time between. Our French Canadian teacher made a great effort to teach us the English language and armed with a pencil and scribbler and a French- English dictionary we made great progress the first year. We learned to write sentences in English. The large pot-bellied stove in the centre of the room provided warm meals during the long cold winters. The climate there was bitter cold in those years. When the wind howled around the corner and the snow drifted to ten feet high, we were allowed to toast our large homemade sandwiches on the top of the stove while we discussed our mother’s method of baking bread. There was no well at our school, so in the summer we carried a large sealer of water. This added tremendously to the weight of lunches for three, a sealer of cocoa and all the books we had to take home every night in case of a forest fire. All these things were packed in a large suitcase and carried across country by my brother, my sister and I, who took turns over a distance of three and a half miles, this made our education more interesting. The smell of new wood and chalk, etc.', as we entered the school still fills me with nostalgia. When it came the last day of school for me, the only three grade four students were a Scotch girl, my cousin and myself. We passed to grade five and were given tokens by our teacher. When she asked us to spell encyclopedia and bicycle we felt much honored when we succeeded. We carried our gifts home with pride, but when we got home we were told we couldn’t go to school any more because there was too much hard work to do. We had gathered in the school yard with unusual pleasure that day, but as we walked home we had fear in the back of our minds that we might not be able to go to school in the fall, and so it was for us. Our means of conveyance to school at times was a little out of the ordinary as we had a retired old sway back bay mare called Nell. She was twenty-seven years old. Dad told us if we felt like it we could hitch retired old Nell to drive to school and send her home alone if we were careful to tie the lines together and slip them over the dashboard after facing her homeward. This worked fine both years as old Nell always stopped by the born when expected and turned up at the school on time, until she became weary of the routine. On two occasions old Nell did not appear at the school so we started walking home one warm sunny day in March only to find her sound asleep, hitched to the cutter halfways home from school in a swamp sur- rounded by trees. We gladly got in and drove gentle old Nell back home.

On our new land of prosperity and hope, our home was built a scant half mile from the lake. Father had made a door upstairs facing the lake shore where he planned on a balcony to be built later, however in

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the absence of the balcony we sat in the open door on that upstairs floor with our feet dangling out and spent most summer evenings there listening to vari- ous water fowl, the many odd soufi‘d’ing birds made a strange harmony but it was music to our ears in a world where radios were unknown. There was only one row of young white poplars left on that side to shelter the garden, then the high dry ridge and the ready strip by the lake. The View was good and with the addition of our great imagination, we enjoyed, not a silent picture, but a theatre of views and sounds which included a large bird that never seemed to tire of repeating “plum pudding”. During the earlier years we picked black currents and gooseberries on the lakeshore in the shade of large elm trees. We loitered long leisurely hours picking shells and snails and pockets full of coloured stones.

The swish of a rolling wave at regular intervals against the large rocks on the shore would still do my soul good if I could be there to hear it again. When the live one gallon syrup pails were full, we watered old Polly, the chocolate brown old mare with the crippled hip and returned home for the mile and a half that we had traveled for the berries, as there were only reeds on the shore opposite the house. There was time for everything in those days. Time to pick up a tiny frog and have nature study without a pencil, time to collect a few shells for the cover of a jewelry box for mother and time to stop on the way home to pick wild flowers. Time to sit on the ground to repair a broken shoe lace. We did not know the ordeal of racing with time which plagues this modern age. Their rush to catch the school bus, rush homework to go to a show, rush to a ball game in the summertime, rush to a hockey game in the winter. We realized that the great transformation of the modem students’ wardrobe is a great convenience compared to the one good wear dress and two prints of yesterday. The synthetics of today don’t need ironing but do we really have time for ironing? This rush to make use of time is not used now as it was when we girls had time to fry a stack of pancakes a foot high before the rest of the family would get through milking twenty-one cows by hand in the morning. Time to spend the rest of the day making hay with the men, time to scrub a rough board floor, with a scrub brush and homemade soap. That floor was sixteen by thirty-two and the time was eight pm. There was time even to dress up on Sunday afternoon, if you cared to put on your one and only good dress at two pm. and take it off at four pm. to do chores. These were precious times and always made use of, and appreciated. 'We hear so much of gadgets, ways and means of saving time, time savers and wife savers, but today it is not time saved for hoeing, raking, pitching hay, threshing and