A winter of content

NOVEMBER is the month of mosses. Every fallen tree, every rotting stump, every rock, the trodden paths, and even the hard face of the cliff, are padded deep with velvet. The col...

APPROPRIATELY enough, on this first day of the calendar spring, I am warned that the ice is unsafe and that I must stay on the island until the lake is open water. The natives s...

THE time of great winds has come, the heavy November gales that roar down the lakes, lashing the water into white-capped waves, dashing the driftwood against the rocks and decki...

WE are no longer tenderfeet, the rabbit and I. We have come through a blizzard. For the better part of a week we have been “denned in” along with the squirrels, chipmunks, coons...

A SMALL, rocky island in a lake, a canoe paddling away across the blue water, a woman standing on a narrow strip of beach, looking after it. I was the woman left on the shore, t...

JANUARY the twenty-second was a great day in the county. It was the date of the “Tea Meeting,” given under the auspices of the English Church, for the benefit of the destitute B...

THE Lake of the Many Islands, long, irregular, spring-fed, lies in a cup of the rolling Ontario farmlands. At the south its waters, passing through a narrow strait, widen into b...

WE are at the very heart of winter now. It is “_le grand frête_,” that I have been secretly dreading, and all my ideas of it are changing as the quiet days go on. Winter in the...

THE days are still warm, but autumn is surely here. The wasps are dying everywhere and lie in heaps on all the window-sills; the great water spiders have disappeared, and all da...

WINTER has thrown a veil of lace over the islands, a wet, clinging snow that covers every tree-trunk, rock, and stump, and turns the cedars to mounds of fluffy whiteness. The pa...

SINCE the first of December we have not seen the ground—only a great field of white so dazzling that one understands the Indian’s name for the March moon. Verily, my own eyes te...

THE mudcat season has come. After the winter’s diet of salt herring, and before the open season for bass and pickerel, comes the mudcat, alias bullhead, to give us the taste of...

WHAT is the first wild flower of the spring? Each of us has his own first flower. It varies with the locality and the special season. Here it was the hepatica, that lifted its l...

THE May woods are full of color; the crimson of the young maple sprays, the bronze and yellows of the new birch and basswood leaves reflecting the tints of autumn.

HOW do we know when the turn of the year has come? The calendar gives March twenty-first as the official birthday of spring, but that has nothing to do with it. One February day...

NOVEMBER’S moon is said to be the Indian’s Moon of Magic, but here the June moon is the wonder moon and “the moon of my delight.” It sails resplendent in a luminous sky, pouring...

WILD geese flying over, cold mornings, colder nights, warn me that it is time to lay in supplies of firewood, oil and food against the coming of winter. Last evening a laden row...

IT is wild strawberry time in lower Canada. The fields are carpeted with them and the fern-covered rocks hold each a little garden where the red berries hang over the water like...

THE Beaulacs belong to a tribe of French Canadians that has peopled half the countryside. They have various nicknames—Black Jack, Little Joe, Yankee Jim, Big John, Rose Marie, M...

GOOD FRIDAY, a heavy fall of snow and winter come again. The ground is white, the sky dull gray, the lake a dark, bluish green flecked with windrows of snow. It is more than a w...