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By Root 1186 0

and shifted as they’d dried and aged, leaving big chinks to be plugged with rags and old paper. The stovepipes were so brittle that Susanna never dared light a blazing fire. The cups were chipped; the blankets on the bed were worn; mice had nibbled away the covers of the small library of books; there was scarcely any firewood left, and the supply of candles was almost exhausted. It was all Susanna could do to survive from day to day, as winter gales roared around her clearing in the woods. She had barely recovered from her grotesquely infected breast abscess when two-year-old Donald fell onto the corner of the iron stove and gashed his head open. “Jenny called out that he was killed, and for a moment when I saw his ghastly face, the blood pouring in a torrent from the frightful wound, I thought so too…. After some time I succeeded in staunching the blood with very warm water, and then I examined his head and I felt convinced his skull was not fractured though I saw the bone plainly.”

Donald’s head had not yet had time to heal properly when a third disaster struck the Moodie household: scarlet fever. First Donald was taken with “sudden inflammation on the lungs, attended with violent fever and every symptom of croup.” Within twenty-four hours, the baby was similarly afflicted. Johnnie “was to all appearance dead,” Susanna later wrote to her husband. “All sense appeared to have fled. His jaws were relaxed, the foam was running from his mouth and my lovely dear’s beautiful limbs fell over my arms a dead weight. I burst into an agony of tears.” Dr. Hutchison refused to come this time: the roads were almost impassable, and besides, there was little he could do—the fever was killing children throughout the district. Helped by Jenny, Susanna nursed her two children with warm baths, castor oil and hot mustard poultices on their chests. Then, as soon as she was sure they were out of danger, she collapsed with influenza herself.

During all these troubles, Susanna learned a powerful lesson. Although she was not nearly as popular in the settlement as her sister, her neighbours rushed to help her. A wealthy and childless young Scots woman, Mary Hague, realized that five-year-old Agnes was getting on Susanna’s nerves with her constant singing and screaming, so she swept her off to her own house in Peterborough and kept her for the rest of that year. Aggie was soon skipping around in new shoes and a pretty dress, showing off newly acquired reading skills and visiting her mother only reluctantly. Susanna admitted to John, “My heart yearns for my poor noisy little pet,” but she was relieved to have her off her hands. Another neighbour, Hannah Caddy (mother of James, who had given Bond Head’s proclamation to Sam), took four-year-old Dunbar for a few weeks. Susanna’s friend Emilia Shairp, with whom she had walked to Dummer, moved into the Moodie cottage to help Susanna through her own sicknesses. And often, when the Moodie pantry was bare, a silent Indian would slip out of the woods and leave a brace of duck, or a haunch of venison, on the doorstep. “They [were] true friends to us in our dire necessity,” Susanna would recall in later years.

Common humanity, Susanna realized, was a far more attractive and useful quality than the class consciousness she had brought with her from England. “You must become poor yourself before you can fully appreciate the good qualities of the poor—before you can sympathise with them, and fully recognise them as your brethren in the flesh,” she wrote in Roughing It in the Bush, primly adding, “Their benevolence to each other, exercised amidst want and privation, as far surpasses the munificence of the rich towards them, as the exalted philanthropy of Christ and His disciples does the Christianity of the present day.” Never again would she bad-mouth Hannah Caddy, she promised John, for being a common old fusspot: “She is really a most generous affectionate woman, and I begin to be very sorry that I ever suffered my prejudices to overlook her real merit.” In Belleville, John worried incessantly about his little