“That blackguard calls himself a gentleman.  In what respect is he better than us?” was an observation too frequently made use of at these gatherings.  To see a bad man in the very worst point of view, follow him to a bee:  be he profane, licentious, quarrelsome, or a rogue, all his native wickedness will be fully developed there.

Just after the last of these logging-bees, we had to part with our good servant Mary, and just at a time when it was the heaviest loss to me.  Her father, who had been a dairyman in the north of Ireland, an honest, industrious man, had brought out upwards of one hundred pounds to this country.  With more wisdom than is generally exercised by Irish emigrants, instead of sinking all his means in buying a bush farm, he hired a very good farm in Cavan, with cattle, and returned to his old avocation.  The services of his daughter, who was an excellent dairymaid, were required to take the management of the cows; and her brother brought a wagon and horses all the way from the front to take her home.

This event was perfectly unexpected, and left me without a moment’s notice to provide myself with another servant, at a time when servants were not to be had, and I was perfectly unable to do the least thing.  My little Addie was sick almost to death with the summer complaint, and the eldest still too young to take care of herself.

This was but the beginning of trouble.

Ague and lake fever had attacked our new settlement.  The men in the shanty were all down with it; and my husband was confined to his bed on each alternate day, unable to raise hand or foot, and raving in the delirium of the fever.

In my sister and brother’s families, scarcely a healthy person remained to attend upon the sick; and at Herriot’s Falls, nine persons were stretched upon the floor of one log cabin, unable to help themselves or one another.  After much difficulty, and only by offering enormous wages, I succeeded in procuring a nurse to attend upon me during my confinement.  The woman had not been a day in the house before she was attacked by the same fever.  In the midst of this confusion, and with my precious little Addie lying insensible on a pillow at the foot of my bed—­expected at every moment to breathe her last—­on the night of the 26th of August the boy I had so ardently coveted was born.  The next day, old Pine carried his wife (my nurse) away upon his back, and I was left to struggle through, in the best manner I could, with a sick husband, a sick child, and a newborn babe.

It was a melancholy season, one of severe mental and bodily suffering.  Those who have drawn such agreeable pictures of a residence in the backwoods never dwell upon the periods of sickness, when, far from medical advice, and often, as in my case, deprived of the assistance of friends by adverse circumstances, you are left to languish, unattended, upon the couch of pain.

The day that my husband was free of the fit, he did what he could for me and his poor sick babes, but, ill as he was, he was obliged to sow the wheat to enable the man the proceed with the drag, and was therefore necessarily absent in the field the greater part of the day.