Believe It Or Not (By M. McKenna, Kinkora)

It was the evening of a “rare” June day, of a day such as must have inspired Lowell’s picture in poetry which alas! we appreciated but little in our Fourth Reader days. I walked leisurely up the Kinkora road. H ow all about me soothed my weary, worn nerves! (My doc- tor — God bless him) —— had ordered me away from a busy New York office for a month’s holiday in peaceful Prince Edward Island.)

The Robin ’s vesper trill and the e’er sweeter musical notes of the Song Sparrow raised my heart to God; soft breezes rustled the pale green new leaves of the white birch es and wafted fragrant odors to me from the blossoming farm orchards. Along the footh paths, golden dandelions peered from the green, green grass —— green such as is seen nowhere else, so travellers say, except in Ireland. The same unique green in the June hay fields contrasted charmingly with the Island “red” soil as displayed in the acres under potatoes, where straight, even rows made by modern machinery were themselves things of beauty scarcely less pleasing than the rich plant growth and clustering blooms which covered the fields in six weeks time.

As I gazed across the fields to the comfortable farm homes of Newton, then bathed in the reflected rays of the setting sun, my eyes fell upon that homestead which my ancestors had hewn from the primeval forest. The magic of the evening cast the “spell of other days arOund me” and I seemed to see enacted before me a story of the middle 60’s that my grandfather loves to

relate: “Johnny, Johnny,” called his mother, leaning out

over the half-door of their pioneer log house, it’s time to go fetch the cows.” The sturdy nine-year—old boy thus

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summ oned—my future grandfather—was engaged in the self—imposed and, consequently, enjoyable task of digging worms for a flock of new chicks. He left it reluctantly but promptly, without staying to watch the outcome of a tug-of—war between two balls of fluff over a particularly juicy angle worm for well he knew his mother brooked no delay.

Ordinarily he would not have bothered with a hat, would have gratefully let the June breezes rumple his unparted hair, but that very day his mother had finish- ed fashioning for him a new hat, sewing the long braids of plaited wheat straws into shape. Johnny’s joy of possession was enhanced by the fact that he himself had picked out the unbroken straws from the bound sh eaves before the flails were put to work for threshing the previous Autumn. Indeed, he would not dream of going for the cows without his new hat! He regretted that his “frock” the common garb of small boys in those days, had faded from the nice blue it was when his mother had dyed the material woven from flax with a mixture of fermented buckwheat stems and alum. For a moment Johnny wondered where he had left his prized headpiece but remembered he had laid it on the kitchen settle bed, thinking it too laborious a job to reach the high row of wooden pegs—his big sister would hang it up when she went to open up the bed for the young lads.

Johnny’s heart was heavy as he thought of the long tramp he would likely have before he’d hear old Brin- dle’s bell, for then the cows did not pasture behind wire fences in snug fields luscious, with white clover. Newton’s few settlers had only a small acreage under cultivation. To the north of the road and beyond the Dunk River for miles to the North, East and West, stood thick forest which was at one time designated