The Yellow Briar. Patrick Slater

seems her father is a surgeon, practicing in Baltimore or some place down there. Her mother, who died at the time of the child’s birth, had been a Canadian girl from near Estevan in southern Saskatchewan, who went south, quite young, to train as a nurse. And those Canadian girls that train for nurses? Well, you know what nurses are! Of course, they are wholesome, capable young persons; but I notice they wear nifty little affairs on their heads; and they wear them, I figure, so that they can set their caps for likely young doctors, who are starting up in good practice.

      Anyway, the big car had crossed the border at Niagara Falls en route to Montreal and points farther east. The young lady had a notion to go fifty miles north from the lake to see what sort of place it was among the hills that her mother’s family had come from. And youth nowadays must be served — even if a bit impatiently. Some person in the neighbourhood had referred to me as a historical landmark from which to take her bearings.

      Yes, I told her, I had known her mother’s family. I remembered her great-great-grandmother as a robust young woman. In fact, her people had lived in this very house — not in the weather-beaten old place as it now is, but in the days of its youth and glory. I had come to work on the farm as a little lad fresh out from Ireland; and, on and off, I have lived on the place ever since. It is the only real home I ever had.

      I took her around to see a yellow briar-bush planted many years ago by a little girl who wore hoop skirts on Sundays. The little gardener, I told her, had been her mother’s mother. As good luck had it, the season being early, the yellow rosebush was a mass of waxy blossoms and unfolding buds.

      Of course, she was tremendously interested; but the big car seemed to get a little impatient.

      “And where were these folk of mine buried?” she inquired.

      I told her she would notice the little graveyard as they drove out to the pike. It now stood, deserted-like, in the corner of a pasture field; but at one time its stones had nestled around a Methodist meeting-house.

      “But if you go in, be careful of those sheer stockings,” said I, “because we don’t take much care of these little burial places up this way.”

      She asked me if she might take some of the yellow roses. I cut off a bundle of the branches with my jack-knife, and wrapped a sheet of newspaper about the prickly stems.

      “Put them on the old woman’s grave,” I suggested, “but don’t shake them, because the petals blow and scatter. Your old kinswoman, I must warn you, was a very orderly person.”

      “Yes,” she said to me, “you seize the flower, its bloom is shed.”

      “Anyhow,” I replied, “briar blossoms never feel the ugliness of age.”

      The girl lifted up her quiet eyes to the limestone hills whence has come the strength of my farm.

      “Doesn’t that mean,” she asked me, “that they must die in the beauty of their youth?”

      “Then they are beloved of the gods,” said I.

      And we walked back toward the car.

      “And for goodness sake, don’t leave the Globe newspaper there,” I cautioned her, “because that old Irish lady of yours had no use at all — at all — for George Brown’s paper or the Reform Party.

      The big car slipped down the lane as noiselessly as the shadow of a passing cloud. I chuckled at the thought of the fit the old relative would have thrown had any young female of the connection appeared before her in the sheer, curve-showing nakedness of the well-groomed young lady of Baltimore who was taking flowers down to place on her grave. But, of course, the old body has been sleeping these many years in a peaceful twilight beneath the clover and the daisies. Not, mark you, that I think shifting customs and styles have any effect on the unchanging heart of women. A bit of rouge and plucked eyebrows seem no more artificial to me than bustles were and the swish of ladies’ skirts across the grass.

      I was startled by the visit of that strange young girl to the old Ontario farm. In the span of my lifetime, I got to thinking, I had seen the huge pocket of British territory that nestles within the arms of the Great Lakes — a fertile land larger in extent than the republic of France — cleared of its hardwood forests and turned into fruitful farm-lands. The hard-working men and women from the British Isles who did this great job were lovers of the soil and they hungered for homes of their own. From their firesides I have seen great waves of young life go out in search of fame and an easier fortune. One would travel beyond Greenland’s icy mountains and farther than India’s coral strand to find a locality in which a father has not told his son how hard “the old man” made a fellow work on the farm back in Ontario. And I have lived long enough to know that farm homes of the Scottish and Irish pioneers will pass into the hands of other races and breeds of men whose children have remained lovers of the soil.

      I have thought several times since of the quiet-spoken, hard-working women, out of whose decent lives that young girl had come; and, every time I think of them, I feel inclined to dodge around and have a look at that simple, old-fashioned, yellow rose-bush. It has stood out there, these many years, untended and unprotected in a wind-swept place; it has learned to suffer and endure – and it still endures. It keeps itself neat and tidy, because Nature mends by subtle art the ravages of time. Apparently the old bush has always been well content with its location and station in life. There is no evidence that it has ever tried to spread out or encroach upon its neighbours. It is well equipped to protect its rights and dignity, and to prevent others from encroaching upon it. At ordinary times, it is a trim, healthy sort of a shrub, and retiring in its nature; but, when it shows its soul, the whole bush bursts suddenly into a magnificence of bloom.

      There were like qualities in the hearts of the Irish women who were pioneering in the timber-lands of Upper Canada when Victoria began her long reign. In 1838, a young girl set up the first housekeeping on this farm. Her family were originally adherents of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and had settled as small farmers in County Armagh at the time Cromwell put the curse on Ireland. And I think, sometimes, that perhaps old Ireland also put a curse on them that settled within the pale. There was bred in their children’s children a hard, silent, stubborn pride that became pitiable as all Ireland fell upon evil days at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.

      A high birth-rate and young folk who hung around home, instead of whistling themselves over the hills and far away, added greatly to the woes of the cabins and cottages of old Ireland,

      … that mournful nation

       With charmin’ pisintry upon a fruitful sod,

      Fightin’ like devils for conciliation

      And hatin’ each other for the love of God.

      The result was rack-renting and the splitting up of small landholdings. Owing to its over-abundance, farm labour in that fertile land became less efficient than anywhere else in Europe.

      The Irish Protestant families that pioneered in the backwoods of Upper Canada in the thirties were driven out of Ireland by forces as cruel and inexorable as were the troops of bloody Cromwell. Their womenfolk had learned in Ireland to skimp and suffer, and still endure; but they had endured there in a grim and haughty silence. I never met one of them, in the early days, whose grandfather had not apparently been the proud possessor of an entailed estate — I suppose of four acres and a cow. These landed gentry had dined on potatoes and hake, one day; but, to keep up the family standing, they varied to hake and potatoes the next. As for the rest of us in Ireland, we lived in those days on potatoes and point. You get that? The children stood around the table at mealtime, eating potatoes — boiled with the jackets on. To get a flavour, they pointed the tatties at the bit of salt herring their father ate. Nineteen years was the average life-span in rural Ireland; and only one soul of five passed the age of forty.

      Coming to Canada, these women continued to suffer and endure as their menfolk cut homesteads on these stony hillsides — but there was a touch of hope thrown in. And where there is hope, there is joy. One of the finest things Canada ever did was to put a kindly twinkle into the blue-grey eyes of these proud, poverty-stricken Irish women.

      Their