After all, I fancy that the youngsters learn as much while they toss the hay in the clean, hot meadows, or when they drive the cattle along the shady roads to the lakes, as they would if penned in the little one-room houses, where some eighteen-year-old girl, just from high school, struggles with the work of all the grades at once.
This thing of getting an education is a mighty matter in Canada. The roads are dotted with schoolhouses, the papers have long columns of advertisements for teachers, and it is always specified as to whether Catholic or Protestant is needed. It seems the dear ambition of each family to produce at least one teacher, and the Normal School at Queensport turns them out by the score. On Monday mornings and Friday afternoons vehicles of every description travel to and from town, taking the girls home for Sundays and back for the week’s work.
Students hire a room in Queensport for two dollars a month, and with it goes the privilege of cooking on the family stove and sitting in a warm room to study. Those who live near enough to town bring their food from home, so food costs them nothing. Thus they work their difficult way through to the little country schools.
My neighbor, Mrs. Spellman, is doubly proud, for her two daughters are teaching, one in Alberta, the other in far-away British Columbia.
“It was hard work to give them their training,” she says. “Their father had no patience with the notion of sending them to high school, so he wouldn’t help. But I made up my mind that they should have their chance. They’d not be tied down to a farm all their days, as I’ve been. Mary, my eldest, was always such a home girl too. She wouldn’t hear of leaving me until I promised that she should come home every week. There wasn’t anyone to drive her to town and back but me, but I seen to it that she got home. Every Friday noon I’d harness up and go for her, coming back long after dark. Every Monday morning I’d be up before day, to feed the horse and cook breakfast in time to take her back to school again, and she never was late. I always had her there by nine o’clock. Sometimes the roads were so dark that I’d drive all the way with the reins in my two hands. I was afraid to hold them in the one hand lest I should get them crossed in the darkness and pull the horse out of the road and into the drifts. I’d feel sometimes as though my hands was frozen. But I never missed a week all those two long years. When Nellie, my second girl, went, it wasn’t so hard for me. The two stayed in Queensport together, and they didn’t get so homesick. Yes, it was a hard pull, but I’d do it all over again, for my children did well. They stood at the head of their class. I’m proud of them when they come home, summers.”