Mrs. Moodie seemed to think that it was a great privilege to have been in London while the Catholic Emancipation Act and the Reform Bills were carried, and still in her comfortable house in Toronto loves to talk of the bustle and excitement of the time. I was privileged twice to see her, and then we parted, never more to meet—in this world, at least.
Near Peterborough, about a hundred and fifty miles from Toronto, I found another far-famed Canadian authoress, Mrs. Traill, whose ‘Backwoods of Canada,’ published when I was a lad by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, and now, I believe, by Messrs. Routledge and Sons, was a delight to me in my young days. I remember her well as a young woman, tall and stately, with a wonderful flow of talk—enthusiastic as a worshipper of nature—ever ready to write of Suffolk lanes, with all their richness of floral and animal life; of Suffolk copses, where the birds sang, and the partridge and the pheasant and the timid hare found shelter; of farmers, then merry, and of peasants, then contented with their humble lot.
In person she was attractive, the most so, to my mind, of all the Strickland family, and she was very stately in manner, for was not her maiden name Katherine Parr Strickland, and had she not some of the blood of that family allied to royalty in her veins? The Stricklands came of an ancient and honoured line, and besides that, there is a great deal in names, as the reader of ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘Kenelm Chillingly’ perfectly understands. What could you expect of a Katherine Parr Strickland but queenly manner, as assuredly the young lady who bore that name had?
When I was a lad, she married a Major Traill, and accompanied her sister, Mrs. Moodie, to Canada. I cannot think how ladies thus tenderly nursed could have done anything of the kind—or, having done it, how they could have survived the hardships they were called to endure. The lot in their case was by no means cast in pleasant places. Mrs. Moodie, in her delightful book, ‘Roughing It in the Bush,’ says: ‘A large number of the immigrants were officers of the army and navy, with their families—a class perfectly unfitted by their previous habits and standing in society for contending with the stern realities of emigrant life in the backwoods. A class formed mainly from the younger scions of great families, naturally proud, and not only accustomed to command, but to receive implicit obedience from the people under them, are not men adapted to the hard toil of the woodman’s life.’