The rural telephone was not a possibility of those times. Life may have been more meagre then than it is now; though, looking back, it does not seem that it lacked any of the best elements of happiness. The town of five thousand people has distinct advantages over the city of five hundred thousand. Everybody may know more of everybody else’s business than is always good for anybody; but there is a greater neighbourliness in the smaller community. On the whole despite poverty, firebugs and politics, the Portage of the late eighties was a goodly place to dwell in. The winters were severe--nobody ever succeeded in reducing forty below zero to a poetic phantasy. But there was a snowshoeing club; there was plenty of social intercourse; the choir would give concerts at Burnside or High Bluff, under the leadership of one who had heard his father’s pitch pipe in the Original Seceders’ kirk at Pollokshaws. From that choir, by the way, there went out into a great career on the concert platform Edith Miller, whose father was postmaster, and whose husband is heir to a baronetcy. In some of the churches the ultra-strictness of the Puritan faith and practice rigidly obtained--or rather among some of the church people. There was old Hugh Macdonald, for instance, who wouldna’ drive his horses the twa miles to church on Sabbath. He warned me against being entangled with “sae mony wimmins” who, to their shame, sang without their hats on, alongside the idolatrous box of whustles that degraded the pulpit in the hoose o’ God. The Baptist minister was also a Macdonald. He was once announced to preach on a week-night in Gaelic, and Hugh and his freen Grant repaired to the church to consume choice spiritual fare. They walked solemnly in, deposited their tam o’ shanters beneath the seats, and awaited the meenister. But the harmoniumist appeared while yet the preacher tarried in the vestry. There she sat, the bold thing, trilling her fingers over the keys--a voluntary they called it. That was no way to precede a sermon in Gaelic, and Hugh and his freen forsook the place more solemnly than they had entered it. By the way, the land for the Presbyterian church in which we worshipped was given by Michael Blake, a Roman Catholic. Peace be to him.