Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago: Personal recollections and reminiscences of a sexagenarianHaight, Canniff
History
Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago: Personal recollections and reminiscences of a sexagenarian
Haight, Canniff
Frontier and pioneer life -- Ontario; Ontario -- Social life and customs
woody banks into the wide sweep of the bay like the four fingers of a
man's hand. For quiet, picturesque beauty, there is nothing to surpass
it. On every hand the eye is arrested with charming landscapes, and
looking across the several points of the township you have dwellings,
grain fields, herds of cattle, and wood. Beyond you catch the shimmer of
the water. Again you have clumps of trees and cultivated fields, and
behind them another stretch of water, and so on as far as the eye can
reach. The whole course of the bay, in fact, is a panorama of rural
beauty, but the old homes that were to be seen along its banks twenty-
five and thirty years ago have either disappeared altogether or have
been modernized. It is now very nearly one hundred years since the first
settlers found their way up it, and it must have been then a beautiful
sight in its native wildness, the clear green water stretching away to
the west, the sinuosities of the shore, the numberless inlets, the
impenetrable forest and the streams that cut their way through it and
poured their contingents into its broad bosom, the islands here and
there, upon which the white man had never set his foot, water fowl in
thousands, whose charming home was then for the first time invaded,
skurrying away with noisy quake and whir, the wood made sweet with the
song of birds, the chattering squirrel, the startled deer, the silent
murmur of the water as it lapped the sedgy shore or gravelly beach--
these things must have combined to please, and to awaken thoughts of
peaceful homes, in the near future to them all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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