Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [161]
Kind Lady Lansdowne rescued her guest and took her into Rideau Hall for refreshments. Catharine admired the platefuls of cakes and fruit, but contented herself with a cup of hot coffee. She was not impressed by the manners of her fellow guests: “all seemed bent on making the most of the liberal hospitality of His Excellency.” But she herself made quite an impression on others. When Agnes Chamberlin told her friend Mrs. John Thorburn, wife of the librarian of the Canadian Geological Survey, that her elderly aunt was present, Maria Thorburn made a beeline for Catharine and introduced herself. “I do love nice old ladies,” Maria wrote in her journal. “And she is so interesting, over eighty … I wonder if it is her love of nature that has kept her young and cheerful. Mrs. Traill has that pretty pink complexion that you see sometimes in old English ladies, a nice forehead and soft white hair.”
Catharine enjoyed her glimpse of viceregal life, but she had a particular motive for attending the Governor-General’s party. She knew that James Fletcher, a botanist and entomologist who was then sub-librarian in the Parliamentary Library, was likely to be present, and she wanted to ask his advice about her plant manuscript. Towards the end of the evening, wrote Maria Thorburn, “Mr. Fletcher made his appearance. I vacated my seat to him and left him and the old lady to consult on the matter.”
Catharine had got to know James Fletcher in the early 1880s, when she had tentatively sent him her manuscript for comment. Fletcher, who was born in Kent, England, was still a young man, but he became an instant ally to Catharine because he was a natural historian of the old school. “I am charmed with your style and find it so attractive after the irreverent materialistic philosophy, falsely so-called, of too many of our contemporary naturalists,” he had replied. “It is very charming for me to see such love for our beneficent creation, and reverence for His perfect works.” He read her manuscript carefully, marking with a red tick those flowers that he thought she had identified incorrectly, or for which she had given the wrong geographic locale. But he was a tactful editor. He suggested he send her specimens of the plants he had queried, so she could check. And he assured her that he had “seldom enjoyed any ‘communing with nature’ more than I have the perusal of your thoroughly and patently original notes on our loveliest treasures, the flowers of the field.”
Catharine’s Ottawa visit in 1884 allowed her to see other prominent scientific men in the capital. An extraordinary collection of self-educated and gifted engineers, geologists and biologists had gravitated to Ottawa after Confederation. These were men eager to participate in the great enterprise of discovering, mapping and developing the vast territories at Ottawa’s doorstep. Many were associated with the Geological Survey of Canada, which had moved from Montreal to Ottawa in 1881; most were charter members of Canada’s Royal Society, founded in 1882. Armed with specimen boxes and notebooks, they accompanied each other into the Gatineau Hills on the congenial field trips organized by the Ottawa Field Naturalists’ Club (of which James Fletcher was secretary-treasurer). In 1884, and during a handful of visits Catharine subsequently made to Ottawa, these distinguished scientists went out of their way to pay homage to the old lady who had written The