Canada -- Social life and customs; Ontario -- Description and travel
Old Ontario generally is placid and beautiful, ultra-marine blue, and
shimmering. But he is not always so. When rude Boreas awakes the
slumbering giant, he frets, and froths, and spumes, and roars. As he is
in his might he becomes awful to look upon, and doubly so if one
ventures upon his bosom. And while he is spurring and warring, his waves
continually come upon the shore, each time a little higher and higher,
searching each nook, cranny and fissure along the bank of the water’s
edge. Many such storms, you can easily understand, you who live distant
from navigable and great waters, tend to undermine the foundations of
the banks, which after a few more beatings fall with a plunge, a roar,
and a cloud of densest dust, into the waters below. In this manner does
old Ontario encroach at points upon the land. The sequel may be readily
seen. Those in their graves must give them up, while their bones whiten
the shingle for many a sunshiny day. This is no fanciful picture. With a
fowling-piece upon his shoulder the author has passed along the foot of
the bank, where a graveyard is, and seen skulls, long hair, ribs, femurs
and other larger bones of the human body bestrewing the beach. And he
has seen also where the bank has fallen away, only one-half the length
of the grave, and where only one-half of the skeleton went down with the
submerged bank, while the other half remained in the grave, and the
point of severance of the bones was plainly observable on the bank above
the beholder’s head. Flesh, of course, there is none. Time has long
since decayed and changed that.
Noble men and women, the pioneers of Canada, you deserve better graves,
and cushions to lie on of the softest and most enduring velvet!
Pursuing this subject a little further, the author may observe that he
personally owns a graveyard on a large farm which has been used by
whites since 1798 and by red men before that on Lake Ontario
[Illustration: OLD GRAVEYARD NEAR OSHAWA, THE PROPERTY OF THE AUTHOR.
Graveyard on a bluff beside Lake Ontario, at Port Oshawa, overlooking
the surrounding country for a radius of ten miles. The red man, with an
eye to beauty, first used this for his place of sepulture, and now my
tenants plough out skulls, stone pipes, thigh bones, and iron tomahawks
with a star on them, which were given to the Indians by the French
before the English Conquest of Canada. The waves of Lake Ontario perform
a perpetual requiem to the memory of Indians and whites here
interred.]
shore, where the waves produce a perpetual lullaby and a requiem to the
sainted memories of the dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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