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    Dick's Desertion A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests
    Dick's Desertion A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests
    Dick's Desertion A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests
    Ebook164 pages1 hour

    Dick's Desertion A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests

    By Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    Dick's Desertion A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests

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      Book preview

      Dick's Desertion A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests - Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dick's Desertion, by Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: Dick's Desertion

      A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests

      Author: Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

      Release Date: September 26, 2010 [EBook #34002]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICK'S DESERTION ***

      Produced by Al Haines

      The great branch torn from a neighbouring maple told all the tale.—p. 20

      DICK'S DESERTION

      A Boy's Adventures

      in Canadian Forests

      A TALE OF THE EARLY SETTLEMENT OF ONTARIO

      By

      MARJORIE L. C. PICKTHALL

      WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

      Toronto:

      The Musson Book Company, Limited.

      1905

      CONTENTS.

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      The great branch torn from a neighbouring maple told all the tale. . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

      'If I had fifty rivers and fifty canoes, I could not leave Stephanie.'

      They began to sing the old carols their mother had taught them long before.

      He flung out his arm, circled with savage ornaments—flung it out with a wild gesture, and began to speak.

      He held out a tiny package, wrapped in birch-bark, with an inquiring glance towards her.

      'For pity's sake, let me alone!' Dick pleaded. 'Go on and leave me.'

      'Dick! Dick! Where are you?'

      DICK'S DESERTION:

      A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests.

      CHAPTER I.

      In the Heart of the Woods.

      It was early fall, and all the world was golden. Golden seemed the hazy warmth of the sky; golden were the willow leaves and the delicate foliage of the birches; even the grass, pale from the long heat of the summer, had taken on a tinge of the all-pervading colour. Far as the eye could reach, the woods and uplands were bright with gold, relieved only by the deep sombre green of pines and hemlocks. Save for these, it seemed a country that some gracious Midas had touched, turning everything to ethereal, elfin gold.

      The Midas-touch had even included the little log-cabin and its untidy clearing, for broad-disced sunflowers were scattered over the neglected garden, and between them bloomed late goldenrod, which had crept in from the wilds outside; and a small patch of ground was covered with shocks of Indian corn, roughly bound together, yellowing also beneath the influence of sun and frost.

      The land was beautiful to look upon—Ontario scenery, marred little by the works of man in that autumn of 1820, when His Most Gracious Majesty George IV. was king. And the log-cabin and its clearing were picturesque enough to the eye of an artist, though speaking of all lack of skill and thrift and industry to the eye of a farmer. Even the garden in front of the cabin was being slowly and surely swallowed up into the wilderness again. The sunflowers flourished and bloomed and seeded, forming food-stores for multitudes of birds; and the squirrels would flicker down the tree-trunks and feast upon the seeds which the birds dropped, spitting the hard shells deftly to right and left through their whiskers. But the wild asters and the long convolvulus vines were choking the blossomless pinks and the sweet-williams and the few shy English flowers that were left. There were only very few of these fading alien plants for the healthy native growth to smother and kill, most of them having been taken away to set upon the grave of the woman who had cherished them.

      In the centre of this neglected garden grew a clump of sumach trees, heavy with their clumsy crimson cones; and beneath these, in a little hollow lined with all the dead drift of the October woods, a boy was lying. He was about sixteen, burnt brown as any young savage of the forests, but with sun-bleached fair hair and blue eyes to proclaim his English birth. His clothes were of very coarse homespun, and he wore a pair of old moccasins and a deerskin belt, brightened with gaudy Indian-work of beads and dyed grasses. The whole clearing was crying out for some skilled hand to tend and reclaim it once more from the encroaching wilderness; but this sturdy lad lay there with all the busy idleness of a savage, very deftly making a tiny canoe of birch-bark. He seemed a fit occupant for the tangled garden and the half-cultivated fields.

      Five years before, a certain Captain Underwood, flying from financial disaster in England, had come to Canada with his wife and his two children, Dick and Stephanie. There was roving blood in the Underwoods, so perhaps it was not surprising that the unfortunate captain should have ranged farther afield in Ontario than others had then done; for he left the settlements and the surveyed townships behind him, and struck farther north, wishing to get as far away as possible from the world that had brought him ruin. In the friendly forests, a little beyond the region where the white settlers had penetrated, but not entirely out of touch with them, he found a natural clearing, and here he had built his tiny cabin and roughly marked out his small fields. Here, perhaps, the poor man, knowing nothing of the country, had thought to live a sort of idyllic hermit existence. But he found it very different. It was a terrible life to which he had brought his wife and children; and when Mrs. Underwood died, three years after leaving England, he blamed himself for her death. Most of his heart he buried with her in that lonely grave under the mighty maples on the hill; and afterwards he turned to the wild life around him as to his only help and comfort.

      But he had no longer the courage to fight the farmer's fight, the primitive conflict between man's skill and nature's strength. Soon the garden that his wife had loved became overgrown with native flowers and weeds. Soon the bushes and the grass crept inwards over his fields. Soon his son and daughter shot up from childhood to youth, perfectly healthy in their hard life. Stephanie was fifteen years old, and being as strong as a young lynx, she did all the work of the log-cabin. She made a rough sort of corn cake which served for bread, she prepared the endless pea-soup and pork, she washed and mended and even made the clothes. Dick helped his father, or idled away on little hunting expeditions of his own, from which he returned happy and rarely empty-handed.

      It was a strange life for a boy and girl, carefully and lovingly brought up amid English comforts and ease, to lead. Their nearest neighbours, the Collinsons, with whom Captain Underwood did most of his little trading, were twenty miles distant. Kindly Mrs. Collinson had offered Stephanie a home when Mrs. Underwood died, but the girl had chosen to stay with her father and Dick, and be the one influence which restrained that little household in the woods from lapsing into the happy-go-lucky sort of savagery to which even the most cultivated are liable in a new land.

      I do not think that we of this generation can quite realise the life which was led in Upper Canada eighty years ago, when forest and swamp and bush foretold nothing of the great farms and cities and thriving towns which now replace them to such a great extent. Those first settlers did not foresee the heights of prosperity and hope to which the land would rise in the time of their children. They looked upon it rather as some unfriendly place from which they might wrest a living, than as a goodly country given them that they and their children and their children's children might labour in it and love it and enjoy it—and fight and die for it if need were. All their love and remembrance they gave to those little Isles across the sea; but, willy-nilly, they were obliged to give their wit and muscle to Canada. They fought against hardships and privations that were almost incredible, chiefly in the hope that they might win enough from the New World to take them back in comfort to the Old. They thought chiefly of making provision for present needs, not foreseeing that their toil went to the making of a nation, the building of an Empire. They wrought indeed better than they knew.

      No prophetic vision of the mighty future came to Dick Underwood as he lay beneath the sumachs that golden October day, nearly ninety years ago. He gave all the sentiment of which his boyish heart was capable to his fading memories of his English home, even as his father did—laying these recollections aside, as it were, in a sacred place. But here the likeness to his father ceased; for he looked forward in vast, ignorant, splendid dreams to the possibilities of the land of his adoption—not

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