Romantic Canada. Victoria Hayward

      IN THE ORCHARD.

      How much does he receive in payment for each barrel? Just five cents. The most expert of these “Old-timers” make as many as eighty barrels a day, or enough to keep one skilful apple-picker busy from sunrise to sunset, enough to ensure two full loads to the old cart that looks like some strange tortoise on the highway.

      One could sit here forever and watch, fascinated, the cooper at his work, so clean, so redolent of the winter landscape in its hand-cut and split birch rods, the air filled with the peculiar, refreshing incense of the toasting staves, the barrel all completed in the mind of the cooper before it materializes in his skilful hand—the barrel, a new barrel, appearing as if by magic every six minutes. What visions one sees through the old door of the men who have come in the carts to its threshold; what tid-bits of news given and received in the half century since the old cooper picked up his trade by long association with the cooper ahead of him, and he in his turn from the cooper before him. What tales the old man could tell, and does, while the barrel toasts. One wonders why the story-teller has never wandered into this open door and sat him down on one of these barrel heads.

      Riding away from this door, in one of the ox-drawn carts, always atmospheric and redolent of a romance denied to speedier transportation, one sets out to follow the barrel into the world, as it were. The ribbon road curves and turns by streams dashing under spreading willows or straight as a line it etches its way between rows of stately Lombardy poplars. We overtake other carts passing Grand Pré Church or standing idly for the moment before a local smithy, one ox looking as if Nirvana had descended upon him, while his fellow steps inside and endures the agony attending the acquisition of a pair of new shoes, the world over. Past creaking carts we go with oxen straining under full loads on their way to the large shipping centres of the railroad. It is a countryside glowing with crimson and yellow, and placid as only autumn that still lingers in the lap of summer, can be. Presently we come to the orchard where we would be. And there the family is gathered, laughing and chatting, waiting for barrels, for orchards and many hands give the cooper and the carter all they can do to supply them with the sweet-smelling barrels.

      It is a family party, even the baby is here holding an apple in hand. The family cat rubs its nose on every pair of legs before strolling to hunt a field mouse. A mother wagers with her lad, willowy as an apple branch, that she can beat him filling a barrel. Tall ladders, home-made, loll against the topmost branches of Bellefleur and Baldwin. The father of the family cuts out the full barrels for a trip to the Station or Packing house to which he sells. The general conversation may centre around apples or it may wander off, as it is likely to, into an epic of hunting, shooting and bringing home the moose John got yesterday. Or, it may take a turn and become a tale of adventure, telling how Jamie, coming into the orchard this morning, encountered two bears, berry-hunting, directly in the path.

      In time we board the cart again and roll around to the Packing House. And one may pick and choose, for the line of the D. A. R. runs through the heart of the fruit region from Digby to Halifax. And at any of these stations one comes upon the potato barrels, sisters to the apple barrels, and also creations of the skilful old individual, the cooper. We enter, as upon a tide, to behold spreading before the eye a sea of apples, with cataracts of them pouring into the sorting troughs. And barrels! Barrels are everywhere. As one goes around these rooms, one witnesses a sort of transfiguration in the old barrel. No longer is it a mere barrel but an argosy, bearing Nova Scotia products—apples and potatoes—on the high tide of Trade into the ports of the world. Here is a group of barrels, tripping it to London. This is by far the largest group, Great Britain being the largest “Foreign?” market for the Nova Scotia apple. The barrel must be a strong one that carries the fruit across ocean and through fog, to the markets of England. There is a group marked “inland Canada” and these individual barrels must travel far. And still other groups with the impress of “South Africa” and “South America,” where not the barrels alone must suffer hard usage but in the latter case the apples themselves grilled by the change of language, lose their English name and become—Manzana.

      It takes some three or four million barrels to supply the demand made on them by the potato and apple crops alone, of Nova Scotia; not to speak of the fish which demands a barrel, and hence a cooper, of its own. What wonder if the barrel be called “a character” in the land, and if business leans upon it, as upon a staff of life?

CHAPTER III.

       ‘LONGSHOREMEN.

       Table of Contents

      Standing firmly behind. …

      TANDING firmly behind the craft, whether large or small, that crown both Bluenose Fishing and Bluenose Foreign Trade with success, is an army of men and boys heterogeneously grouped together as ’Longshoremen. We find them in each and every village-by-the-sea, wherever there is a boat. Here is a caulker, there a tar-boiler and pitch-runner, an old knitter of fishnet, an old sailmaker—needle and “palm”, in hand—a woodcarver, an oakum-picker, an old boat-builder, “the weather prophet”, and all the old fellows who lend a hand when a heavy boat is to be hauled up the beach, or to be pushed into the sea again. In the evolution of coastal-life these men are amphibious. In their youth they went to sea, but in old-age they retired, not to idleness, but to uphold what is known in the trade, as the “Shore-end” of fishing.

      As one follows the long coastal road macadamized by the Maritime, the ‘Longshore men and the ‘Longshore women afford some of the most picturesque genre encountered anywhere in all Canada. They are unique, in that in every individual case, the product is “the Sea-coast’s Own”. And no two of them are exactly alike. They not only mend and reinforce, tar and paint, but they are the Historians, the Spinners-and-Weavers of Traditions, the story-tellers, that keep alive in the hearts of their listeners the sea-spirit—without which, ships are useless. And so, some morning, when you come along over the cliffs, and see a smoke, black as the traditional pine-cone over Vesuvius before the burial of Pompeii, you know that some old fisherman and his pals are tarring the old boat.

      The old boat that calls for tar is certainly a personality. Coming nearer, and taking care to keep to windward, you stalk this group and watch. First there is the fiery cauldron, that is the Tar-pot, above its blaze of driftwood, with its own special attendant, looking like a Prince of Darkness, wielding the long-handled dipper; and at a little distance by the boat two other figures with long brushes, calling for ladles of tar. Good and thick they lay it into the old seams and over the old plank, the smoke pouring upward like smoke of incense, offered on the altar of the great out-of-doors.

      Such scenes are imminently in danger of passing out of Canadian life. For the old boat that calls for tar, and “the old-timer” that believes in it, are everywhere giving way before the modern gasoline-driven launch—“Gasolener” the Newfoundlanders call it—with “speed” written all over it, and in its tanks “Power” to laugh in the face of gales and head winds. But whereas the “gasolener” may boast of these things, she can never boast of the atmosphere and spirit of romance emanating from such a scene as—“The tarring of the Old Boat.”

      The men who tar the boat to-day may have turned their hands to something else by to-morrow. On fine days the old sails are spread out on the beach to dry or stood to flap-in-the-breeze from the mast-hole of some old boat on the beach, long ago condemned as unseaworthy and gradually being disintegrated by the elements. Oh what lovely seats these old gunwales make for the audience of men and boys, eyes aflame with imagination, as some old grandfather of the beach, in the role of raconteur, makes the details of a noted gale live anew in the vision of his listeners. To-morrow these listeners