the same place.

I once described it in a book of verse which I wrote as a farewell to economics, which was so clever that no one could read it and which I may therefore quote with novelty now. I admit that within the last generation or so, in softer times of multiplying luxury, men of eminence have been raised in a sickly sort of way in the cities themselves, have got their strength from high-school athletics, instead of at the woodpile and behind the harrows, and their mental culture by reading a hundred books once instead of one book a hundred times.

But I am talking of an earlier day. It was a condition, of course, that one must be raised on the old farm and then succeed in getting off it. Those who stayed on it turned into rustics, into "hicks" and "rubes," into those upstate characters which are the delight of the comic stage. You had your choice! Stay there and turn into a hick; get out and be a great man. But the strange thing is that they all come back.

They leave the old farm as boys so gladly, so happy to get away from its dull routine, its meaningless sunrise and sunset, its empty fresh winds over its fields, the silence of the bush—to get away into the clatter and effort of life, into the crowd. Then, as the years go by, they come to realize that at a city desk and in a city apartment they never see the sunrise and the sunset, have forgotten what the sky looks like at night and where the Great Dipper is, and find nothing on the angry gusts of wind or the stifling heat of the city streets that corresponds to the wind over the empty fields.

Only they rebuild it, but not with an ax but with an architect. They make it a great country mansion with flagstoned [pg 49] piazzas and festooned pergolas—and it isn't the old farm any more. You can't have it both ways. But as I say, I had my qualifying share, six years of the old farm—after I came out as a child of six from England—in an isolation which in these days of radio and transport is unknown upon the globe. As explained in the first chapter, I was brought out by my mother from England to Canada as the third of her six children in on the steamship Sarmatian , Liverpool to Montreal, to join my father who had gone ahead and taken up a farm.

The Sarmatian was one, was practically the last one, of those grand old vessels of the Allan Line which combined steam with the towering masts, the cloud of canvas, the maze of ropes and rigging of a full-rigged three-masted ship. She was in her day a queen of the ocean, that last word which always runs on to another sentence. She had been built in , had had the honour of serving the queen as a troopship for the Ashanti war and the further [pg 50] honour of carrying the queen's daughter to Canada as the wife of the Marquis of Lorne, the governor general.

No wonder that in my recollection of her the Sarmatian seemed grand beyond belief and carried a wealth of memories of the voyage of which I have already spoken. For years I used to feel as if I would "give anything" to see the Sarmatian again. And then it happened years and years after, when I had gone to Montreal to teach at McGill it was in , that I saw in the papers that the Sarmatian was in port; in fact I found that she still came in regularly all season and would be back again before navigation closed.

So I never saw her. I meant to but I never did. When I read a little later that the old ship had been broken up I felt that I would have "given anything" ten dollars then to have seen her. In those days most people still came up, as we did in , by river steamer from Montreal to Toronto. At Kingston we saw the place all decked with flags and were told that it was the "Twenty-fourth [pg 51] of May.

They kept Coronation Day with a great ringing of bells, but whether there was any more holiday to it than bell ringing I don't remember. But, as we were presently to learn, the "Twenty-fourth" was at that time the great Upper Canada summer holiday of the year; Dominion Day was still too new to have got set.

There wasn't any Labour Day or any Civic Holiday. From Toronto we took a train north to Newmarket; a funny train, it seemed to us, all open and quite unlike the little English carriages, cut into compartments that set the fields spinning round when you looked out of the window. Newmarket in was a well-established country town—in fact, as they said, "quite a place. It was at that time the place from which people went by the country roads to the south side of Lake Simcoe, the township of Georgina, to which at that time there was no railway connection.

From Newmarket my father and his hired man were to drive us the remaining thirty miles to reach the old farm. They [pg 52] had for it two wagons, a lumber wagon and a "light" wagon. A light wagon was lighter than a lumber wagon, but that's all you could say about it—it is like those histories which professors call "short" histories.

They might have been longer. So away we went along the zigzag roads, sometimes along a good stretch that would allow the horses to break into a heavy attempt at a trot, at other times ploughing through sand, tugging uphill, or hauling over corduroy roads of logs through thick swamps where the willow and alder bushes almost met overhead and where there was "no room to pass. And so on, at a pace of four or five miles an hour, till as the day closed in we went over a tumbled bridge with a roaring milldam and beyond it a village, the village of Sutton—two mills, two churches, and quite a main street, with three taverns.

My father told us that this was our own village, a gift very lightly received by us children after memories of Porchester and Liverpool and the Sarmatian. My [pg 53] mother told me years afterwards that to her it was a heartbreak. Beyond the village, my father told us, we were on our home road—another dubious gift, for it was as heavy as ever, with a great cedar swamp a mile through in the centre, all corduroy and willows and marsh and water; beyond that up a great hill with more farmhouses, and so across some fields, to a wind-swept hill space with a jumble of frame buildings and log barns and outhouses, and there we were at the old farm, on a six-year unbroken sentence.

The country round our farm was new in the sense that forty years before it was unbroken wilderness and old in the sense that farm settlers, when they began to come, had come in quickly. Surveyors had marked out roads. The part of the bush that was easy to clear was cleared off in one generation, log houses built, and one or two frame ones, so that in the sense the country in its outline was just as it is now: And of course in a lot of old primeval trees, towering hemlocks and [pg 54] birch, were still standing.

The last of the great bush fires that burned them out was in the summer when we came, the bush all burning, the big trees falling in masses of spark and flame, the sky all bright, and the people gathered from all round to beat out the shower of sparks that fell in the stubble fields. This country around Lake Simcoe we were four miles to the south of it and out of the sight of it , beautiful and fertile as it is, had never been settled in the old colonial days. The tourist of today sees from his flying car the road signs of "Martyr's Shrine" intermingled with the "Hot Dogs" and "Joe's Garage.

The Iroquois danger kept the country empty, as it did all western Ontario. Nor did the United Empire Loyalists come here. They settled along the St. Lawrence and the Bay of Quinte and Niagara and Lake Erie, but the Lake [pg 55] Simcoe country remained till that century closed as empty as it is beautiful. Settlement came after the "Great War" ended with Waterloo and world peace, and a flock of British emigrants went out to the newer countries.

Among them were many disbanded soldiers and sailors and officers with generous grants of land. These were what were called in England "good" people, meaning people of the "better" class but not good enough to stay at home, which takes money. With them came adherents and servants and immigrants at large, but all good people in the decent sense of the word, as were all the people round our old farm no matter how poor they were.

It was at first just a horse track through the bush, presently a rough roadway connecting Toronto York with the Holland River, and then, by cutting the corner of Lake Simcoe with the Georgian Bay and thus westward to the Upper Lakes, a line of communication safe from American invasion. It was part of Governor Simcoe's preoccupation [pg 56] over the defense of Upper Canada, which bore such good fruit in its unforeseen results of new settlement. So the settlers, once over the waters of Lake Simcoe, found their way along its shore, picked out the likely places, the fine high ground, the points overlooking the lake.

Here within a generation arose comfortable lake-shore homes, built by people with a certain amount of money, aided by people with no money but glad to work for wages for a time, till they could do better. From the first the settlement was cast in an aristocratic mould such as had been Governor Simcoe's dream for all his infant colony.

Simcoe was long since gone by this time. He left Canada in and died in England in But the mark that he set on Upper Canada wore faint only with time and is not yet obliterated. Simcoe planned a constitution and a colony to be an "image and transcript" of England itself. An established church and an aristocracy must be the basis of it. To Simcoe a democrat was a dangerous Jacobin and a dissenter a snivelling hypocrite. He despised people who would sit down to eat with their own servants, as even "good" people began to do in Upper [pg 57] Canada; "Fellows of one table," he called them, and he wanted nothing to do with them in his government.

Others shared his views, and hence that queer touch of make-believe, or real aristocracy, that was then characteristic of Simcoe's York Toronto and that helped to foster the Canadian rebellion of So after the first "aristocracy" houses were built on the lake shore of Georgina Township settlers began to move up to the higher ground behind it, better land and cheaper.

For the lake, for being on the water, most of them cared nothing. They wanted to get away from it. The lake shore was cold. It is strange to think that now you can buy all of that farmland you want at about thirty or forty dollars an acre, but an acre down at the lake shore is worth, say, a couple of thousand, and you can't get it anyway. Our own farm with its buildings was, I will say, the damnedest place I ever saw. The site was all right, for the slow slope of the hillside west and south gave a view over miles of country and a view [pg 58] of the sunset only appreciated when lost.

Someone had built a cedar log house and then covered it round with clapboard, and then someone else had added three rooms stuck along the front with more clapboard, effectually keeping all the sunlight out. Even towards the sunset there were no windows, only the half glass top of a side door. A cookhouse and a woodshed were stuck on behind. Across a grass yard were the stable, cedar logs plastered up, and the barns, cedar logs loose and open, and a cart shed and a henhouse, and pigsties and all that goes with a farm. To me as a child the farm part seemed just one big stink. Guano had nothing on them.

We presently completed our farmhouse to match [pg 59] the growing family by adding a new section on the far side of it, built of frame lumber only, with lath and plaster and no logs, thin as cardboard and cold as a refrigerator. Everything froze when the thermometer did. We took for granted that the water would freeze in the pitchers every night and the windowpanes cover up with frost, not that the old farm was not heated.

It had had originally a big stone fireplace in the original log house, but as with all the fireplaces built of stone out of the fields without firebrick, as the mortar began to dry out the fireplace would set the house on fire. That meant getting up on the roof it wasn't far with buckets of water and putting it out. My father and the hired man got so tired putting out the house on fire that we stopped using the fireplace and had only stoves, box stoves that burned hemlock, red hot in ten minutes with the dampers open.

You could be as warm as you liked, according to distance, but the place was never the same two hours running. There were, I think, nine stoves in all; cutting wood was endless. I quote again from my forgotten book. For light we had three or four coal-oil lamps, but being just from England, where they were unknown, we were afraid of them.

We used candles made on the farm from tallow poured into a mould, guttering damn things, to be snuffed all the time and apt to droop over in the middle. It is hardly credible to me now, but I know it is a fact that when my brother and I sat round a table doing our lessons or drawing and painting pictures, all the light we had was one tallow candle in the middle of the table. It should have ruined our eyesight, but it didn't. I don't think any of us under fifty wore spectacles; just as the ill-cooked food of the farm, the heavy doughy bread, the awful pork and pickles should have ruined our digestions but couldn't.

Boys on the farm who go after the cattle at six in [pg 61] the morning are in the class of the iron dogs beside a city step. My father's farm—one hundred acres, the standard pattern—was based on what is called mixed farming—that is, wheat and other grains, hay, pasture, cattle, a few sheep and pigs and hens, roots for winter, garden for summer and wood to cut in the bush. The only thing to sell was wheat, the false hope of the Ontario farmer of the seventies, always lower in the yield than what one calculated if you calculated low it went lower and always except once in a happy year lower than what it had to be to make it pay.

The other odd grains we had to sell brought nothing much, nor the cattle, poor lean things of the prebreeding days that survived their awful cowshed. My father knew nothing about farming, and the hired man, "Old Tommy," a Yorkshireman who had tried a bush farm of his own and failed, still less. My father alternated furious industry with idleness and drinking, and in spite of my mother having a small income of her [pg 62] own from England, the farm drifted onto the rocks and the family into debt.

Presently there was a mortgage, the interest on which being like a chain around my father's neck, and later on mine. Indeed, these years of the late s were the hard times of Ontario farming, with mortgages falling due like snowflakes. Farming in Ontario, in any case, was then and still is an alternating series of mortgages and prosperity following on like the waves of the sea. Anyone of my experience could drive you through the present farm country and show you except that it would bore you to sleep the mark of the successive waves like geological strata.

Here on our right is the remains of what was the original log house of a settler: You will see, too, a section of its outline that was once a window. Elsewhere, perhaps on the same farm, but still standing, is an old frame house that was built by mortgaging the log house. This one may perhaps be boarded up and out of use because it was discarded when [pg 63] wheat went to two dollars and fifty cents a bushel in the Crimean War and the farmer, suddenly enriched, was able to add another mortgage and built a brick house—those real brick houses that give the motorist the impression that all farmers are rich.

So they were—during the Crimean War. Later on, and reflecting the boom years of the closing nineties and the opening century, are the tall hip-roofed barns with stone and cement basements below for cattle and silos at the side, which give the impression that all farmers are scientists—only they aren't; it's just more mortgages. Our routine on the farm, as children, was to stay on it.

We were too little to wander, and even the nearest neighbours were half a mile away. So we went nowhere except now and then, as a treat, into Sutton village, and on Sunday to the church on the lake shore. Practically, except for school, we stayed at home all the time—years and years. There was, a mile away, a school School Section No. It was a plain frame building, decently lighted, with a yard and a pump and a woodpile, in fact all the accessories that went with the academic life of School Section No.

The boys and girls who went there were the children of decent people there were no others in the township , poor, but not exactly aware of it. In summer the boys went barefoot. We didn't—a question of caste and thistles. You have to begin it at three years old to get the feel for it. There were two teachers, a man teacher and a lady teacher, and it was all plain and decent and respectable, and the education first class, away ahead of the dame-school stuff in England.

All of the education was right to the point—reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography—with no fancy, silly subjects such as disfigure our present education even at its beginning and run riot in the college at the top. Things about the school that were unsanitary were things then so customary that even we children from England found nothing wrong. We spit on our slates to clean them with the side of our hand. We all drank out of the same tin mug [pg 65] in the schoolyard. The boys and girls were together in classes, never outside.

The only weak spot in the system of the little red schoolhouse was that the teachers were not permanent, not men engaged in teaching making it their lifework, like the Scottish "dominie" who set his mark upon Scotland. You can never have a proper system of national education without teachers who make teaching their lifework, take a pride in it as a chosen profession, and are so circumstanced as to be as good as anybody—I mean as anything around.

In the lack of this lies the great fault in our Canadian secondary education, all the way up to college. So it was with the country schools of The teachers were young men who came and went, themselves engaged in the long stern struggle of putting themselves through college, for which their teaching was only a steppingstone. An arduous struggle it was. A schoolteacher they were practically all men; the girl teachers were just appendages to the picture got a salary of three hundred dollars to four hundred dollars a year.

Call it four hundred dollars. During his ten months a [pg 66] year of teaching he paid ten dollars a month for his board and washing. I don't suppose that his clothes cost him more than fifty dollars a year, and all his other extras of every kind certainly not more than another fifty. For in those days, after necessaries were paid for, there was nothing to spend money on. The teacher never drank. Not that he didn't want to, but every drink cost money, five cents, and he hadn't got it. If a teacher did begin to drink and did start to loaf around the taverns, it undermined the sternness of his life's purpose as a slow leak undermines a dam.

It became easier to drink than to save money; he felt rich instead of poor, and presently, as the years went by, he drank himself out of this purpose altogether, quit schoolteaching, went north—to the lumber shanties or worked in a sawmill—living life downhill, marked out still, by the wreck of his education, as a man who had once been a teacher and still quoted poetry when he was tight. But most, practically all, stuck right at it, saving, say, two hundred dollars a year towards college. And this is what college cost, college being the University of Toronto.

The fees were forty dollars a [pg 67] year say sixty dollars in medicine , and board and lodging in the mean drab houses of the side streets where the poorer students lived cost three dollars a week, and washing, I think, twenty-five cents a week. They washed anything then for five cents, even a full-dress shirt, and anyway the student hadn't got a full-dress shirt. College books in those days cost about ten dollars a year. There were no college activities that cost money, nothing to join that wanted five dollars for joining it, no cafeterias to spend money in, since a student ate three times a day at his boardinghouse and that was the end of it.

There was no money to be spent on college girls, because at that time there were no college girls to spend money on. Homer says that the beauty of Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships meaning made that much trouble. The attraction of the college girl was to launch about a thousand dollars—added to college expenses.

But all that was far, far away in , and a student's college budget for the eight months of the session, including his clothes and his travel expenses and such extras as even the humblest and sternest must incur, would work out at about three [pg 68] hundred dollars for each college year. That meant that what he could save in a year and a half of teaching would give him one year at college.

Added to this was the fact that in the vacation—the two months of a teacher's vacation or the four months for a college vacation—he could work on a farm for his board and twenty dollars a month and save almost the whole of the twenty dollars. I have known at least one teacher, later on a leader of the medical profession of Alberta, who put in seven years of this life of teaching to get his college course.

But in most cases there would be some extra source of supply: For what could he do with it, except drink or go to college? So in the end adversity was conquered, and the teachers passed through college and into law or medicine, with perhaps politics and public life, and added one more name to the roll of honour of men who "began as teachers. But the system was, and is, all wrong.

Our teacher, with his thirty dollars a month, didn't get as much as our Old Tommy, the hired man, for he and his wife had twenty dollars a month and a cottage with it and a garden, milk and eggs and vegetables and meat to the extent of his end I forget which of any pig that was killed. A teacher situated like that could be a married man, as snug and respected as a Scottish dominie with his cottage and his kailyard, his trout rod and his half dozen Latin books bound in vellum—"as good as anybody," which is one of the things that a man has got to be in life if he is to live at all.

I never was, and never felt I was, in the ten years I was a teacher. That is why later on I spent so many words in decrying schoolteaching as a profession, not seeing that schoolteaching is all right for those who are all right for it. The thing wrong is the setting we fail to give it. Such was our school at School Section No. It had also its amenities as well as its work. Now and again there were school "entertainments. I rather think not, because in that case they wouldn't come.

For an entertainment the school was lit with extra lamps. The teacher was chairman. The trustees made speeches or shook their heads and didn't. The trustees were among the old people who had come out from the "old country" with some part of another environment, something of an older world, still clinging to them. Some, especially Scotsmen like old Archie Riddell, would rise to the occasion and make a speech with quite a ring and a thrill to it, all about Marmion and Bruce and footprints on the sands of time.

The Boy I Left Behind Me by Leacock, Stephen

Then the teachers would say that we'd hear from Mr. Brown, sitting in a sunken lump in a half-light, would be seen to shake his head, to assure us that we wouldn't. After which came violin music by local fiddlers, announced grandiloquently by the chairman as "Messrs. Perhaps also some lawyer or such person from the village four miles away would drive up for the entertainment and give a reading or a recitation.

It was under those circumstances that I first heard W. Gilbert's Yarn of the "Nancy Bell. But going to the country school just didn't work out. It was too far for us, and in rough weather and storm impossible, and it was out of the question for a younger section of the family the ones in between the baby and ex-baby and the "big boys". Moreover, my mother was haunted with the idea that if we kept on at the school we might sideslip and cease to be gentlemen.

Already we were losing our Hampshire accent, as heard in Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star —not "stah," and not "star," but something in between. I can still catch it if I am dead tired or delirious. We were beginning also to say "them there" and "these here," and "who all" and "most always," in short, phrases that no one can use and grow up a gentleman.

So my mother decided that she would teach us herself and with characteristic courage set herself at it, in the midst of all her other work with the baby and the little children and the kitchen and the servants and the house. Servants, of course, we always had: There was a certain queer gentility to it all. The hired men never sat down to eat with us, nor did the hired girl. Her status, in fact, as I see it in retrospect, was as low and humble as even an English earl could wish it. She just didn't count. My mother had had in England a fine education of the Victorian finishing-school type and added to it a love and appreciation of literature that never left her all her life, not even at ninety years of age.

So she got out a set of her old English schoolbooks that had come with us in a box from England—Colenso's [pg 73] Arithmetic , and Slater's Chronology , and Peter Parley's Greece and Rome , and Oldendorf's New Method of French —and gathered us around her each morning for school, opened with prayers, and needing them. But it was no good; we wouldn't pay attention, we knew it was only Mother. The books didn't work either—most of them were those English manuals of history and such, specially designed for ladies' schools and for ladies who had to teach their own children out in the "colonies.

Thus they reduced Roman history to something like this:. In this way one could take a birdlike flight over ancient history. I think we hit up about two hundred years every morning, and for ancient Egypt over one thousand years. I had such a phenomenal memory that it was all right for me, as I remembered the question and answer both. But my elder brothers Dick and Jim were of heavier academic clay, and so they just—as the politicians say—took it as read. The Arithmetic of Bishop Colenso of Natal was heavier going. After multiplication and division it ran slap-bang into the Rule of Three, and Mother herself had never understood what the Rule of Three was, and if you went on beyond it all you found was Practice and Aliquot Parts.

I know now that all this is rule-of-thumb arithmetic, meant for people who can't reason it out, and brought straight down from the Middle Ages to Colenso. The glory of the unitary method, whereby if one man needs ten cigarettes a day then two men need twenty, and so on for as many men and as many cigarettes and as long a time as you like—this had not dawned [pg 75] on the British mind.

I think it was presently imported from America. So my mother's unhappy lessons broke down, and we were just about to be sent back to the red schoolhouse when by good luck we managed to secure a family tutor, from whom we received, for the next three or four years, teaching better than I have ever had since and better than any I ever gave in ten years as a schoolteacher. Our tutor was a young man off a near-by farm, stranded halfway through college by not having taught long enough and compelled to go back to teaching.

So my grandfather from England put up the money for fear, of course, that we might come back home on him , and there we were with a tutor and a schoolroom, inkwells, scribblers, slates—in fact, a whole academic outfit. Our tutor was known as "Harry Park" to his farm associates, but to us, at once and always, as "Mr. Park," and he ranked with Aristotle in dignity and width of learning.

Never have I known anyone who better dignified his office, made more of it, so that our little schoolroom was as formal as Plato in his Academy could [pg 76] have wished it. Park rechristened my brother Jim as "James," to give him class, and Dick reappeared as "Arthur. Park's watch soon took precedence over the kitchen clock, as the "classes" made up of us four boys and my little sister, just qualified were as neatly divided as in a normal school.

I had to be Class I, but my brothers didn't care, as they freely admitted that I was the "cleverest"—they looked on it as no great asset. For certain purposes, poetry and history, we were all together. Park" knew everything, and I rather think that he thought this himself. Ask him anything and we got the answer.

Park, what were the Egyptians like? Park's" teaching my brothers at least learned all that could be put into them, and I personally went forward like an arrow. At eleven years of age I could spell practically anything, knew all there was to know of simple grammar syntax, parsing, analysis , beyond which there is nothing worth while anyway, knew Collier's British History [pg 77] and History of English Literature , all the geography of all the countries including Canada the provinces of Canada which had not been in Mother's book , and in arithmetic had grasped the unitary system and all that goes with it and learned how to juggle with vulgar fractions even when piled up like a Chinese pagoda, and with decimals let them repeat as they would.

Park came to us as tutor and the little red schoolhouse of School Section No. We practically stayed on the farm. But of course a part of the old farm, to children of eight to twelve years old, newly out from England, was a land of adventure; all the main part of it, as it sloped away to the south and west, was clear fields of the seven-acre pattern with snake fences all round it, piles of stones that had been cleared off the fields lying in the fence corners, raspberry bushes choking up the corners, but here and there an old elm tree springing up in an angle of the fence as a survival of the cleared forests.

Elm trees have the peculiarity that they can do well alone, as no storm can break them, [pg 78] whereas hemlocks isolated by themselves are doomed. Hence the odd elm trees scattered all through this part of central Ontario, as if someone had set them on purpose to serve as shade trees or landscape decoration.

Heaven knows no one did. For the earlier settlers' trees, to a great extent, were the enemy. The Upper Canada forest was slaughtered by the lumber companies without regard for the future, which in any case they could neither foresee nor control.

In the early days the export of lumber was only in the form of square timber—great sticks of wood from twelve to eighteen inches each way, not cut up into the boards and deals and staves of the later lumber trade. Hence the trees were squared as they fell in the falling forest, and about one third of the main tree and all its branches burned up as litter to get rid of it. That was the early settlers' idea of the bush: Then cut out the big trees and haul them out, leave the rest of the bushes there, and let farm clearings and roads get round it as best they could. As to planting any new trees to conserve the old ones, the [pg 79] farmers would have thought it a madman's dream.

The only trees planted were the straight, fast-growing Lombardy poplars, still seen in their old age, set out in single or in little rows in front of the early Ontario houses. These owe their origin to the legend or the fact that they act as lightning conductors, a part of Benjamin Franklin's legacy to North America, along with the box stove and much else.

I am saying then that our old farm at its north end fell slap away down a steep hillside at the foot of which began the bush that spread off sideways in both directions as far as one could see, and directly in front it rose again in a slope that blotted out all view of Lake Simcoe four miles away.

Along the fringes of it were still some of the giant hemlocks that had escaped the full fury of the last bush fire, dead, charred, and still standing, but falling one by one. The bush, as one tried to penetrate it, grew denser and denser, mostly underbrush with tangled roots and second growth sprung up after the fires. It was so dense that for us it was impenetrable, and we ventured our way farther and farther in, carrying hatchets and alert for wildcats, [pg 80] which I am practically certain were not there, and for bears, which had left years and years ago.

We had hardly any social life, as we were prevented, partly by "class" and mainly by distance, from going over to the other farms after dark. To one farm where lived a family of English children of something the same mixed antecedents as ourselves we sometimes went over for tea, and at times all the way to the village or to the lake-shore houses.

But such treks meant staying overnight. So mostly we stayed at home, and in the evenings we did our lessons, if we had lessons to do, and my mother read to us Walter Scott and carried us away to so deep an impression of the tournaments and battlefields of the Crusade and of the warring forests of Norman-Saxon England that any later "moving picture" of such things is but a mere blur of the surface. We cannot have it both ways. Intensity of mental impression and frequency of mental impression cannot go together. Robinson Crusoe's discovery of Friday's footprints on the sand—read aloud thus by candlelight to wondering children—has a dramatic "horror" to it horror means making one's hair stand up that [pg 81] no modern cinema or stage can emulate.

Similarly I recall the reading aloud of Tom Sawyer , then of course, still a new book, and the dramatic intensity of the disclosure that Indian Joe is sealed up in the great cave. Our news from the outside world came solely in the form of the Illustrated London News sent out by my grandmother from England.

With it we kept alive the British tradition that all Victorian children were brought up in, never doubting that of course the Zulus were wrong and the Afghans mistaken and the Boers entirely at fault. This especially, as Mother had lived in South Africa and said so. On one point, however, of British Victorian orthodox faith I sideslipped at eight years old and have never entirely got back, and that too the greatest point in all British history.

I refer to the question of George Washington and George the [pg 82] Third and whether the Americans had the right to set up a republic. It so happened that there came to our farm for a winter visit an English cousin of my father's who had become I do not know how, for it must have been a rare thing in the seventies a female doctor in Boston. She used to tell me, while Jim and Dick were mucking out the chores in the barnyard, which was their high privilege, about the United States and the Revolution, and when she saw how interested I was she sent to Boston and got a copy of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Young Folks' or People's History of the United States.

There it was, pictures and all—General Gage and the Boston Boys very neat boys and a very neat general , Washington crossing the Delaware hard going , Washington taking command at Cambridge. Forthwith the theory of a republic, and the [pg 83] theory of equality, and the condemnation of hereditary rights seemed obvious and self-evident truths, as clear to me as they were to Thomas Jefferson.

I stopped short at the queen partly, I suppose, because one touched there on heaven and hell and the church service and on ground which I didn't propose to tread. But for me, from then on, a hereditary lord didn't have a leg to stand on. In the sixty years nearly seventy since elapsed I have often tried to stand up hereditary peers again I mean as members of a legislature , but they won't really stay up for me. I have studied it all, and lectured on it all, and written about it all. I know all about the British idea that if a thing had existed for a long time, and if most people like it and if it seems to work well and if it brings no sharp edge of cruelty and barbarity such as the world has learned again, then it is silly to break away from established institution on the ground of a purely theoretical fault.

But I can't get by with the arguments. I broke with the House of Lords, with its hereditary peers and its bishops voting because they are bishops in —or whenever it was—and the breech has never been really healed.

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People from [pg 84] India have told me that no matter how scientific an education you may smear over an Indian doctor or scientist, put him in any emergency or danger and back he comes to his first beliefs: I'm like that with my underlying Jeffersonian republicanism: Occasional treats broke the routine of our isolation on the farm, such as going into Sutton village for the "Twenty-fourth" of May , the great annual holiday, or to see cricket matches between Sutton and other places, such as Newmarket, within cricket reach.

For up to that time cricket still remained the game of the Upper Canada countryside, the game living on strong as against [pg 85] the competition of Yankee baseball and dying hard. At present cricket has shrunken in on Toronto and a few larger cities and school centres. But in the seventies and eighties it was everywhere. The wonder is, though, that it could survive at all—it makes such heavy demands—a decent "pitch" of prepared ground, without which the game is worthless, an outfield not too rough, and even for decent practice a certain minimum of players; while cricket "at the nets" is poor stuff without a good pitch and good bowling, especially if you haven't any nets.

Nor can you have a real "match" at cricket without a real side of eleven or something close to it. Baseball, on the other hand, is quick and easy and universal. It can be played in a cow pasture or behind the barnyard or in the village street; two people can "knock out flies" and three can play at "rolling over the bat," and if you can't get nine for a game, a pitcher, catcher, and baseball will do—what's more, the game can be played out in an afternoon, an hour, or a minute.

The wonder is that the British settlers in Upper Canada kept doggedly on with their British cricket as against the facile Yankee baseball and the indigenous [pg 86] lacrosse. I am quite sure that in the township of Georgina no one had ever seen the latter game in Rarest and most striking of all treats was to be taken on a trip to Toronto on the new railway, which reached Lake Simcoe from the south by a branch line of the Toronto and Lake Nipissing Railway extended from Stouffville to Sutton and Jackson's Point Wharf on the lake.

It was part of that variegated network of little railways—of varied gauges and plans, all crooked as country roads, all afraid of a hill, and all trying to keep close to a steamer dock, each under different ownerships—which represents the shortsighted railway building of Ontario. And yet I suppose it was hard to see ahead at all, in a community that stumbled and fell with every new onslaught of bad times and fought stubbornly against its forests and its torrents—half strangled in its own opportunity.

The completion of the railway and the arrival of the first train was a great event, much ringing of bells and blowing of whistles; then the train itself arrived by the sash factory and the gristmill. But, as with most town and village advances of that date, it just went so far and then stopped.

Sutton fell asleep again and woke only to the sound of the motor horn and the advent of the tourist, in another world years later. But for us children a trip on the train to Toronto, a treat that was accorded to each of us about twice in the next three years, was a trip into wonderland—England had grown dim. Toronto, even the Toronto I describe in the next chapter, was marvellous beyond all description. But the most real of our standing treats and holidays came to us on contact with Lake Simcoe.

This grew out of our going to church every Sunday in summer to the Lake Shore Church four miles away. To our farm equipment there had been added a "phaeton" for Mother to drive and the kind of horse that is driven in a phaeton, which is born quiet, never grows old, and lives on into eternity. The ease and comfort of a phaeton can be appreciated by riding once in a buckboard just [pg 88] once is all you need , a vehicle that means a set of slats on axles, with a seat on the slats.

Its motion is similar to that of the new "seasickness medicine. Even at that we walked in turns. The parish church of Georgina stood on the high bank dotted with cedar trees overlooking Lake Simcoe, and oh! I have often and often and often written of Lake Simcoe, I know, with a few odd miles left out here and there, its every stick and stone, its island and points, and I claim that there is in all the world no more beautiful body of water.

Writing it up years ago in a Canadian Geographical Journal , I said:. But to my thinking none of those will stand comparison with the smiling beauty of the waters, shores, and bays of Lake Simcoe and its sister lake, Couchiching. Here the blue of the deeper water rivals that of the Aegean; the sunlight flashes back in lighter colour from the sand bar on the shoals; the passing clouds of summer throw moving shadows as over a ripening field, and the mimic gales that play over the surface send curling caps of foam as white as ever broke under the bow of the Aegean galley.

Its islands carry the crumbling temples of Homer's times. But everywhere its vegetation has been cut and trimmed and gardened by the hand of man. Simcoe is far older. Its forest outline is still what Champlain saw, even then unchanged for uncounted centuries. Look down through the clear water at the sunken trees that lie in the bay southeast of Sibbald's Point. They sank, as others sank before them, a hundred years ago; no hand of man has ever moved or [pg 90] touched them. The unquarried ledges of Georgina Island stood as they stand now when the Greeks hewed stone from the Pentelicus to build the Parthenon.

The whole point of our going to church on the lake shore on summer mornings was that we were allowed, by a special dispensation from the awful Sunday rules we were brought up on, to go in for a swim and to stick around beside the lake for an hour or so. The spot was one of great beauty. The earliest settlers had built a wooden church among the cedar trees, and in the very years of which I speak it was being replaced by the Lake Shore Church of cut stone that is one of the notable landmarks of the scenery of the district.

It was built by the members of the Sibbald family, one of the chief families of the district, whose sons had gone abroad for service in the British Army and Navy and in India and, returning in our day as old men enriched in fortune and experience, built the stone church still standing as a memorial to their mother. A Latin motto which outclassed me at nine years old cut in a memorial stone on [pg 91] the face of the tower commemorates the fact.

The church was built during two of our summers of churchgoing and swimming. The masons were not there on Sundays, but we could follow its progress every Sunday, in the stones new drilled for blasting, in the fresh-cut completed stones, and then in the rising layers of the walls, the upsweep of the tall roof one Sunday to the next , the glass, the slates, and then—all of a sudden, as it were—we were singing in it.

Better still was it when my mother, a year or two later, , was able to take a "summer cottage" near the church for a holiday of a month or so. It was an old log building built as a "parsonage," which in time proved unfit for habitation even by the meekest parson. But for a summer habitation it did well enough, and with it the glory of the lake and of the return to the water, which we lost since Porchester.

1. The Canadian Historical Review?
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3. ;
4. Admiral William T. Sampson: A Progressive Navalist an Essay.
5. Franklin Roosevelt (Presidents of the United States Biographies).

We were like Viking children back to the sea! So will you find any British children, used to sight and sound of the sea, shut from the water a brief space in some inland or prairie town but exulting to get back to their agelong heritage. So [pg 92] were we with Lake Simcoe: After rafts a flat-bottomed boat, liberally plugged up with hot pitch, then an attempt at making a sail and discovering that a flat-bottomed boat is no good—and so on, repeating the life of man on the ocean as the human race repeats in the individual its every stage of evolution.

In my case Lake Simcoe was a more interesting field of navigation then than now, more real. It is strange how our inland lakes have deteriorated from the navigation of reality to the navigation of luxury. What do you see now? Speed—sailing dinghies built like dishes and used for water aquations but with no connection with sailing in the real sense. And all this in any case only a fringe that fills the lake-shore resorts, crowds round luxury hotels, and leaves the open water of Simcoe and such lakes emptier than when La Salle crossed them. Not so in the s. Navigation filled the lake. Sailing vessels, lumpy, heavy, and ungainly, and nearly as broad as long, carried quarry stone and heavy stuff from the top of Lake Couchiching to the railway pier at Belle Ewart.

The Emily May steamer that circulated the lake all day and all night in her prime days , with double crew, half of it awake and half asleep—two captains, two mates, two stewardesses, and two bartenders. Ships from the UK.

Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Your purchase also supports literacy charities. Better World Books Ltd Condition: Stephen Leacock was in the process of writing his autobiogrphy when he passed away. This book represents the first four chapters of the book and tell the story of his childhood and youth in mid-Victorian England and in Canada. No chips, tears, creases or written inscriptions on pages. Small tear half-inch on rear endpaper. Red coverboards with gilt lettering on spine. Corners of boards are bumped with some wear.

Book shows very light wear only. Dust jacket is tanned with heavy chipping and small tears at edges and corners, scuffing, a few small marks. Small format, pages. Pistil Books Online Published: BL5P3X8 Missing dust jacket; otherwise in excellent condition. Five star seller - Buy with confidence! Gail Kennon Book-Comber Condition: Very good copy with some age toning to margins, in very good dust jacket in a mylar protector.

The Scarlet Pimpernel Published: Good, average condition for its age. Book has been read but remains straight, and tight. Former owner's inscription on inside front cover. DJ is Good; edgewear, rubbing, 1" open tear to bottom of front and back panel, priceclipped.. Yellowing to pages, Stored in sealed plastic protection. In the event of a problem we guarantee full refund. Good condition, paper aged. Good condition, paper aged ISBN: Bodley Head, no DW, war era production, biographical note by his nephew and then various essays etc by Leacock.

Boards are worn and marked.