Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [162]
The most significant of Ottawa’s scientists to call at 52 Alexander Street was Sandford Fleming. Fleming, the surveyor and engineering genius behind the Pacific Railway, bubbled over with ideas to improve mail service, science education and communications. At the time of Catharine’s visit, he was going full bore on the campaign for which he is best remembered: the need for global uniformity in time-keeping. (Before the nineteenth century drew to its close, the whole world would adopt his idea of dividing the world into one-hour time zones, with a mean time based on the prime meridian through Greenwich, London). He was also a generous teddy-bear of a man: instead of trying to remember the individual birthdays of his many grandchildren and their friends, he sent them all presents on his own birthday.
Fleming had met Mrs. Traill years ago in Peterborough, where he had arrived as an eighteen-year-old Scottish immigrant in 1845. When he heard she was in town, he immediately came calling. He cut a wonderful figure, with his huge bushy beard and powerful gait, as he strode through record-breaking snowdrifts from his mansion in Sandy Hill to the Chamberlins’ house. Catharine was thrilled by his visit. “He was so kind and cordial it was pleasant to meet with the old dear and he said he would come again soon.”
A brilliant engineer, Catharine’s friend Sandford Fleming (1827–1915) was the inventor of Standard Time and a man of irrepressible charm and boundless energy.
Catharine, indefatigable as ever, packed in plenty of sightseeing in the capital. She saw the fish hatchery organized by Samuel Wilmot, the Dominion’s superintendant of fish culture, where trout, salmon, whitefish, herring, bass and pike were being bred to stock lakes and rivers. She admired the Dominion collection of stuffed animals and birds, and the collection of Indian canoes and artifacts, in the newly built Victoria Hall. Leaning heavily on Agnes Chamberlin’s arm, she walked through the marble corridors of the Parliament Buildings and into the ornately carved elegance of the Parliamentary Library. She was almost overwhelmed when the Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, appeared “and greeted me very cordially.” These glimpses of scientific inquiry and national purpose were of much greater interest to her than Viennese waltzes.
The best news came when, largely thanks to James Fletcher, the Ottawa publisher A.S. Woodburn agreed to publish her manuscript under the title of Studies of Plant Life in Canada. It would be a more modest production than Wild Flowers of Canada: Woodburn wanted to bring it out as a quarto-sized volume, with twenty chromo-lithographs from drawings by Agnes Chamberlin. The introduction was quintessential Catharine, and encapsulated all the themes she had developed in half a century of botanical study. She wrote how, during her early years in the backwoods, forest flowers and shrubs “became like dear friends, soothing and cheering, by their sweet unconscious influence, hours of loneliness and hours of sorrow and suffering.” She insisted that her careful catalogue of plants, which included the Latin name for each plus a host of botanical and literary references, was “not a book for the learned.” The flowers of the field, she wrote, were good reminders of the teachings of Christ. And she deplored the fact that so little effort was being made to record native plants before they vanished “as civilization extends through the Dominion.”
Studies of Plant Life in Canada appeared in 1885, a couple of months before Catharine travelled down to Toronto to sit with her dying sister. The book’s reception lightened Catharine’s mood as she watched Susanna’s steady decline and heard her sad, unhappy rantings. The Toronto Globe wrote of Catharine’s publication: “There is in it enough of technicality to make it extremely useful to the student, while there is about it a literary charm that will lead even