round “warning out” for a certain time and place. The hours of work are from eight o’clock till twelve, and from one till live. A sleigh, cart, waggon, or plough, with horses, counts for one day, but no more. Still there is always a jockeying for whose horses shall be employed; the driver can take it easy. But, “Oh, come,” I think I hear some one say, “I can understand a cart or a sledge, but what can a plough have to do, mending roads?” Plenty, my dear doubter; it is in constant request. By its means the ditches at the sides of the roads are deepened, widened, and cleared out. That is to say, the soil is loosened, furrow by furrow, so that it can be more easily thrown out upon the middle of the road, to round it up, by shovel or by hand. By hand? Yes; for in dry weather the clods are turned up, sometimes, not “as big as your head,” but about as big as a bushel-basket. It may readily be imagined what sort of road this must make, until it becomes, by slow degrees, ground and pounded down. The striking out of a footpath across a newly-ploughed field may give some remote approach to it. Nevertheless, this is the only way in which it can be done, and the result comes out right at last. The operation is called “turn-piking.” It is rather curious that by this term the Canadians mean the road itself, and the English the toll-gates upon it. It is a queer word, and the unde derivatur might be worth hunting up.
Having mentioned a footpath, I must not leave unsaid that that charming feature of the English landscape, so characteristic of that country almost alone amongst all others,—that inestimable boon to the pedestrian and the lover of nature, winding through fields and woods, over stiles, and across streams, shortening and relieving the way, and unveiling scenes of the most exquisite beauty: dust and traffic left behind—does not exist throughout the length and breadth of Canada. The wayfarer must reach his point by a right angle, or a series of right angles; along straight roads, hideous with snake-fences and foul with frouzy weeds. Rather a harsh picture, perhaps. But I am very much afraid that, in the main, it will not admit of much mitigation. Oh, if only for once, for a breezy common, lovely with heath and gorse and broom, or a hollow country lane, lying deep between old sandstone quarries!
The men having assembled, under the pathmaster’s direction, at the trysting-place, there ensues a general languor and laziness after the march; a skirmishing for the easiest places; and a grand demonstration of shirking all along the line. They are distributed here and there, but it is not in the power of even a pathmaster, though clothed in the majesty of authority, to be in more than one place at a time; and, where he is not, then there is sure to be a solemn palaver and a smoking of the calumet of peace—and idleness, or idleset, as it is called in these polite circles. When, in his rounds, he flushes one covey, another is sure to settle down in the place he has left. And so it goes on—a playful see saw of evasion. The pathmaster, in virtue of his office, is exempt from work himself, but he is by far the hardest-worked man on the ground, for all that.
It is common to carry gravel from any place where it can be got to any other where it is wanted. Half a dozen men will be shovelling into a waggon the smallest load with which the remnant of shame that may remain to the driver will permit him to start. But he has so ingeniously accommodated his waggon-bottom and side-boards (the latter probably about three or four inches high), that he contrives to sprinkle the road with the gravel all the way as he goes along, at funeral pace, and to arrive at his destination with not much left. Here are congregated the elders and quidnuncs of the society, each provided with a hoe, and these men set a vigorous example to the juniors by scraping the gravel out of the waggon and spreading it a little more, after they have got it down, with long intervals of inaction between. The great skill of this department of the works seems to consist in resting the elbows or chin upon the hoe-handle, and working out the connection between gravelling the roads and the gossip of the country-side.
In short, so many days, not so much work, have to be “put in.” That problem solved, the conclave breaks up, having spread over four or five days (each household having two, or three, or more hands upon the ground) as much work as could readily have been performed in one.
But, with all its charms of easy leisure, it is not exactly the occupation which a man of any education or refinement would engage in by choice. It is not the most agreeable thing in the world if a knot of gay city acquaintances should happen to come along the road, and catch the country mouse in the act of heaving up clods with his hands out of a ditch, in his shirt-sleeves; perhaps but little distinguished in dress or appearance from the motley mob similarly engaged. The best escape out of such a contrétemps is by an impromptu exhibition of that facile, happy-go-lucky throw-off which those men generally most possess, who have least of anything else. Soon after I came to the colony I was introduced, at the house of a friend, to two young men who had lately emigrated like myself. They were gentlemen by birth, education, manners, association,—by everything, in short, except pocket. Driving home one afternoon with my wife, I came upon these young men in just such a predicament as I have attempted to describe. I had still clinging about me the traditions of the old country, and had not yet learned the golden Canadian lesson, that a man cannot degrade himself by any act that is not in itself discreditable. Would to Heaven that the converse of the maxim held good here also, that every dishonest and disreputable act were visited with the disgrace it deserves! There is not the most distant approach to it. In that respect, Canadian society is rotten to its very inmost core.
To return to the subject from which I have been led away for an instant, fruitlessly, hopelessly led away. I smile now when I remember that when I lived in England there was a garden-door which opened through a wall upon the village street, and that when I had occasion to extend my garden-work outside that door, I used to do it in the twilight, so as not to be remarked or