Romantic Canada. Victoria Hayward
old willows mingle atmospherically with tall and stately Lombardy poplars. It is on these uplands of Nova Scotia one follows the old Post-roads—roads that recall the dashing coach of other days and still cross rivers by old covered-bridges, and preserve the quaint, rambling old houses that served as Inns where passengers of old sought refreshment, or spent the night, while waiting to make connections with the coach to this or that objective.
Sitting down by the roadside to rest, some old-timer driving a span of oxen and urging them along with an apple-bough goad, is sure to come along and enter into conversation in that happy way which is half the charm of adventuring by Nova Scotia highways. This old farmer-carter well remembers Harry Killcup, the Robin Hood-Jehu of the Post-road from Annapolis Royal to Halifax. He relates how Harry was talking to a girl and didn’t pay attention to his horses, and drove them too near the edge of the bridge and they fell over, dragging the coach with them. “The river was in flood, too, but Harry managed to get the girl clear of the wreckage, and saved her, but the young man, with whom she travelled, was drowned.” It sounds like a movie stunt in the cold light of to-day, whereas, in fact, it was Victorian realism and a typical incident of the dashing times of the chaise in which Sam Slick engaged a permanent seat in that other “chaise of Canadian literature” by which Judge Haliburton eventually established his name in Canada’s Hall of Fame. The events live very graphically before you as recited by this old eye-witness; who, with many a “gee” and “whoa there”, again starts his oxen on the way.
To the period of the Post Road belongs that old landmark of time and the road, Grand Pré Church, outstanding figure of the countryside in which dwelt Evangeline and her people. In order to catch its romantic spirit, the time to see Grand Pré church is in the evening, when there is just a wee flare of daylight and a soft mist arises from the waters of Minas, shedding itself like a diaphanous veil over the land, as one strolls up the country-road that comes through the village from the North, under willows and poplars, to the door of the old church and then rambles off to the South between clover fields and stacks of hay; the hay resembling Hottentot villages outlined against the ashes-of-roses sky. It is at dusk, that the rather austere lines of window, tower and roof lose their sharp, almost Quaker-like severity. It is at that hour that the old stones of the graveyard become time-softened, ivory-tinted pages of history assembled under the stately poplars. Inside the church, in the strong, simple lines of its painted box-pews and high pulpit; in the old gallery; and in the square windows with little panes, there is the quaint atmosphere which clings especially to old churches of the early Colonial Period. Sitting in these old pews during service is to be carried away on the wings of history to a pivotal point, whence to behold a Cyclorama of all Canada. To the left, on this great canvas—Glooscap and Micmac; succeeded by crude Breton and Portuguese fishermen in their strange bateaux; followed by stirring panels of Annapolis Royal and Louisburg, contrasted against panels of tenacious pioneer Scotch and English settlers; in the next, the clash between France and England for supremacy, not alone in this sweet countryside of Grand Pré, but in every other contained in the word Canada. These are followed by a panel of United Empire Loyalists—very realistic this, because, in the village, you have just been looking at an old oil-painting of Colonel Crane and fingering his fine old sword, that never wavered in its allegiance.
The other half of the Cycle, begins the New Order. First, a symbolic figure of the stream of emigration flowing through the Maritime Gate to the great Canadian West, followed by prairie scenes and mountain peaks, mining scenes, cattle scenes, tawny grain, and Trans-Canada trains, sisters of “Glooscap”, and “The Flying Bluenose”. That, is Grand Pré Church—a link between the Past and the Present.
CHAPTER II.
BARRELS.
One often wonders. …
Each trade calls for a different barrel. There is a barrel for apples, another for potatoes, and still a third for the fish. And, behind each barrel stands the—Cooper—a character in the Gaspereau Valley. And housing the Cooper and his quaint trade, every so often, voyaging along these sweet country roads, one happens on the “Cooperage”, always a landmark of its neighbourhood.
Stepping into the door of a cooperage, one is met by the smell of scorching wood and the smoke thereof. Through the smoke, and bending over the barrel, whence it comes, behold, the cooper! Plenty of finished barrels stand about in the large room. The cooper nods his head toward one of them and we step quietly to the proffered seat. For a moment, one fears that the cooper will stop work to talk, and the spell be broken. But no, he goes on. In the “tub” or “jack”, with a groove in the bottom, he places new staves in a large iron ring or hoop the size of the barrel to be made. About the staves, creaking as the tourniquet is twisted tighter and tighter, a stout piece of Manilla rope slowly draws each stave to its fellow and all into a perfect round. Tauter and tauter the rope is wound, long after you think the breaking point has been reached. Then one’s eyes are drawn from the barrel to the man. His eye is like an eagle’s for clarity. He has forgotten everything in the world but the barrel. The tension in the room is so great one could hear a pin fall. Then, the hand relaxes, the spell is broken, the barrel is “set up”. Afterward, the barrel, having no bottom or head in it as yet, is set over the drum-stove in which there is a fire. And while it scorches and dries and toasts a golden brown on the inside, the cooper talks a little, turning the barrel. He “cut the birch boughs that make the hoops, from the woods, in winter, in the slack season when time hangs heavy.” No, “he does not work-up the staves.” Buys them from a sawmill down the road (the direction of the mill being indicated by a sweep of the arm). Keeps them for a time, to season the wood. So with the bundles of split birches. Then following his eye glancing aloft, one sees the ceiling, hung with the straight, tobacco-brown withes afforded by the Nova Scotia woods, especially provided of Nature it would seem, to gird up the sticks of dumb wood over in the corner into—staves.
The smell of the scorching barrel by this time fills the cooperage with its own peculiar perfume anew, like puffs of incense, from a censor replenished. Now the cooper turns again to his work, visitors out of mind. He lifts the barrel over the head of the stove, selects an adze and a split birch-wand. In a twinkling, a curve is swept around the barrel and with the eye alone, expert measurement is taken of the long wood-ribbon. Slish! The adze has cut! Attention is now drawn to a handmade arrangement into which the cooper is slipping the ribbon. His foot comes automatically in contact with a treadle and the withe is turned out, curved permanently. In a twinkling, the adze cuts the little jib-slit—two of them, one in each end—into which the hoop, now wound around the barrel has its ends locked forever. Set like a garland about the barrel-head the hoop is driven into place, tapped round and round and round. The inner edges of the staves are now bevelled off; the groove cut and the head hammered into place. Then on goes the last hoop. And, presto! The barrel is done and thrown over to one side among two or three score of its fellows. The cooper puts some of the shavings into the stove and starts at once, all over again on another barrel. You can see that in his mind’s eye he carries a vision of score upon score of waiting orchards, waiting for his barrels, the barrel that he feels