60 EURAL LIFE IN CA:N^ADA 



of wood carefully laid, and seeing the strange gases ooze 

 through the covering of clay, while creosote condensed 

 and dripped from the inserted gun-barrel. How differ- 

 ent the amount of labor bestowed on such products then 

 and now ! As we detrained at Longford to come over 

 here to Geneva Park a day or two ago we passed one of 

 the Canada Chemical Company's extensive plants, 

 where by the carload wood is run, car and all, into the 

 retort, and the car comes out at length with a load of 

 charcoal upon it ready for shipment. Now, too, the dis- 

 tillates, formerly wasted, pay for both material and 

 process, and the once costly charcoal is a clear-gain by- 

 product. 



In the open country on the other side of the village by 

 the Chateauguay another smith — master alike of his 

 trade and the situation — forged the long iron-frame 

 plow, so heavy to turn at the furrow's end, but so light 

 of draft upon the team because of true lines of design 

 and fine workmanship. With that same long plow the 

 plowmen of the days of my boyhood turned furrows so 

 true in line and so clean in comb that a rifle bullet might 

 be fired from end to end of the field on those level 

 meadows without once rising above the crest of the fur- 

 row, yet without staining itself with touch of the clay. 

 Presently there came to the village the machine-shop 

 also, for local service, and for well-nigh a generation 

 the threshing-machines for the locality were of home 

 manufacture. Space forbids my describing other busy 

 shops — those of the tailors, the shoemakers, the sad- 

 dlers, and many another. In that small village of eight 

 hundred people there were then over thirty-five such 

 shop industries. 



