laboratory; my music-room is the forest in summer and the chimney in
winter, while my studio, according to the latest aesthetic fad--I
think that is the word--opens off the music-room.
"Now, if you take away art, science, literature, and society from
the daily life of a man, what do you leave? Simply the three radical
necessities of sleeping, eating, working. My work I do mostly in the
open air, so that, practically, I need but two rooms, one to cook in
and the other to sleep in. I have always felt convinced that to be
happy I only require two rooms, except on extra cold nights, when I
find that one suffices. That is when Tim and I lie near the kitchen
fire to keep warm. Home! Why of course it is home. Didn't I build
the house myself? What association is dearer than that? To come into
a pile of half-ruined towers, all gables and gargoyles, built
somewhere about the fourteenth century, and added to by every fool
who liked, without the slightest pretence to knowledge of
architecture and civilization may be very gratifying, but, strange
as it may seem, I prefer the work of my own hands. I am quite a
Canadian, of course, though I once was an Englishman. I array myself
in strange raiment, thick and woollen, of many colours; my linen is
coarse and sometimes superseded by flannel; I wear a cast-off fur
cap on my head and moccasins on my feet. I have grown a beard and a
fierce moustache. I have made no money and won no friends except the
simple settlers around me here. And I shall grow old and grey in
your service, my Muskoka. I shall be forty-one on my next birthday.
Then will come fifty-one, another ten years and sixty-one. All to be
lived here? Yes, I have sworn it. Not Arcady, not Utopia, only
Muskoka, but very dear to me. There is the forest primeval! I know
everything in it from the Indian pipe--clammy white thing, but how
pretty!--to that great birch there with the bark peeling off in
pieces a yard wide. There is the lovely Shadow river. Masses of
cardinal flowers grow there in the summer, and when I take my boat
|