Canada -- Social life and customs; Ontario -- Description and travel
Indeed, the wife’s help is a very great element to the farmer’s success,
as regards saving money; and she deserves her place of importance beside
her husband. Our Ontario farmer drives a good team upon the roads,
encased in first-class harness, and a smart light spring buggy behind
them. Rope traces and straw collars, which one sees in the South, would
be beneath his dignity, and one must search Ontario over and over to
find an example of such. And he is well clad in clothes, the product of
the factory loom. Only a few years back he wore clothes made from
home-grown wool spun by his good wife and woven upon some loom near at
home. But latterly the factories have produced tweeds and fullcloths at
so small a price that it has not paid him to work up his own wool. His
table is well supplied with not only an abundance of food, but in great
variety, fruit in various forms forming a feature at almost every meal.
The universal meat diet of England is not acceptable to his palate nor
suitable for our climate, for our systems require a laxative in this
climate, which fruit gives him. His wife is more than the equal in
cooking of her friends in Old England. She can compound more dishes out
of the same material, make more tasteful and toothsome pastry than one
can buy in a pastrycook’s shop in Europe. She does not consider it
beneath her dignity assisting in milking the cows, teaching calves which
are to be reared to drink milk, or possibly feeding the pigs if the men
be busy.
As a transformation she can, after a wash, quickly don garments fit for
the parlor, and entertain company at her board with an ease and
heartiness truly surprising to European travellers who visit us. Even if
not able to converse in half Frenchy English, many of them can dash off
a number of tunes upon an organ or piano in a manner acceptable to most
persons not musical critics. An organ is in most good farm-houses, and
sometimes a piano, and the daughters are daily becoming proficient on
them, practising after the evening milking is done.
Well might the European ask, “Where are your peasants?” These are our
peasants, and the reason you do not recognize them is because they are
on a higher plane in cultivation, taste and education than yours are;
and even if they do appear as ladies and gentlemen, they are not above
engaging in the arduous toil of the farm.
Ontario farms are worth so much in dollars, because, for the reason I
have already given, of the little waste land, and also because of the
industriousness of its people. Look across the border at our American
cousins and you do not find the genuine American doing the downright
hard work. The European emigrant performs that duty for him, while the
American fills the offices to be filled, and does the scheming.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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