84 WILD, OR XATIVE FLOWERS. 



a certain remedy in the herbs of the field and trees of the forest ; that 

 there is a sovereign virtue in roots and barks, and leaves and flowers, if 

 man will but search them out and test their qualities. 



The use of simples, as the vegetable medicament used emphatically 

 to be termed, has always found advocates in the lower classes, especially 

 amongst the humble country-folk, who dread mineral medicines, with 

 the nature of which they are totally unacquainted — preferring the herbs 

 of the field, which they see growing about them, to the more costly 

 Doctor's stuff, as they call the prescriptive medicines of the physician. 

 To the Herb Doctor they apply with every confidence, entertaining no 

 fear of the vegetable poisons, in which he often deals ; in his skill they 

 have unlimited faith. 



Much of this kind of knowledge is possessed by the old Canadian and 

 Yankee settlers, those hardy pioneers who emigrated from the United 

 States at the close of the Revolutionary War, induced by the promised 

 reward of certain grants of land in return for their professed, or actually 

 proved attachment to the British Government. These families under 

 the appellation of U. E. or United Empire Loyalists, spread themselves 

 along the then unbroken forests on the shores of the St. Lawrence, and 

 bore hardships and privations, to which there are few parallel cases. 



Dwellers in the lonely, leafy wilderness, with no road but the 

 rushing river, or broad-spread sea-like lake. They lived apart from their 

 fellow-men ; self-dependent, they '■elied upon their own ingenuity and 

 personal exertions for the actual necessaries of life. The men supplied 

 the household with game from the forest (it was over-plentiful in those 

 days) and fish from the lakes and streams. While in clearing the land 

 and cultivating it in the rude fashion of those days, the women and 

 children, without respect of age and sex, did their part. On the females 

 depended the manufacture of every article of clothing ; the loom 

 occupied a prominent place in the log-house, and the big spinning-wheel 

 the stoop in Summer. 



Occasionally a few families l)Ound together by ties of love, or interest, 

 wisely formed a colony and lived within a reasonable distance from one 

 another ; but more commonly their grants comprising many hundreds of 

 acres, according to the number of persons in one household, the settlers 

 were thrown far apart. A blazed path through the forest their only 

 means of communication by land ; and this often interrupted by rapid 

 unbridged streams, or impenetrable cedar-swamps. 



In case of accidents, such as wounds from axes, broken limbs, and 

 such ailments as agues and fevers, necessity compelled active measures 

 to be adopted on the spot ; medical-practitioners, so called, there were 



