24 EMIGRATION TO CANADA 



One other incident that happened in the same winter I may 

 mention, to show the dangerous things new settlers in a new coun- 

 try had to pass through. One night, in the latter part of 

 winter, a shower of rain had fallen and caused all the logs to be 

 covered with a thin sheet of ice, I was chopping a beech tree 

 that was about a foot and a half through and standing on it at 

 the same time. My boots happened to slip off the log, the axe 

 flew from my hands, and my head scraped over the log and I 

 almost lost my senses, but soon found that no bones were broken, 

 but a small bone about my "Adam's Apple" was dislocated and 

 I could not get my head straight, until I shoved the bone back in 

 place again. The curious part of it is that that bone came out 

 occasionally for ten years after that accident happened. 



I shall say nothing about selling goods, while I was a clerk in 

 John Gibb's store, except in regard to one circumstance that shows 

 that I was not very wide awake at this stage of my life. I had 

 remarked that old ladies who came to the store to buy cotton and 

 such things always wanted me to sell it at a lower price than the 

 one fixed, so, to be even with them, when they came to the store, 

 I always added a cent to the price set per yard, and, after due 

 discussion and deliberation, I threw it off again, and got credit 

 from these older people, of being a very accommodating clerk. 

 Mr. Gibb noticed that the old ladies preferred me to wait upon 

 them and asked me the reason and I told him what I always did, 

 and he advised me to cease doing anything like that as he would 

 lose custom if it got around that he had two prices. 



After clerking, I went to Mrs. Carlow, who had an old farmer 

 called Ivey, as foreman, and a young man to take care of the 

 horses and I was just the young man that did odd jobs about the 

 place and had charge of nothing. During the summer, Mrs. Car- 

 low, being an Anglican, gave ten acres of her land, which was bush, 

 for an English Rectory and Church and she asked Mr. Ivey to 

 go and locate it. He reported that he was unable to do it and 

 she then asked the other man and he said that he had no idea of 

 how to go about it. In the end, she turned away in great indig- 

 nation and said it was an awful thing for her to have three men 

 about her who could not do a simple thing like that. I spoke up 



