”MY LIFE IN CRAPAUD"

By GENE AUTUMN

(As appeared in Charlottetown Guardian) Saturday, November 8, 1929

My boyhood days in Crapaud, 85 years ago, are passed and gone, and what I knew and saw with my own eyes, and the ups and downs since, up to the present time, may be worth recording.

Well, in the good old days, our mothers wore white caps, the border all crumpled up with curling irons. In those days, the good house- wife used wood buckets, made by the Indians, and bought their splint brooms at Sixpence a piece. We used to go to their camps and watch them making baskets, while their girls used to throw their splints at us and laugh. I was interested in their life. They lived below Sturdy Bridge, on land given by John Hall for a timber yard, and every Indian family had a birch bark boat to row up and down the river; and at that time, they had a free run of all the woods, and made a good living. We had no French living in Crapaud, and our land, our woods, our homes, were never bought with human blood, for peace reigned supreme.

Crapaud never had a murder, and never sent a man, to penitentiary. There once lived a man in Crapaud -— his name was Big John, an old bachelor from the Old C‘outry, who made carts and truck wheels, and also made our coffins, which he called dead men’s overcoats. He lived at Hampton, on the roadside: in a bush. He had a small workshop boarded up and down with hemlock boards, and lived, in it. He had a rough stone chimney at the west end, a bed in one corner, no floor in front of the fireplace, where he did all his chopping. He cooked, he ate and washed, and did everything in his little workshop. He went out shearing sheep every spring, and at last he died without a friend at his bedside. But the neighbors had a little love for him, for they buried him in the chapel yard, and then called a sale and sold his tools to pay for his burial, and now his grave, his work, his place that knew him once, knows him no more.

Crapaud has a beautiful sheet of water. I remember that at one time there was a bright light seen on the east end of the bay every summer night, and when you sailed out to it, it would move away to another spot, and you could not get close to it. I think it must have been a diamond or some bright pearl, or a ghost. It disappeared long ago. I suppose it was covered in deep sand.

SHIPPING DAYS

In my young days, I remember William W. Lord of Charlotte-town, — a great business man. ,He built a great many ships in town and in Crapaud. He ran a great trade with the Old Country. He bought up all our hardwood timber and sent it home to Ireland. Mr. Lord brought out a number of immigrants who settled at Kelly’s Cross, on wood farms rented at one shilling an acre. Here they cut down the woods, cleared up the land, made timber in the winter, and hauled it out to Sturdy’s Mill, and in the summer — high spring tides — they made small rafts and pulled them down below Wington Bridge and put them into one big raft : and then rolled them out to the basin.

The Irish people had good English tongues, very sweet voices, and were good singers, and the best of neighbors. Their children, that hired out, were honest and the best of servants. I knew them well. I saw one

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