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Soon after the parcel arrived, Susanna decided to leave Lakefield. Perhaps she had simply had enough of Westove’s endless stream of relatives with their crying babies. It must have been hard for her to stomach the contrast between Catharine’s children, who showered their mother with affection and worried about her health, and her own offspring, whose attention to her was fitful at best. Or maybe she left because Agnes’s will, with its ostentatious concern for Catharine and disregard for Susanna, pushed her youngest sister’s nose painfully out of joint. For whatever reason, Susanna packed her bags and took the train back to Toronto.

From now on, Susanna stayed only a few weeks at Lakefield each summer, and spent the rest of the time in Toronto, where Robert now lived, and where she could be close to her Moodie and Vickers grandchildren. There was a more varied stream of visitors in Toronto than in Lakefield to amuse Susanna with talk of exotic new fashions, such as spotted veils and women’s rights. It was still not very comfortable living with Robert (he moved house seven times in less than three years), but Nellie Moodie had returned home after three years in the asylum and was willing to cherish her cantankerous mother-in-law.

Susanna was a petulant old woman, but she always kept her sense of humour. Her own children found her moods hard to bear, but her grandchildren appreciated her mischievous stories about their relatives. Who wouldn’t be amused by a grandmother who wrote funny verse, as Susanna did to fourteen-year-old William Vickers, the fourth of Katie Vickers’s ten children? William, a student at Upper Canada College in Toronto, had lost the March 1885 that the old lady seemed ready another pair. Susanna replied:

You careless fellow!—What, lost your mitts?

Aren’t you afraid I’ll give you fits?

Punch your head, or slap your face,

Or send to a corner in dire disgrace?

Were I a lady young and fair,

You would certainly take the greatest care,

Of the smallest thing her love could proffer,

So what excuse my lad can you offer?

By 1876, Susanna’s eyesight was no longer sharp enough to knit, but her wit was quite sharp enough for verse.

When I take up the pins in your behalf

I give you leave my boy to laugh—

At old Knitty Knotty, who loves you well,

And hopes to see you a learned swell.

When Catharine and Susanna were apart, they thought fondly of each other—even though they knew that, together, they got on each other’s nerves. They exchanged frequent letters, never forgetting to mark each other’s birthdays. Susanna wrote to “my beloved sister of old” whose face “seems looking at me through the dim mist of years in its youthful bloom.” She assured friends that “My dear sister Catharine is as amiable and loveable as ever….We still love with the old love through weal or woe.” The sisters were now in their seventies, and with each passing year, more ailments filled their letters. Catharine’s lumbago made writing uncomfortable; Susanna had an “odious hernia” which prevented her from walking very far. Both women complained of failing memories (although each could reel off the name of every single family member on each side of the Atlantic). More poignantly, Susanna began to suffer spells of dementia. “I had no idea,” she wrote sadly in 1882, “that age was such a ruthless destroyer of the senses and so perfectly obliterates the past, by mingling it up with the present.”

In 1883, Catharine received a summons from Robert Moodie: Susanna was sick. As Catharine boarded the 2:30 pm train to Toronto at Lakefield Station on a gloomy November afternoon, she wondered whether she would ever see any of her sisters again in this world. “There are only four of all the old Stricklands left,” Catharine had written sadly to Ellen Dunlop that morning. “Two in England—Mrs. Gwillym 85—Jane Margaret 83—myself 81—and dear Mrs. Moodie in her eightieth year—an aged sisterhood.” After a seven-hour journey, she stepped onto the platform at the