Just after the last of these logging-bees, we had to part with our good
servant Mary, and just at a time when it was the heaviest loss to me.
Her father, who had been a dairy man in the north of Ireland, an honest,
industrious man, had brought out upwards of one hundred pounds to
this country. With more wisdom than is generally exercised by Irish
emigrants, instead of sinking all his means in buying a bush farm he
hired a very good farm in Cavan, stocked it with cattle, and returned
to his old avocation. The services of his daughter, who was an excellent
dairymaid, were required to take the management of the cows; and her
brother brought a wagon and horses all the way from the front to take
her home.
This event was perfectly unexpected, and left me without a moment's
notice to provide myself with another servant, at a time when servants
were not to be had, and I was perfectly unable to do the least thing. My
little Addie was sick almost to death with the summer complaint, and the
eldest still too young to take care of herself.
This was but the beginning of trouble.
Ague and lake fever had attacked our new settlement. The men in the
shanty were all down with it; and my husband was confined to his bed
on each alternate day, unable to raise hand or foot, and raving in the
delirium of the fever.
In my sister and brother's families, scarcely a healthy person remained
to attend upon the sick; and at Herriot's Falls, nine persons were
stretched upon the floor of one log cabin, unable to help themselves or
one another. After much difficulty, and only by offering enormous
wages, I succeeded in procuring a nurse to attend upon me during my
confinement. The woman had not been a day in the house before she was
attacked by the same fever. In the midst of this confusion, and with
my precious little Addie lying insensible on a pillow at the foot of my
bed--expected every moment to breathe her last sigh,--on the night of
the 26th of August, the boy I had so ardently coveted was born. The next
day, Old Pine carried his wife (my nurse) away upon his back, and I
was left to struggle through, in the best manner I could, with a sick
husband, a sick child, and a new-born babe.
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 eould 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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