Winter in Ontario--Flax-working in the old time--Social gatherings--The churches are centres of attraction--Winter marriages--Common schools--Wintry aspect of Lake Ontario. Our fathers spent their winter evenings and days of winter storms in working at the flax. It was the universal custom for each householder in our fathers’ time to raise a piece of flax, and, during the enforced housing of the winter, it was broken, scutched and spun around the big cavernous open fire. The distaff in those days was ever upon the floor in the common dwelling room, and as much an article of furniture as the family table. Quite a few of these old distaffs are yet bundled away in garrets, dust and cobweb laden. My own people did not fail to bring the distaff along with them when they came from Massachusetts in 1792, and this one was in constant use until machinery got to be common and the necessity for home manipulation to supply the family clothing no longer existed. To-day all that is changed, and during these midwinter days our people of this part of Ontario have no such occupation to fill in their leisure hours. The days of wood-getting, logging and timber-making, too, are past; and at this day this people have to develop a new order of civilization to meet the new condition of affairs. Our people read far more than formerly, and very many of their hours of winter leisure are spent over the printed page. In nearly every house one enters, too, in this part of our province to-day, one finds quite a number of volumes of books, as well as the general stock of newspapers. So the taste and knowledge of our people is steadily on the gain; and we are, as a people, taking the benefit of the respite from enforced hours of weary labor at the flax from which machinery has relieved us. Very serious accidents used to occur, too, in those days of hand labor at the flax, even simple as the work may seem. Very frequently the flax would be hung in bunches around the living room of the family, in which the great fireplace was. This flax, having been broken and scutched with the swingle, and ready for spinning, was perforce quite as ready to light as tinder. There were numerous instances of most dreadful fires occurring by this suspended flax igniting from some sparks dropping on it from the open fire. In one instance, not far from where my own house now is, a woman stepped to the road, only five or six rods away, leaving two small children in the room, and before she could get back to them the whole room was ablaze, and they perished, with the total destruction of the house. Social gatherings largely make up to-day for the hours spent formerly in work at home. Among themselves the people of Ontario are eminently a social and hospitable lot. Almost nightly our folks gather among their fellows and spend their evenings in harmless chat.