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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781596055360 |
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Publisher: | Cosimo Classics |
Publication date: | 11/01/2005 |
Series: | Cosimo Classics Travel & Exploration |
Pages: | 240 |
Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.55(d) |
About the Author
In 1831 Susanna Strickland married John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a military officer who had returned to England from South Africa to explore publication projects and to find a wife. A year later, they emigrated to Upper Canada (Ontario). For their first seventeen months in Canada, the Moodies lived on cleared farmland near Port Hope, and later on a bush farm in Douro Township, north of Peterborough. Roughing It in the Bush (1852), describes their life in these two backwoods areas.
Susanna Moodie died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1885.
Read an Excerpt
The early part of the winter of 1837, a year never to be forgotten in the annals of Canadian history, was very severe….
The morning of the seventh was so intensely cold that everything liquid froze in the house. The wood that had been drawn for the fire was green, and it ignited too slowly to satisfy the shivering impatience of women and children; I vented mine in audibly grumbling over the wretched fire, at which I in vain endeavoured to thaw frozen bread, and to dress crying children….
After dressing, I found the air so keen that I could not venture out without some risk to my nose, and my husband kindly volunteered to go in my stead.
I had hired a young Irish girl the day before. Her friends were only just located in our vicinity, and she had never seen a stove until she came to our house. After Moodie left, I suffered the fire to die away in the Franklin stove in the parlour, and went into the kitchen to prepare bread for the oven.
The girl, who was a good-natured creature, had heard me complain bitterly of the cold, and the impossibility of getting the green wood to burn, and she thought that she would see if she could not make a good fire for me and the children, against my work was done. Without saying one word about her intention, she slipped out through a door that opened from the parlour into the garden, ran round to the wood-yard, filled her lap with cedar chips, and, not knowing the nature of the stove, filled it entirely with the light wood.
Before I had the least idea of my danger I was aroused from the completion of my task by the crackling and roaring of a large fire, and a suffocating smell of burning soot. I looked up at the kitchen cooking-stove. All was right there. I knew I had left no fire in the parlour stove; but not being able to account for the smoke and smell of burning, I opened the door, and to my dismay found the stove red-hot, from the front plate to the topmost pipe that let out the smoke through the roof.
My first impulse was to plunge a blanket, snatched from the servant’s bed, which stood in the kitchen, into cold water. This I thrust into the stove, and upon it I threw water, until all was cool below. I then ran up to the loft, and by exhausting all the water in the house, even to that contained in the boilers upon the fire, contrived to cool down the pipes which passed through the loft. I then sent the girl out of doors to look at the roof, which, as a very deep fall of snow had taken place the day before, I hoped would be completely covered, and safe from all danger of fire.
She quickly returned, stamping and tearing her hair, and making a variety of uncouth outcries, from which I gathered that the roof was in flames.
Table of Contents
Advertisement IX
Introduction 1
Canada 7
A Visit to Grosse Isle 11
Quebec 26
Our Journey Up the Country 42
Tom Wilson's Emigration 57
Our First Settlement, and the Borrowing System 84
Old Satan and Tom Wilson's Nose 113
Uncle Joe and His Family 126
John Monaghan 148
Phoebe H-, and Our Second Moving 166
Brian, the Still-Hunter 180
The Charivari 202
The Village Hotel 229
The Land-Jobber 245
A Journey to the Woods 276
The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends 293
Burning the Fallow 328
Our Logging-Bee 338
A Trip to Stony Lake 354
The "Ould Dhragoon" 371
Disappointed Hopes 382
The Little Stumpy Man 398
The Fire 424
The Outbreak 446
The Whirlwind 471
The Walk to Dummer 482
A Change in Our Prospects 513
Adieu to the Woods 526
Canadian Sketches 543
Introductory Chapter to the-1871 Edition 580
Afterword 592