Dr. W.H. Drummond's Complete Poems E-Book

William Henry Drummond

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This volume contains all the poems previously published in separate volumes under the following titles: The Habitant; Johnnie Courteau; The Voyageur; The Great Fight, and comprises the complete collected poems of William Henry Drummond. To these are added a memorial poem and introductions by Neil Munro and Louis Fréchette.

Leseprobe

The Poetical Works of

First Editions, 1926

© 2021 Librorium Editions

In Memory of William Henry Drummond

By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D., LL.D.

PEACE to his poet soul. Full well he knew

To sing for those who know not how to praise

The woodsman’s life, the farmer’s patient toil,

The peaceful drama of laborious days.

He made his own the thoughts of simple men,

And with the touch that makes the world akin

A welcome guest of lonely cabin homes,

Found, too, no heart he could not enter in.

The toilworn doctor, women, children, men,

The humble heroes of the lumber drives,

Love, laugh, or weep along his peopled verse,

Blithe ’mid the pathos of their meagre lives.

While thus the poet-love interpreted,

He left us pictures no one may forget—

Courteau, Batiste, Camille mon frere and best,

The good brave curé, he of Calumette.

With nature as with man at home, he loved

William Henry Drummond

THE name of Canada to me, as to many of my race and age, has a romantic charm that does not rise from any great historical associations, but survives from early youth, the true period of natural magic, of unquestioning illusions, when great men and great deeds have less power to stir the imaginative faculty than a hint, in some trumpery fiction, of wild, free spaces of the unspoiled world. Not to prenatal glory does the memory of youth go back, as Wordsworth thought; not to some Platonic Eden where, in a previous incarnation we were as angels in a sinless garden; but to the early, primitive, and essentially mundane valleys, plains, and hills that knew the toils and wanderings of our ancestors. It is the unfenced, uninhabited, and tractless areas our subliminal memory recalls; the lonely morning forest, the shouting cataract with no name, lakes undiscovered, hunts perilously followed, evening fires with their ashes deep below the mould of centuries. No savage tribe with rude camp equipage set forth at dawn from the sheltering edge of pines, pursuing the windings of the river through the mist, without, in some sensitive heart, a pang of wonder and surmise which we in our blood inherit. We have all come from the tribes, trailing no clouds of glory, but still with rags of zest in things adventurous, still capable of a thrill at the thought of phantoms and of dangers now no longer waiting us on our morning march along the clean-swept pavements of a thousand cities.

It was natural that Canada should evoke the visionary romance of our youth in Scotland, for yet the more favoured of us saw surviving scraps of that ancient unpossessed, uncultivated, and untamed world whereof Scotland and Canada alike were parts. In both lands Nature wore much the same aspect; clothing the bluffs with pine, the plains with northern wild-flowers, spilling her streams down precipices, filling the mountain crevices with snow or mist, or the creeks and bays with the same Atlantic Ocean. The very cold of Canada in winter helped to render her familiar—were our happiest hours not those when the North wind whistled and our lakes were ice? We knew that, with the frost, to men came grandeurs of endurance and reserves of zest incommunicable to the offspring of the South.

Then, too, only a tiny period, as time goes in History—less than two hundred years—separated us in our Highland life from many of the customs of the Indian. We had still—though hung upon the wall—the weapons of our forefathers, and our fireside tales were yet of native war-trails, forays, feuds, old passions, and alarms. Little wonder that the Red River settlers from Sutherlandshire found the aboriginals less strange and inimical than the whites, or that the great North-West should prove so hospitable to the Gaelic winterers from Hudson’s Bay! And one last feature especially, of the New World rendered it more alluring to our youth—our folk were there! They had blazed trails and builded flourishing communities, they occupied the outmost forts and knew the land from sea to sea; they had given their names to the mightiest rivers.

I have been through Canada at a time when the early affections for things unseen and enterprises unexperienced are usually worn rather thin; when the “radiance that was once so bright” is replaced by

——a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality,

and though the views which I had previously formed of the country and its life had necessarily to undergo some process of readjustment, I am happy to say it yet retains an infinite glamour and romance. For the preservation of this fond illusion—as the realist may consider it—I owe much to the good fortune of knowing one man who, after living nearly all his life in Canada, had not discarded a single jot of his youthful vision of her as a land magnificent and romantic; a man for whom the Redskin or the half-breed still was a being not to be despised; for whom the woodman, the trapper, and the pioneer were glorified by all the antique circumstances of their lives. The forest for William Henry Drummond, as for me, had not relinquished any of its early power to rouse half-awed expectancy, to challenge, to allure. A Celt in every artery of his being, it was not for him, as it never was for me, by fauns and fairies that the thickets, glades, or verges of the solitary lakes were inhabited, but by the creatures of his boyish worship, by Leather-Stocking rather than the dryads.

No alien could doubt the persistance of romance in Canada, who saw the joy of Drummond in it, his delight in the very things that thrilled in the books of youth; in guides and voyageurs, in camps, and portages, and canoes. He was himself a sportsman, and the woods and rivers, therefore, had a fascination for another portion of his nature, but rightly or wrongly, I fancy his love of the wilds and his sense of kinship with the courageous, hardy, and enduring men he found in sporting camps, were more often the attraction of the Laurentian lakes and woods than the fishing and the shooting to be got there.

It was not in Montreal where he practised medicine that he found the inspiration of his written work; poems associated with the life of towns and cities are almost wholly absent from his books, for his most impressionable years had been spent elsewhere—in Bord-à-Plouffe, on the banks of the Rivière des Prairies, at Marbleton, and Stornoway near Lake Megantic. From Ireland, his direct heredity, he probably took no more than a childish memory which gave a tinge of Celtic pensiveness to his later years. He was born near Mohill, County Leitrim, on April 13, 1854, and taken by his parents to the Dominion while yet a boy. At Bord-à-Plouffe, where he worked for a while in the telegraph service, he was in a great centre of the lumber trade and came for the first time in contact with the habitant and the voyageur, a class of men for whom his destiny was to be expositor. Their chansons gave to his first literary essays the mould and spirit which were to distinguish the greater part of his poetical work. Later, he returned to study in the High School, passing thence to McGill College and on to Bishop’s Medical College, where he graduated in 1884. If academic prizes went for athletic feats, the Irishman would have achieved the highest distinctions in his college years, but in truth he won no medals save on the college campus. Of such are good doctors made, and often poets also! His first medical appointment was that of House Surgeon at the Montreal Western Hospital, but at an early date he established a physician’s practice at Stornoway, and later at Knowlton, where the mountains, glens, woods, and lakes of Brome ministered to every aspect of his love for nature. What was the character of his duties there may be gathered from his pictures of “The Canadian Country Doctor” and “Ole Docteur Fiset.” At the end of four years, he returned to practise in Montreal, and, in 1894, he married Miss May Harvey, a lady with whom he became acquainted while she and her father were on a visit from the West Indies to the Dominion.

On his marriage with one who shared his own romantic and poetic nature, and was, further, dowered with the finest literary sensibilities, Drummond’s muse, aforetime somewhat shy and fugitive, assumed more confidence and zeal. He was already known in Canada and throughout the United States as the author of “The Wreck of the ‘Julie Plante,’ ” a poem at no time greatly valued by himself, but holding some essential charm for the very class of men it pictured, no indecisive proof that a poet has a definite call. He had written other poems in the dialect of the French-Canadian habitant, hitherto the medium of buffoonery in verse, but dignified by him to graver purposes, and his own recitation of these poems at occasional public gatherings earned for him the name of “Poet of the Habitant” before he had published a single book.

In an old house in Mountain Street, Montreal, which had sheltered Jefferson Davis during the first years after the American war, the poems for Drummond’s first book were written rather for domestic entertainment than for the world, and at the solicitation of his wife and brothers, the manuscript of “The Habitant” was sent to the publishers of New York. Its merits were discerned by the Putnams, and the book, beautifully illustrated by Frederick Simpson Coburn, whose drawings marvellously caught the atmosphere and spirit of the poems, immediately proved successful. Drummond’s place in the highest rank of North American bards was assured. He was hailed by the Poet Laureate of Canada, Louis Fréchette, as a new “pathfinder in the land of song,” and the credentials of such a French-Canadian dispelled all fears that the fidelity to the dialect, portraiture, and foibles of the habitant might prove unpleasant to the race and class delineated.

In truth, the work had no fonder admiration than with the habitants themselves. They found in it not only a scrupulous representation of their racial life, customs, and character, but the attitude of a sympathetic and admiring friend. A man of the tenderest sentiment, of the finest tact, devoid of any cankering notion of superiority, he never wrote a line but in affection, and the humour, wit, and pathos of his verses carried the irresistible conviction of a great and generous soul. Of ridicule he was temperamentally incapable; on the human weaknesses of his characters he held his judgment in suspense; he gave to Anglo-Saxon Canadians a new respect for their French compatriots. Till then, French-Canadian minstrelsy, for the outside world, was represented so far as the habitant and the voyageur were concerned, by academic English renderings of the old chansons; it was Drummond’s place to make the living habitant and voyageur articulate in the patois which distinguished them, and yet the naïveté and the natural magic of the old régime, of “À La Claire Fontaine” and “En Roulant ma Boulé” are reproduced, transfigured strangely, in the language of the modern Canayen of lumberers and peasants of to-day as Drummond gave them voice in “Johnnie Courteau” or “The Curé of Calumette.”

Drummond’s increasing reputation as a man of letters in no way affected the conscientious discharge of his professional work; his practice was not permitted to lose his unremitting attention, however far his imagination might wander or however briskly his pen might run in his scanty leisure hours as a physician. Rich and poor alike among his patients shared his consideration, and it is related of him that on one occasion, when two calls came simultaneously, one from a wealthy man, and the other from a poor carter from whom a fee might scarcely be expected, he chose to attend the latter first, saying “The rich can get any number of doctors, but poor Pat has only me.” Mrs. Drummond, in the touching biographical sketch she prefixes to his posthumous book The Great Fight, says:

“Many of his patients declared that just to see Doctor Drummond did them good, and grumbled at the scarcity of his visits, but he, never dreaming that he had anything other than a prescription to bestow, said: ‘What’s the use of paying professional visits to people for whom I can do nothing more? I might just as well steal the money out of their pockets.’ On the other hand, if the case was a serious one, it absorbed him, and his attention to it was unremitting. At such times he was with difficulty persuaded to take proper rest or food, and would often leave the dinner-table to search his book-shelves for yet another authority on the disease he was fighting; then he would return with the book to the table, and if it contained what he sought, his plate would be pushed aside, and, in spite of remonstrances from the rest of us, he was off and away to his ‘case’ once more.”

For several years he occupied the chair of Medical Jurisprudence in his Alma Mater, in which position he earned and kept the affection and confidence of students and professors alike. In 1901 appeared his second volume of poems, Johnnie Courteau, and in the following year the University of Toronto conferred on him the degree of LL.D. He was subsequently elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature of England, and, later, one of the Royal Society of Canada. These honours, with the degree of D.C.L., of Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, sat so lightly on him that I confess I was unaware of them till his death. In England he was simply “Habitant Drummond.”

It was in the year last-mentioned that I met him. He was paying his first visit to the motherland since he had left it as a child, and Scotland was included in his itinerary. A man, it seemed to me, less physically suggestive of a poet, it was difficult to conceive. There was nothing fragile about the build of William Henry Drummond—a massive yet athletic figure seemingly endowed with the health and sinews of a wrestler, emanating airs of active life and the open country; the last man to suspect of literary vigils and of enervating dalliance with the sisters of the sacred well. And yet I would not for the world have had him otherwise. The poetry of Canada, particularly the poetry of the voyageur, should not, in common decency, be made by delicate and myopic men; to such, indeed, the heart and mystery of the child of nature, reticent and shy, are rarely to be revealed. If I had had doubts—the usual journalistic doubts—of the poet’s likelihood to express the lowly life of Eastern Canadian country places with authority, they would have been immediately dispelled, for here was unmistakably a plain man’s man with whom it would be joyous to go fishing. I put him to the test with young folk at that period full of the book romance of Canada, and apt to think the most heroic qualities were requisite in every man with his badge the Maple Leaf, and my visitor came grandly up to the most fastidious standard. For them he clinched the matter—Canada was genuine; the moose, and the wapiti, and the bear were not mere beasts of myth like the dragons on our coinage; the trapper was still in Ungava, and the red canoe was yet upon the waters. To a child his unsophistication and trustworthiness were instantly apparent; he was himself an unspoiled and eternal boy!

I incline to think Drummond was never a bookish man; at all events, like Wordsworth, he was certainly no bookworm; and his conversation having rapturously dealt with three or four modern poets who were at the time his deities, tangentially escaped as soon as possible into affairs of prose; of nature, dogs, and angling; children, weather, travel, politics, and nationality. He was plainly the kind of man to be fascinated by any novel phase of the wild and vagabondish in mankind; his eye was ever alert for racial idiosyncrasy. I went with him on a flying visit to my native Highlands of Argyll; the woods of Inveraray roused his admiration,—I see him still, the good physician Melampus, walk under the hoary oaks of Easachosain,—but it was, I think, by gipsy pipers, shaggy, wild rogues and ragged, that he was most permanently impressed.

It was, however, especially to revisit Ireland he had come across the sea, and after some days in Scotland he set out for the scenes of childhood. He got as far as Dublin, and here, as I have written elsewhere, something came to him—an apprehension possibly of the fact that the actual Ireland was not the Ireland of his warm imagination, that the “first, fine, careless rapture” of his childhood in Leitrim could never be recaptured—the saddest of discoveries for middle age. He came back to Glasgow and went home to Canada without accomplishing the purpose that had brought him three thousand miles.

In the following year, I brought a long tour in Canada to a termination with a week in the society of Dr. and Mrs. Drummond, in the attractive homes of his brothers George and Thomas, on the lake-bespangled property of St. Bruno, and later at the sporting camp of the Laurentian Club on Lac La Pêche. With the men and women of that holiday community among primeval woods, it was obvious that the poet was the supreme inspiring friend and favourite, high priest of revels, councillor and high grand consultant upon all projects and contemplated exploits. Not even the old “Commodore,” Director Parker, had more potent sway with the Laurentians. The French-Canadian guides and boatmen were on the most affectionate and even playful terms with “the Doctor”; it was always he who could most easily induce them to indulge the expectant tenderfoot with song or dance. It was then I found that though full of the lore of the hunter, Drummond had long since lost his love of the gun. He preferred to see the creatures of the wood inviolate, and I shall not readily forget his indignation and contempt for anything savouring of unsportsmanlike slaughter.

In 1905, Drummond joined his brothers in the exploitation of new mines at Cobalt, northern Ontario, and, released from his medical work in Montreal, he took up the active personal superintendence of operations which were by no means uncongenial to him, since they were pursued in a region new to him, of magnificent lakes and forests. The fall of the year saw the publication of his last completed work, The Voyageur, which met with the same great vogue and high eulogium that attended its predecessors. It looked as if in worldly prospects and in literary fame the best of his life was still before him, but in truth life smiled but to deceive, and the end came as narrated in the memoir of his widow:

“It had been his intention to spend Easter Day of 1907 with us in Montreal, but hearing that smallpox had broken out in the camp at Cobalt, he hurried away a week earlier. The night of his departure from Montreal he seemed possessed by a strange and overwhelming reluctance to go. ‘I don’t know why I hate to go away so much this time,’ he said, and I, thinking that his health was not as good as usual, would have persuaded him to stay at home, but no, his duty lay there with the sick of the little camp, and bidding us an unusually solemn good-bye, he left the home he was never more to enter. It was just a week from this time that he was stricken with cerebral hemorrhage, and on the morning of April 6th, after five unconscious days, passed to the beyond.”

Drummond’s grave on the side of Mount Royal has upon its stone a phrase of Moira O’Neill’s that has the secret of his wide appeal and his endearment to the readers of the English-speaking world:

          Youth’s for an hour

          Beauty’s a flower,

But love is the jewel that wins the world.

Among the poets of the British Empire, he holds a place unique. The poetry and romance of the North American continent have found, in one form or another, expression in the works of innumerable modern writers, struck, like him, by the natural grandeur of their country, the picturesque side of the struggle by which men subdue it to the purposes of civilisation, and the gallantry and devotion of humble lives. But the laureates of camp-fire, shack, and mine, too generally indulge a strident, even brutal, note which is never found in the poems of Drummond as collected in the present definitive edition.

Melampus dwelt upon men: physician and sage,

  He served them, loving them, healing them, sick or maimed,

Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage

  Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed.

He played on men, as his master, Phœbus, on strings

  Melodious: as the God did he strive and check,

Through love exceeding a simple love of the things

  That glide in the grasses and rubble of woody wreck.

Neil Munro.

Introduction

ON me demande, pour ce charmant volume, un mot de préface en français; le voici: Quand, en 1863, je publiai mon premier recueil de poésies—écrites au collège, pour la plupart,—le grand poète américain Longfellow eut la flatteuse bienveillance de m’appeler The pathfinder of a new land of song.

Avec mille fois plus de raison puis-je aujourd’hui passer le compliment à mon sympathique confrère et ami, l’auteur de ce livre; car, si jamais quelqu’un, chez nous, a mérité le titre de pathfinder of a new land of song, c’est assurément lui.

Non seulement il a découvert le champ, la clairière, la vallée fertile et encore inexplorée; il en a fait l’exploitation à sa manière, avec des outils et des moyens de son invention; et, fier de sa conquête, il laisse, de son épaule robuste, tomber à nos pieds le fruit de son travail, la gerbe plantureuse aux ors vierges, à l’arôme sauvage, aux savoureuses promesses, toute fraîche et toute crissante dans sa rusticité saine.

N’est-elle pas, en effet, d’une originalité peu commune, l’idée de prendre un pauvre illettré, de le présenter comme un type national à part, de lui mettre aux lèvres une langue qui n’est pas la sienne et qu’il ne connaît qu’ à demi; d’en faire en même temps un personnage bon, doux, aimable, honnête, intelligent et droit, l’esprit en éveil, le cœur plein d’une poésie native stimulant son patriotisme, jetant un rayon lumineux dans son modeste intérieur, berçant ses heures rêveuses de souvenirs lointains et mélancoliques?

Et cela sans que jamais, dans ce portrait d’un nouveau genre, le plus subtil des critiques puisse surprendre nulle part le coup de crayon de la caricature!

Dans ses inimitables contes villageois, George Sand a peint les paysans du Berry sous des dehors très intéressants. Elle nous les montre même d’un sentiment très affiné dans leur simplicité naïve et leur cordiale bonhomie. En somme, elle en fait des natures, des tempéraments, quelque chose de typique, en même temps qu’harmonieux de teinte et de forme.

Mais George Sand faisait parler ses personnages dans la langue du pays, dans la langue de la chaumière, dans leur propre dialecte, enfin. Elle n’avait, pour ainsi dire, qu’ à faire pénétrer le souffle de son talent sous le réseau de la phrase, pour animer celle-ci d’un reflet de lyrisme ou d’une vibration attendrie.

La tâche abordée par M. Drummond présentait un caractère beaucoup plus difficile.

Ici, le poète avait bien, il est vrai, le milieu à saisir, placé; droit en face de son objectif. Il était assez familier avec ses acteurs pour les grouper avantageusement, en ménageant les effets d’ombres et de lumière. Il est naturellement assez artiste pour ne rien négliger de ce qui ajoute du pittoresque à la pose; surtout, il connaissait à fond le type à reproduire, ses mœurs, ses passions, ses sentiments, ses penchants, ses superstitions et ses faiblesses.

Mais comment, sans tomber dans la charge ou la bouffonnerie, faire parler systématiquement à ses personnages une langue étrangère, forcément incorrecte dans la bouche de quelqu’un qui l’a apprise par oreille, sans savoir lire même dans sa propre langue?

La tentative était hardie; mais on sait que le succès a un faible pour les audacieux.

Dans son étude des Canadiens-français, M. Drummond a trouvé le moyen d’éviter un écueil qui aurait semblé inévitable pour tout autre que pour lui. Il est resté vrai, sans tomber dans la vulgarité, et piquant sans verser dans le grotesque.

Qu’il mette en scène le gros fermier fier de son bien ou de ses filles à marier, le vieux médecin de campagne ne comptant plus ses états de service, le jeune amoureux qui rêve au clair de la lune, le vieillard qui repasse en sa mémoire la longue suite des jours révolus, le conteur de légendes, l’aventurier des “pays d’en haut,” et même le Canadien exilé—le Canadien errant, comme dit la chanson populaire—qui croit toujours entendre résonner à son oreille le vague tintement des cloches de son village; que le récit soit plaisant ou pathétique, jamais la note ne sonne faux, jamais la bizarrerie ne dégénère en puérilité burlesque.

C’est là un tour de force comme il ne s’en fait pas souvent, et c’est avec enthousiasme que je tends la main à M. Drummond pour le féliciter de l’avon accompli.

Il a véritablement fait là œuvre de poète et d’artiste.

J’ajouterai qu’il a fait aussi œuvre de bon citoyen. Car le jour sous lequel il présente mes compatriotes illettrés ne peut manquer de valoir à ceux-ci—et partant à tout le reste de la nationalité—un accroissement desirable dans l’estime de nos compatriotes de langue anglaise, qui n’ont pas été à même de les étudier d’aussi près que M. Drummond.

La peinture qu’en fait le poète est on ne peut plus sympathique et juste; et de semblables procédés ne peuvent que cimenter l’union de cœur et n’esprit qui doit exister entre toutes les fractions qui composent la grande famille canadienne appelée à vivre et à prospérer sous la même loi et le même drapeau.

En lisant les vers de M. Drummond, le Canadien-français sent que c’est là l’expression d’une âme amie; et, à ce compte, je dois á l’auteur plus que mes bravos, je lui dois en même temps un chaleureux merci.

Louis Fréchette.

Montréal, 13 octobre 1897.

Preface

IN presenting to the public “The Habitant, and other French-Canadian Poems,” I feel that my friends who are already, more or less, familiar with the work, understand that I have not written the verses as examples of a dialect, or with any thought of ridicule.

Having lived, practically, all my life, side by side with the French-Canadian people, I have grown to admire and love them, and I have felt that while many of the English-speaking public know perhaps as well as myself the French-Canadian of the cities, yet they have had little opportunity of becoming acquainted with the habitant, therefore I have endeavored to paint a few types, and in doing this, it has seemed to me that I could best attain the object in view by having my friends tell their own tales in their own way, as they would relate them to English-speaking auditors not conversant with the French tongue.

My good friend, Dr. Louis Fréchette, Poet Laureate, has, as a French-Canadian, kindly written an “Introductory” in his own graceful language, and I have to thank him above all for his recognition of the spirit which has actuated me in writing “dialect” verse.

William Henry Drummond.

Montreal, September, 1897.

Contents

PAGE

The Habitant

1

The Wreck of the “Julie Plante”—A Legend of Lac St. Pierre

7

Le Vieux Temps

9

“De Papineau Gun”—An Incident of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837

18

How Bateese Came Home

21

De Nice Leetle Canadienne

30

’Poleon Doré—A Tale of the Saint Maurice

32

De Notaire Publique

39

A Canadian Voyageur’s Account of the Nile Expedition—“Maxime Labelle”

42

Memories

49

Phil-o-rum Juneau—A Story of the “Chasse Gallerie”

52

De Bell of Saint Michel

63

Pelang

65

Mon Choual “Castor”

70

Ole Tam on Bord-À Plouffe

75

The Grand Seigneur

80

M’sieu Smit, The Adventures of an Englishman in the Canadian Woods

82

When Albani Sang

91

De Camp on de “Cheval Gris”

98

De Stove Pipe Hole

104

“De Snowbird”

110

The Habitant’s Jubilee Ode

113

Ole Docteur Fiset

118

Johnnie Courteau

122

The Corduroy Road

125

The Curé of Calumette

131

The Oyster Schooner

137

My Leetle Cabane

140

Bateese the Lucky Man

144

The Hill of St. Sebastien

145

Marie Louise

149

The Old House and the New

153

The Canadian Country Doctor

158

Mon Frere Camille

163

The Habitant’s Summer

169

Little Lac Grenier—(Gren-Yay)

175

The Windigo

177

National Policy

187

Autumn Days

190

Madeleine Vercheres

192

The “Rose Delima”

199

Little Mouse

210

Strathcona’s Horse

212

Johnnie’s First Moose

214

The Old Pine Tree

218

Little Bateese

220

Donal’ Campbell

222

The Dublin Fusilier

225

Dreams

229

The Old Sexton

231

Child Thoughts—Written to Commemorate the Anniversary of my Brother Tom’s Birthday

235

Bateese and his Little Decoys

237

Phil-o-Rum’s Canoe

242

The Log Jam

246

The Canadian Magpie

252

The Red Canoe

255

Two Hundred Years Ago

256

The Voyageur

259

Bruno the Hunter

262

Pride

265

Dieudonné (God-Given)

272

The Devil

273

The Family Laramie

281

Yankee Families

282

The Last Portage

286

Getting On

288

Pioneers

292

Natural Philosophy

297

Champlain

300

Pro Patria

305

Getting Stout

310

Doctor Hilaire

313

Barbotte (Bull-pout)

320

The Rossignol

322

Meb-be

325

Snubbing (Tying-up) the Raft

327

A Rainy Day in Camp

332

Josette

335

Joe Boucher

337

Charmette

340

Lac Souci

342

Poirier’s Rooster

345

Dominique

349

Home

352

Canadian Forever

355

Twins

357

Keep Out of the Weeds

359

The Holy Island

362

The Rivière des Prairies

367

The Wind that Lifts the Fog

372

The Fox Hunt

374

The Great Fight

379

Victoria Square—An Idyll

384

Marriage

387

We’re Irish Yet

392

Chibougamou

394

The First Robin

401

Bloom—A Song of Cobalt

406

The Boy from Calabogie

407

The Calcite Vein—A Tale of Cobalt

409

Pierre Leblanc

413

Silver Lake Camp

418

The Tale of a Cocktail

419

The Land we Live in and the Land we Left

422

Deer-Hunting—(By an Expert)

423

“He Only Wore a Shamrock”

425

The Godbout

427

Doonside

430

The Spanish Bird

431

Boule

432

Cauda Morrhuae

437

Index to Titles

441

Index to First Lines

445

Remember when these tales you read

Of rude but honest “Canayen,”

That Joliet, La Verandrye,

La Salle, Marquette, and Hennepin

Were all true “Canayen” themselves—

And in their veins the same red stream:

The conquering blood of Normandie

Flowed strong, and gave America

Coureurs de bois and voyageurs

The Habitant

DE place I get born, me, is up on de reever

  Near foot of de rapide dat’s call Cheval Blanc

Beeg mountain behin’ it, so high you can’t climb it

  An’ whole place she’s mebbe two honder arpent.

De fader of me, he was habitant farmer,

  Ma gran’fader too, an’ hees fader also,

Dey don’t mak’ no monee, but dat isn’t fonny

  For it’s not easy get ev’ryt’ing, you mus’ know—

All de sam’ dere is somet’ing dey got ev’ryboddy,

  Dat’s plaintee good healt’, wat de monee can’t geev,

So I’m workin’ away dere, an’ happy for stay dere

  On farm by de reever, so long I was leev.

O! dat was de place w’en de spring tam she’s comin’,

  W’en snow go away, an’ de sky is all blue—

W’en ice lef’ de water, an’ sun is get hotter

  An’ back on de medder is sing de gouglou—

W’en small sheep is firs’ comin’ out on de pasture,

  Deir nice leetle tail stickin’ up on deir back,

Dey ronne wit’ deir moder, an’ play wit’ each oder

  An’ jomp all de tam jus’ de sam’ dey was crack—

An’ ole cow also, she’s glad winter is over,

  So she kick herse’f up, an’ start off on de race

Wit’ de two-year-ole heifer, dat’s purty soon lef’ her,

  W’y ev’ryt’ing’s crazee all over de place!

An’ down on de reever de wil’ duck is quackin’

  Along by de shore leetle san’ piper ronne—

De bullfrog he’s gr-rompin’ an’ doré is jompin’

  Dey all got deir own way for mak’ it de fonne.

But spring’s in beeg hurry, an’ don’t stay long wit us

  An’ firs’ t’ing we know, she go off till nex’ year,

Den bee commence hummin’, for summer is comin’

  An’ purty soon corn’s gettin’ ripe on de ear.

Dat’s very nice tam for wake up on de morning

  An’ lissen de rossignol sing ev’ry place,

Feel sout’ win’ a-blowin’, see clover a-growin’,

  An’ all de worl’ laughin’ itself on de face.

Mos’ ev’ry day raf’ it is pass on de rapide

  De voyageurs singin’ some ole chanson

’Bout girl down de reever—too bad dey mus’ leave her,

But comin’ back soon’ wit’ beaucoup d’argent.

An’ den w’en de fall an’ de winter come roun us

  An’ bird of de summer is all fly away,

W’en mebbe she’s snowin’ an’ nort’ win’ is blowin’

An’ night is mos’ t’ree tam so long as de day.

You t’ink it was bodder de habitant farmer?

  Not at all—he is happy an’ feel satisfy,

An’ cole may las’ good w’ile, so long as de woodpile

  Is ready for burn on de stove by an’ bye.

W’en I got plaintee hay put away on de stable

  So de sheep an’ de cow, dey got no chance to freeze,

An’ de hen all togedder—I don’t min’ de wedder—

  De nort’ win’ may blow jus’ so moche as she please.

An’ some cole winter night how I wish you can see us,

  W’en I smoke on de pipe, an’ de ole woman sew

By de stove of T’ree Reever—ma wife’s fader geev her

  On day we get marry, dat’s long tam ago—

De boy an’ de girl, dey was readin’ its lesson,

  De cat on de corner she’s bite heem de pup,

Ole “Carleau” he’s snorin’ an’ beeg stove is roarin’

  So loud dat I’m scare purty soon she bus’ up.

Philomene—dat’s de oldes’—is sit on de winder

  An’ kip jus’ so quiet lak wan leetle mouse,

She say de more finer moon never was shiner—

  Very fonny, for moon isn’t dat side de house.

But purty soon den, we hear foot on de outside,

  An’ some wan is place it hees han’ on de latch,

Dat’s Isidore Goulay, las’ fall on de Brulé

  He’s tak’ it firs’ prize on de grand ploughin’ match.

Ha! ha! Philomene!—dat was smart trick you play us

  Come help de young feller tak’ snow from hees neck,

Dere’s not’ing for hinder you come off de winder

  W’en moon you was look for is come, I expec’—

The Wreck of the “Julie Plante”—A Legend of Lac St. Pierre

ON wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,

  De win’ she blow, blow, blow,

An’ de crew of de wood scow “Julie Plante”

  Got scar’t an’ run below—

For de win’ she blow lak hurricane

  Bimeby she blow some more,

An’ de scow bus’ up on Lac St. Pierre

  Wan arpent from de shore.

De captinne walk on de fronte deck,

  An’ walk de hin’ deck too—

He call de crew from up de hole

  He call de cook also.

De cook she’s name was Rosie,

  She come from Montreal,

Was chambre maid on lumber barge,

  On de Grande Lachine Canal.

De win’ she blow from nor’-eas’-wes’,—

  De sout’ win’ she blow too,

W’en Rosie cry “Mon cher captinne,

  Mon cher, w’at I shall do?”

Den de Captinne t’row de big ankerre,

  But still the scow she dreef,

De crew he can’t pass on de shore,

  Becos’ he los’ hees skeef.

De night was dark lak’ wan black cat,

  De wave run high an’ fas’,

W’en de captinne tak’ de Rosie girl

  An’ tie her to de mas’.

Den he also tak’ de life preserve,

  An’ jomp off on de lak’,

An’ say, “Good-bye, ma Rosie dear,

  I go drown for your sak’.”

Nex’ morning very early

  ’Bout ha’f-pas’ two—t’ree—four—

De captinne—scow—an’ de poor Rosie

  Was corpses on de shore,

For de win’ she blow lak’ hurricane

  Bimeby she blow some more,

An’ de scow bus’ up on Lac St. Pierre,

  Wan arpent from de shore.

Le Vieux Temps

VENEZ ici, mon cher ami, an’ sit down by me—so

An’ I will tole you story of old tam long ago—

W’en ev’ryt’ing is happy—w’en all de bird is sing

An’ me!—I’m young an’ strong lak moose an’ not afraid no t’ing.

I close my eye jus’ so, an’ see de place w’ere I am born—

I close my ear an’ lissen to musique of de horn,

Dat’s horn ma dear ole moder blow—an only t’ing she play

Is “viens donc vite Napoléon—’peche toi pour votre souper.”—

An’ w’en he’s hear dat nice musique—ma leetle dog “Carleau”

Is place hees tail upon hees back—an’ den he’s let heem go—

He’s jomp on fence—he’s swimmin’ crik—he’s ronne two forty gait,

He say “dat’s somet’ing good for eat—Carleau mus’ not be late.”

O dem was pleasure day for sure, dem day of long ago

W’en I was play wit’ all de boy, an’ all de girl also;

An’ many tam w’en I’m alone an’ t’ink of day gone by

An’ pull latire an’ spark de girl, I cry upon my eye.

Ma fader an’ ma moder too, got nice, nice familee,

Dat’s ten garçon an’ t’orteen girl, was mak’ it twenty t’ree

But fonny t’ing de Gouvernement don’t geev de firs’ prize den

Lak w’at dey say dey geev it now, for only wan douzaine.

De English peep dat only got wan familee small size

Mus’ be feel glad dat tam dere is no honder acre prize

For fader of twelve chil’ren—dey know dat mus’ be so,

De Canayens would boss Kebeck—mebbe Ontario.

But dat is not de story dat I was gone tole you

About de fun we use to have w’en we leev a chez nous

We’re never lonesome on dat house, for many cavalier

Come at our place mos’ every night—especially Sun-day.

But tam I ’member bes’ is w’en I’m twenty-wan year—me—

An’ so for mak’ some pleasurement—we geev wan large soirée

De whole paroisse she be invite—de Curé he’s come too—

Wit plaintee peep from ’noder place—dat’s more I can tole you.

De night she’s cole an’ freeze also, chemin she’s fill wit snow

An’ on de chimley lak phantome, de win’ is mak’ it blow—

But boy an’ girl come all de sam an’ pass on grande parloir

For warm itself on beeg box stove, was mak’ on Trois Rivières—

An’ w’en Bonhomme Latour commence for tune up hees fidelle

It mak’ us all feel very glad—l’enfant! he play so well,

Musique suppose to be firs’ class, I offen hear, for sure

But mos’ bes’ man, beat all de res’, is ole Bateese Latour—

An’ w’en Bateese play Irish jeeg, he’s learn on Mattawa

Dat tam he’s head boss cook Shaintee—den leetle Joe Leblanc

Tak’ hole de beeg Marie Juneau an’ dance upon de floor

Till Marie say “Excuse to me, I cannot dance no more.”—

An’ den de Curé’s mak’ de speech—ole Curé Ladouceur!

He say de girl was spark de boy too much on some cornerre—

An’ so he’s tole Bateese play up ole fashion reel a quatre

An’ every body she mus’ dance, dey can’t get off on dat.

Away she go—hooraw! hooraw! plus fort Bateese, mon vieux

Camille Bisson, please watch your girl—dat’s bes’ t’ing you can do.

Pass on de right an’ tak’ your place Mamzelle Des Trois Maisons

You’re s’pose for dance on Paul Laberge, not Telesphore Gagnon.

Mon oncle Al-fred, he spik lak’ dat—’cos he is boss de floor,

An’ so we do our possibill an’ den commence encore.

Dem crowd of boy an’ girl I’m sure keep up until nex’ day

If ole Bateese don’t stop heseff, he come so fatigué.

An’ affer dat, we eat some t’ing, tak’ leetle drink also

An’ de Curé, he’s tole story of many year ago—

W’en Iroquois sauvage she’s keel de Canayens an’ steal deir hair,

An’ say dat’s only for Bon Dieu, we don’t behere—he don’t be dere.

But dat was mak’ de girl feel scare—so all de cavalier

Was ax hees girl go home right off, an’ place her on de sleigh,

An’ w’en dey start, de Curé say, “Bonsoir et bon voyage

Menagez-vous—tak’ care for you—prenez garde pour les sauvages.”

An’ den I go meseff also, an’ tak’ ma belle Elmire—

She’s nicer girl on whole Comté, an’ jus’ got eighteen year—

Black hair—black eye, an’ chick rosée dat’s lak wan fameuse on de fall

But don’t spik much—not of dat kin’, I can’t say she love me at all.

Ma girl—she’s fader beeg farmeur—leev ’noder side St. Flore

Got five-six honder acre—mebbe a leetle more—

Nice sugar bush—une belle maison—de bes’ I never see—

So w’en I go for spark Elmire, I don’t be mak’ de foolish me—

Elmire!—she’s pass t’ree year on school—Ste. Anne de la Perade

An’ w’en she’s tak’ de firs’ class prize, dat’s mak’ de ole man glad;

He say “Ba gosh—ma girl can wash—can keep de kitchen clean

Den change her dress—mak’ politesse before God save de Queen.”

Dey’s many way for spark de girl, an’ you know dat of course,

Some way dey might be better way, an’ some dey might be worse

But I lak’ sit some cole night wit’ my girl on ole burleau

Wit’ lot of hay keep our foot warm—an’ plaintee buffalo—

Dat’s geev good chances get acquaint—an’ if burleau upset

An’ t’row you out upon de snow—dat’s better chances yet—

An’ if you help de girl go home, if horse he ronne away

De girl she’s not much use at all—don’t geev you nice baiser!

Dat’s very well for fun ma frien’, but w’en you spark for keep

She’s not sam t’ing an’ mak’ you feel so scare lak’ leetle sheep

Some tam you get de fever—some tam you’re lak snowball

An’ all de tam you ack lak’ fou—can’t spik no t’ing at all.

Wall! dat’s de way I feel meseff, wit Elmire on burleau,