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great-aunt’s manuscripts. The editor particularly liked the short essays that she had written for children about different aspects of nature—the smell, sounds and sight of the Canadian woods in spring, for example, or the behaviour of such Canadian birds as pine grosbeaks and the increasingly rare scarlet tanagers. Edward asked Maime to write a biographical sketch of Catharine as an introduction to a volume that he decided to call Pearls and Pebbles, or Notes of an Old Naturalist. To Catharine’s excitement, when the book was published in mid-December 1894, it did well. Within three months, 750 copies, at one dollar a copy, were sold, and it received favourable notices in both Canada and England. Sandford Fleming, an enthusiastic fan and reliable friend, dashed off a quick note from Ottawa to the author. “Receive dear Mrs. Traill an order for seven copies. I long to see the latest production of yours. You are indeed a wonderful woman.”

The review that must have given Catharine the most pleasure was by the redoubtable Professor Goldwin Smith, the former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University who now lived in splendour in Toronto with his wealthy wife, the former Mrs. Henry Boulton of The Grange. Smith, who delighted in the title “the Sage of the Grange,” was a roaring snob who knew little about the countryside and usually sneered at anything too sentimental. But in his review in the London Illustrated News, which was reproduced in the Peterborough Daily Evening News, he pronounced Pearls and Pebbles “a sort of Canadian counterpart to White’s ‘Selbourne.’”

Caswell was sufficiently encouraged by the success of Pearls and Pebbles to publish a further volume of Catharine’s essays the following year, Cot and Cradle Stories. Maime helped her great-aunt organize the manuscript for, as the ninety-three-year-old author confessed to her niece: “I get dreadfully bewildered now with MS papers, lose time through want of memory. A thousand things flit through my brain—like dreams—good for a few minutes—then gone.” But Cot and Cradle Stories did not do well.

Catharine had never had two cents to rub together—she derived no royalties from the books that had been published in England, and the two little volumes published by the Methodist Book and Publishing House brought slim proceeds. She had always depended on the generosity of relatives like her brother Sam, her sister Sarah and her son William. But now she was the only member of her generation left. Her sister Sarah Gwillym had died in 1890, two years after Jane. “I stand alone,” wrote a saddened Catharine, “the last and only one living of the sisters.”

Both Catharine’s English sisters left her modest legacies, which she invested (along with Agnes’s legacy of $2,500) in a Peterborough enterprise run by a Mr. John Burnham. Mr. Burnham, however, went bankrupt in late 1897, and Catharine, at ninety-five, was left virtually penniless.

Catharine received the dire financial news with her usual “The Lord will provide” stoicism. She had borne many hardships before, and she prepared to weather this latest storm. Several younger members of the Strickland clan, however, thought she deserved better. Mary Strickland, wife of Sam’s grandson Arthur, decided Catharine needed official assistance. Without Catharine’s knowledge, an urgent plea was sent to the British Prime Minister, at 10 Downing Street, for help for the “oldest living author in the British Empire.”

A secretary to Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, sent a stuffy reply, indicating that her service to the Empire did not make Mrs. Traill eligible for a civil list pension. However, he added, she might receive a donation from the Royal Bounty Fund of 150 pounds “if the people of Canada generally, or her friends and admirers in particular, are willing to show their appreciation of her literary merits and character by raising a Testimonial Fund for the purpose of making some permanent provision for the future.” Such a grant, it was made clear, was made on account not of Catharine Parr Traill’s own achievements, but simply