The people of England are not responsible for the wrong done by their rulers in the past; and it is neither just nor wise to write violent diatribes, or cherish vindictive feelings against them. What would be wrong anywhere would be doubly wrong here, where we are showing what Irishmen have done for Canada, not alone, but assisted by Scotchmen and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans. It is a saddening work, in some respects, I am engaged on, for it brings vividly before me how little the dim vast masses of all nationalities get out of life; and yet, dark as seems their fate, when we look into their lives, there are starry brightnesses and glimpses of a tender, indescribable beauty, which thrill and touch and purifiy like the stars, or the delicate crimson of morning, or the pensive tints of "dewy eve." There is a halo round the head of humanity, only our eyes are too dim, too preoccupied, always to discern it; but when we do see it, whether in the wilderness or the crowded city, we are conscious of the divine fire in the heart, and the heavenly nimbus which wraps the careworn head. Mrs. Moodie does not place the settlers too high : "Those hardy sires who bore The day's first heat-their toils are o'er ; Theirs was a mission truly grand. find traces of the Kelts everywhere. But there can be no doubt whatever that the Kelts were once a very widely diffused people. They have left names for rivers and mountains in almost every part of Europe. The name of the river Don in Russia, for example, is one of the common Keltic names for water, and so we find a river Don in Yorkshire, a Dean in Nottinghamshire, a Dane in Cheshire, and a Dun in Lincolnshire. The same name appears in the Rho-dan-us, or Rhone, in Gaul, the Eri-dan-us, or Po, in Italy, as well as in the Dn-ieper, Dn-iester, and Dan-ube, and even in the Are-don in the Caucusus. This is one example out of hundreds, by which we trace the former ubiquity of the Kelts, who as late as the Christian era were present in large numbers, as far east as Bohemia. "The second series of invading Aryan swarms consisted of Germans, who began by pushing the Kelts westward, and ended by assuming a great part of their territory, and mixing with them to a considerable extent. There is some German blood in Spain. and a good deal in France and Northern Italy; and the modern English, while Keltic at bottom, are probably half Teutonic in blood, as they are predominently Teutonic in language and manners. "The Races of the Danube," by John Fiske, in the Atlantic Monthly, for April, 1877, p. 404. See also an Essay by Mr. Goldwin Smith, on "Canada's Political Destiny." He "The Anglo-Saxon race is far less prolific than the Irish, who are even supplanting the Anglo-Saxons in some districts of England." says: ROUGHING IT IN THE BUSH. Brave peasants whom the Father, God, Well they perform'd their task and won Altar and hearth for the woodman's son." 131 The settler who clears the country is its true father. He makes all possible. Without his axe, his log cabin, his solitude, his endurance, his misery, we could not have the abundant appliances of civilization, the stately temple, the private mansion, the palaces of law and legislation, the theatre, the enjoyment of social intercourse, refinement, all, in a word, he forewent. A hard lot even when the settler, owing to some peculiar advantages, was able to take with him into the wilderness some of the conveniences of civilized life. Under the happiest circumstances there were hardships and difficulties. The exclusion, was drear enough during the later spring and summer and autumn, when activity was possible; but indescribable, not to be realized, when barred on all sides by the snows of a Canadian winter, and the atmosphere at times freezing the mercury, so that it could be used as a bullet. Where they were near a town or something capable of being held, by a stretch of fancy, in that light, the sleigh or cariole with its charming bells would bear them over the snow to the social centre. But for those far withdrawn into the heart of the forest, in miserable huts, what a life! Field labour suspended, no employment outside or inside, none of the comforts of a home, hundreds of miles from a doctor*, far removed from the church-going bell, without *“It was a melancholy season, one of severe mental and bodily suffering. Those who have drawn such agreeable pictures of a residence in the backwoods never dwell upon the periods of sickness when far from medical advice, and often, as in my case, deprived of the assistance of friends by adverse circumstances, you are left to languish, unattended, upon the couch of pain. The day that my husband was free of the fit, he did what he could for me and his poor sick babes; but, ill as he was, he was obliged to sow the wheat to enable the man to proceed with the drag, and was, therefore necessarily absent in the field the greater part of the day. I was very ill, yet, for hours at a time I had no friendly voice to cheer me, to proffer me a drink of cold water, or to attend to the poor babe; and worse, still worse, there was no one to help that pale, marble child, who lay so cold and still, with 'half-closed violet eyes,' as if death had already chilled his young heart in his iron grasp. There was not a breath of air in our close burning bed-closet; and the weather was sultry beyond all that I have since experienced. I had asked of Heaven a son, and there he lay helpless by the side of his almost helpless mother, who could not lift him up in her arms or still his cries. * Often did I weep myself to sleep and wake to weep again with renewed anguish. Roughing it in the Bush, such and greater suffering was the fate of thousands."-Mrs. Moodie. the soothing ministrations of religion, exiled from all the sweet human relations, those of the family alone excepted; no school for the children, a dreary monotony in which note of time is lost, the news of the world heard of but fitfully, no hope save of the most humble kind, ambition impossible, an existence not much more intellectual than that of the wolf which dogs the settler's footseps of an evening, stealthy as one of the gathering shadows or the hog that burrows for an acorn near his shanty. The sacrifice of thousands of lives in such an existence is the price we pay for a country made a clear stage for the civic man to play his part. Occasionally we see great force of intellect and character assert itself in spite of the benumbing surroundings. But to most Fate says-go work and die and of your fallen bodies make a bridge over which other men may travel to the fair cities and country towns, law courts and parliaments, well written newspapers, fame and power, and all the noble conflicts of political manhood. If the settler was refined, as he often was, Scotch and Irish and English, he found himself brought in contact with coarse human as well as other coarse conditions. The settler who never went near the woods, but took up his place in some small town, he too was a pioneer, and often made great sacrifices, and whether he made sacrifices or not, if he played his part manfully, deserves to have the debt of gratitude paid. When we first ask ourselves what are the qualities which make a man a good settler, we think chiefly of stern perseverance, and scarcely give a thought to the softer and more winning human characteristics. Yet very little reflection would have convinced us that kindness, generosity, good humour, sprightliness and nobleness, are of almost more importance in the bush than in the crowded city. In the city you can hire attention; in the wilderness you must look to the heart of those you are brought in contact with for it. In the town you can buy amusement and distraction; in the wood you are thrown on the bent and genius of those who happen to be your neighbours, your allies, or your servants. What sort of a settler should we expect the Irishman to make? What work of difficulty and adventure has he ever shrunk from? We might hope to see in him more than patient toil and family KINDLY QUALITIES OF THE IRISH SETTLER. 133 love, and that his gay heart, his wit, his cheerfulness under misfortunes, as well as his generosity in prosperity, would accompany him to the wilds. Nor did the Irish settler in Canada belie such hopes. Most of my readers will have read Mrs. Moodie's graphic account of her sufferings in the bush. Her gallant husband was a Scotchman; she is an Englishwoman. Her testimony is, therefore, that of an impartial person. From what class of settlers did she receive most assistance and most consolation? It is not too much to say that seven-eighths of those who helped her husband and herself efficiently were Irish, and while she had to complain of the conduct of many, amongst the many there was not one with Irish blood in his veins. A friend of hers, one Tom Wilson, is accustomed to put on a false nose. As he walks through the town with this false nose on, the people cry out:-"What a nose! Look at the man with the nose!" But she tells us that a party of Irish emigrants pass, and, " with the courtesy natural to their nation," they forbear laughing until the disfigured man, as they think him, has gone, and then they give full vent to their sense of the ludicrous. They were gentlemen by nature. What servants the Irish have proved themselves to be. Many persons don't like to dwell on the fact that the poor Irishman and woman have had to earn their bread sometimes by the lowest service. But I feel no humiliation about that, because all work seems to me noble, if nobly performed. Did not Apollo serve as a slave? Did not Christ say that He had been among His disciples, not as a master but as one that served? Was not Epictetus a slave? And Æsop? No! there is nothing disgraceful in serving, if men serve well and with loyalty, not with eye service, but with a genuine determination to perform what they do, well. Such a servant was Jack Monaghan, who did all in his power to supply for Mrs. Moody the loss of a maid-servant; lighting the fires; milking the cows; nursing the baby; cooking the dinner, and endeavouring "by a thousand little attentions to show the gratitude he really felt for our kindness;" attaching himself to little Katie "in an extraordinary manner;" spending all his spare time in making little sleighs and toys for her, or dragging the sleigh he had made and the beloved burden in it, wrapped in a blanket, up and down the steep hills in front of the house; his great de light to cook her bread and milk at night, and feed her himself; then he would carry her round the floor on his back, and sing her Irish songs. Touching picture! This dark-haired, dark-eyed untutored Irish Celt, and the fair-haired Saxon child who always greeted his return from the woods with a scream of joy, and running forward to be lifted by him and to clasp his swarthy neck with her white arms. "I could lay down my life for you," he would say to her, as he spoke of her love for him and his love for her. It would be hard to show nobler work done by any emigrant than was done by honest, loving Jack Monaghan. In the wilderness, over the stump of his neglected life, the flowers of the heart broke forth luxuriantly. The movements of his life were like melodies; as is so often the case, the fingers which touched the rude keys, and brought out all the music of this apparently rough nature, were the fingers of a child. There is something truly Godlike about a child in its tenderness and purity, its freedom from petty care and superiority to our small prejudices, its spontaneous goodness and its love; its unwrinkled forehead and unclouded eye look out on us from eternity on this shore of time, soothing the distressed spirit and sweetning the brackish waters of the heart. Then Jack is brave as a lion, and attacked by an enemy of his and of the Moodies, one Uncle Joe, he springs on his foe, and makes the big man roar for mercy. His kindness of heart, and what Mrs. Moodie calls his reckless courage, left him no strong instinct of self-preservation, and when a tree is to be felled, the feller of which carried his life in his hands, he raises the axe and cries: "If a life must be sacrificed, why not mine?" and he commends his soul to God, and plies the axe with vigour. At the logging bee, who behaved best and were, after they had done a good day's work, most amusing? The Irish settlers; and Malachi Chroak takes a pair of bellows and, applying his mouth to the pipe, works his elbows to and fro as one playing on the bagpipes; then he sings a song. "We certainly did laugh our fill," says Mrs. Moodie, "at his odd capers and conceits." Was there ever a more beautiful episode than that trip to Stony Lake? And could there be a more charming family than the Irish Roman Catholic family we are introduced to? What kindliness and pluck and bravery in the men and women! And |