To some minds solitude is depressing,
to others it is congenial. It was the former
to our friend John Robinson; yet he had a large share
of it in his chequered life. John more
familiarly known as Jack was as romantic
as his name was the reverse. To look at him you
would have supposed that he was the most ordinary
of common-place men, but if you had known him, as
we did, you would have discovered that there was a
deep, silent, but ever-flowing river of enthusiasm,
energy, fervour in a word, romance in
his soul, which seldom or never manifested itself in
words, and only now and then, on rare occasions, flashed
out in a lightning glance, or blazed up in a fiery
countenance. For the most part Jack was calm
as a mill-pond, deep as the Atlantic, straightforward
and grave as an undertaker’s clerk and good-humoured
as an unspoilt and healthy child.
Jack never made a joke, but, certes,
he could enjoy one; and he had a way of showing his
enjoyment by a twinkle in his blue eye and a chuckle
in his throat that was peculiarly impressive.
Jack was a type of a large class.
He was what we may call an outskirter of the
world. He was one of those who, from the force
of necessity, or of self-will, or of circumstances,
are driven to the outer circle of this world to do
as Adam and Eve’s family did, battle with Nature
in her wildest scenes and moods; to earn his bread,
literally, in the sweat of his brow.
Jack was a middle-sized man of strong
make. He was not sufficiently large to overawe
men by his size, neither was he so small as to invite
impertinence from “big bullies,” of whom
there were plenty in his neighbourhood. In short,
being an unpretending man and a plain man, with a
good nose and large chin and sandy hair, he was not
usually taken much notice of by strangers during his
journeyings in the world; but when vigorous action
in cases of emergency was required Jack Robinson was
the man to make himself conspicuous.
It is not our intention to give an
account of Jack’s adventurous life from beginning
to end, but to detail the incidents of a sojourn of
two months at Fort Desolation, in almost utter solitude,
in order to show one of the many phases of rough life
to which outskirters are frequently subjected.
In regard to his early life it may
be sufficient to say that Jack, after being born,
created such perpetual disturbance and storm in the
house that his worthy father came to look upon him
as a perfect pest, and as soon as possible sent him
to a public school, where he fought like a Mameluke
Bey, learned his lessons with the zeal of a philosopher,
and, at the end of ten years ran away to sea, where
he became as sick as a dog and as miserable as a convicted
felon.
Poor Jack was honest of heart and
generous of spirit, but many a long hard year did
he spend in the rugged parts of the earth ere he recovered,
(if he ever did recover), from the evil effects of
this first false step.
In course of time Jack was landed
in Canada, with only a few shillings in his pocket;
from that period he became an outskirter. The
romance in his nature pointed to the backwoods; he
went thither at once, and was not disappointed.
At first the wild life surpassed his expectations,
but as time wore on the tinsel began to wear off the
face of things, and he came to see them as they actually
were. Nevertheless, the romance of life did
not wear out of his constitution. Enthusiasm,
quiet but deep, stuck to him all through his career,
and carried him on and over difficulties that would
have disgusted and turned back many a colder spirit.
Jack’s first success was the
obtaining of a situation as clerk in the store of
a general merchant in an outskirt settlement of Canada.
Dire necessity drove him to this. He had been
three weeks without money and nearly two days without
food before he succumbed. Having given in, however,
he worked like a Trojan, and would certainly have advanced
himself in life if his employer had not failed and
left him, minus a portion of his salary, to “try
again.”
Next, he became an engineer on board
one of the Missouri steamers, in which capacity he
burst his boiler, and threw himself and the passengers
into the river the captain having adopted
the truly Yankee expedient of sitting down on the
safety-valve while racing with another boat!
Afterwards, Jack Robinson became clerk
in one of the Ontario steam-boats, but, growing tired
of this life, he went up the Ottawa, and became overseer
of a sawmill. Here, being on the frontier of
civilisation, he saw the roughest of Canadian life.
The lumbermen of that district are a mixed race French-Canadians,
Irishmen, Indians, half-castes, etcetera, and
whatever good qualities these men might possess in
the way of hewing timber and bush-life, they were sadly
deficient in the matters of morality and temperance.
But Jack was a man of tact and good temper, and played
his cards well. He jested with the jocular,
sympathised with the homesick, doctored the ailing
in a rough and ready fashion peculiarly his own, and
avoided the quarrelsome. Thus he became a general
favourite.
Of course it was not to be expected
that he could escape an occasional broil, and it was
herein that his early education did him good service.
He had been trained in an English school where he became
one of the best boxers. The lumberers on the
Ottawa were not practised in this science; they indulged
in that kicking, tearing, pommelling sort of mode which
is so repugnant to the feelings of an Englishman.
The consequence was that Jack had few fights, but
these were invariably with the largest bullies of
the district; and he, in each case, inflicted such
tremendous facial punishment on his opponent that
he became a noted man, against whom few cared to pit
themselves.
There are none so likely to enjoy
peace as those who are prepared for war. Jack
used sometimes to say, with a smile, that his few battles
were the price he had to pay for peace.
Our hero was unlucky. The saw-mill
failed its master being a drunkard.
When that went down he entered the lumber trade, where
he made the acquaintance of a young Scotchman, of
congenial mind and temperament, who suggested the
setting up of a store in a promising locality and
proposed entering into partnership. “Murray
and Robinson” was forthwith painted by the latter,
(who was a bit of an artist), over the door of a small
log-house, and the store soon became well known and
much frequented by the sparse population as well as
by those engaged in the timber trade.
But “the race is not to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong.” There
must have been a screw loose somewhere, for bad debts
accumulated and losses were incurred which finally
brought the firm to the ground, and left its dissevered
partners to begin the world over again!
After this poor Jack Robinson fell
into low spirits for a time, but he soon recovered,
and bought a small piece of land at a nominal price
in a region so wild that he had to cut his own road
to it, fell the trees with his own hand, and, in short,
reclaim it from the wilderness on the margin of which
it lay. This was hard work, but Jack liked hard
work, and whatever work he undertook he always did
it well. Strange that such a man could not get
on! yet so it was, that, in a couple of years, he
found himself little better off than he had been when
he entered on his new property. The region,
too, was not a tempting one. No adventurous
spirits had located themselves beside him, and only
a few had come within several miles of his habitation.
This did not suit our hero’s
sociable temperament, and he began to despond very
much. Still his sanguine spirit led him to persevere,
and there is no saying how long he might have continued
to spend his days and his energies in felling trees
and sowing among the stumps and hoping for better
days, had not his views been changed and his thoughts
turned into another channel by a letter.