The Yellow Briar. Patrick Slater

may have been tart at times, bur they wore their knuckles to the bone in the service of their love. The Scottish Presbyterians may have been the salt of the earth in Upper Canada; but the Irish women gave it sweetness and light. These mothers of Methodist families were quiet, tidy, capable women; and it was a pleasure to watch one of them making ready an evening meal. They were wholesome-minded because they were home-lovers and were busy home-making. And, among women, it is the home-keeping hearts that are happiest. The mother of a family was proud of her station as such; and, as a result, she was content to relax and drift quietly into the matron class. Her Irish eyes were smiling. One was not startled those days by seeing the worn eyes of an old woman looking out from a face made up to recall a youth that had fled. Has not every age of a woman’s life a natural beauty of its own?

      The bodies of these Irish women may have been stiff-necked with a curious family pride that had nothing much to justify it; but that very pride fortified their unconquerable wills, and helped to keep their menfolk respectable. There was constant in their hearts a depth of love and loyalty; and, like my old yellow briar, it burst into bloom at times.

      … for her price is above rubies.

      She seeketh wool and flax and worketh

      willingly with her hands….

      She stretcheth forth her hands to the poor;

      yea, she reacheth forth her hand to the needy….

      She looketh well to the ways of her

      household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.

      Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain; but a

      woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.

      THE WORDS OF KING LEMUEL

2 THE TAVERN TYRONE

      It was early in the spring of 1847 that I first got to know that young girl’s family, as I played around the Tavern Tyrone at Toronto. It is a long journey back, indeed, from life’s end to the little boy at the starting of it.

      My family were of the poor Irish. A sailing vessel, returning to Quebec for timber, that year called at an Irish port to load its decks, as cheap cargo, with famished and wasted emigrants on their wild flight from the famine and the plague. Woe’s me! Unspeakable were the miseries of that long,tempest-tossed voyage in a filthy, fever-stricken ship. Half its human cargo were buried at sea; and, as the vessel sailed past Father Point, the waters of the St. Lawrence for miles behind were strewn with bedding tossed overboard by sailors making the decks shipshape for port. As a flat scow was being towed slowly up the river near Prescott, my poor father was stricken down. He went under shallow earth quickly, without benefit of clergy. My mother wailed after the manner of Irish women, and counted her silver. It was a handful of coppers she had, with a few sixpenny bits and a shilling. A steamboat brought the widow Slater and her small son to Toronto. How fortunate it was she had only one child.

      My mother took lodgings with Mr. Michael O’Hogan in a small frame house that still stands, in tottering decay, on the east side of York Street, a few doors down from Richmond Street. Our living-quarters were upstairs in a small back bedroom, which we shared with a large family. She was only a slip of a girl, she was one of them black Irish. You know what I mean? There was the mop of raven hair, the swarthy skin, and a touch of down on the lip. Beyond the cruel, desolate ocean, there had been a sparkle of fun in her eyes, and the tongue of the laughing little baggage had been always on the wag. But the poor little Irish girl was fair distraught, now, with the outlandish ways of the crazy, new-world town, and sore afraid of its streets infested with Protestants and nigger-folk. She was sick at heart; she was homesick for the earthen floor of a sod cabin, with its friendly smell of burning turf and the sour buttermilk.

      My mother got odd scrubbing jobs, day work like; and I ran about the street. A little lad of eight or nine years has some clear-cut impressions printed at that age on the tender, unscarred membranes of the brain; and they remain distinct and vivid to the end of his days. I got odd jobs myself, splitting kindling and doing chores in the morning for Mistress Kitty O’Shea, who lived in a little frame cottage where Shepherds Lane now is. She was a jolly, ruddy-faced little body, with silver always in her pocket; and she had fashionable ladies lodging with her. On fine afternoons, Paddy Casey would come round with his open carriage and spanking pair. Mistress Kitty O’Shea and her stylish guests were driven slowly up and down King Street to see the sights and take the air. Of course, I did not understand the business at the time; but no doubt my friend Kitty wanted other folk to know the sort of house she was running.

      In 1847, there was plenty going on in Toronto to fill a young lad’s mind and keep his face agape. We had come from drippy Donegal where, in the little pockets and quarter-acre patches, “the praties grow so small they have to eat them skins and all.” Toronto seemed to me a stirring, big town; and things were in constant commotion. There were brawls aplenty for the seeing, and startling street fires by night. Then, too, there were the public hangings. Adventure bunted into a fellow round any corner; and there was lots to eat.

      At the moment, Toronto had become a booming frontier town. For fifty years previously, the obscure, isolated little place had been struggling within its muddy self to keep up the smart military and social swagger of the capital of Upper Canada. Its trade had been obliged to play second fiddle to high-hatted policies of Crown government. Things had moved slowly. To amount to anything in those days, a person required an official job or an official connection of some kind.

      But rapid changes were now setting in. The magnetic telegraph had arrived; and railroads were things actively thought about. The Canada Company was pushing settlement with vigour. There had been a crop failure in Europe in the summer of 1846; and the rot or curl in the praties that brought woe to the thatched cottages of Ireland and the shieldings of the Highlands gave better prices for farm produce to the log cabins of Canada. A flood of immigration set in, which in one season dumped 35,000 new-comers at the port of the placid little, official town — mostly wild Irish, but many people, also, from the Highlands and the English counties. Hammers rang early and late, in all directions, cracking up frame dwellings and lodging places. In 1847, Toronto was a town of small creeks, tanbark, and taverns. With 17,000 residents, the little city had 136 fully-licensed taverns and thirty-two stores with liquor-shop licences. Some of the immigrants brought little gear with them, but they had plenty of hatreds and ugly suspicions packed in their settlers’ effects as they crossed the ocean.

      A few days after my mother and I arrived, I knocked up an acquaintance with a young lad by the name of Jack Trueman, whose father kept the Tavern Tyrone, a small public house on the south side of Queen Street, just around the second corner. He was a man of great strength both in deed and word. When his temper was stirred, he tossed his beard about with his hand; and he could bandy great oaths with the best of men. John Trueman was a teetotaller, and always wore a boiled shirt. Jack told me he wore it to bed. Himself was a stocky, middle-aged man; and no doubt he died in the honest belief that he had always been the complete master of his household. The family were Protestants, and attended the Church of St. George the Martyr, on John Street. The tavern was a decent, tidy, well-kept lodging place; and those who frequented the small tap-room facing the street were Irishmen whose views agreed with those held by Himself of the boiled shirt. He had a tart, bitter tongue for the views of all others; and they went elsewhere for their liquor.

      I got along first-rate with young Jack Trueman, because I let him boss me around to his heart’s content. I split kindling willingly for him, and I slopped in buckets of water for use in the kitchen. He was a harsh taskmaster over me, and many a time I got a smart clout on the lug and was told to take that for a dirty little dogan. But, at other times, he was open-handed enough and a good sharer. I liked to hang around the Tavern Tyrone; and I paid cheerfully for the privilege. It was young Trueman who showed me the town; and at first I believed everything he told me.

      What appealed strongly to my young mind about the Trueman place was a narrow alleyway to the east of the tavern, leading back to a stable in the rear where two cows and pigeons were kept. I liked the job of chivying the cows along Queen Street to a pasture field in the west. One evening, the cows got in the way of the carriage