BUBBLE, BUBBLE, BUBBLE.
_From early spring...._
From early spring until late in the fall, by every highway and by-path
of rural Quebec, and almost as generally in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton,
the visitor happens upon many a housewife turning into multitudinous
service a great iron pot or cauldron, neatly suspended from a log, or
perched skilfully between two heaps of field-stones.
These wayside cauldrons of eastern Canada, with their constant fires,
and their contents always “a-bubble, bubble, bubble”, unlike the
witches’ pot on the heath of auld Scotia with its song of “trouble”, are
to the countryside emblematical not of disaster but of a wonderful
domestic prowess that is far-reaching indeed in its scope and effect
upon national life.
For although many of these wayside pots look common-place affairs in
themselves, the crudest and least artistic of them represents the
individuality and the effort of some man or woman who stands behind it,
who fathers the thought of it and the work it is intended to aid in
accomplishing.
Even when you pass one of these out-of-doors pots, whose fires are
extinct until wash-day or dyeing day comes round again, you
unconsciously feel at once through the pot’s suggestion that in that
little farm-house, over there by the barn, dwells a woman with
initiative; some strong capable soul--some mother of invention--who
turns every simple object at her command into a tool of service.
Investigation of the pots in active service reveals a long list of
different works which this one utensil is able to accomplish. The Quebec
habitant woman graciously informs madame, that by means of the pot she
accomplishes the great wash for her “grande famille”, and that in it she
dyes her home-grown wool clipped from the sheep grazing over there on
the Laurentian hillsides. After every operation she scrubs the interior
of the pot thoroughly, so that though one day it accomplishes the
dyeing, the next it may be used to heat the water for M’sieu to convert
the big porker into winter meat for the family, etc.
Madame’s faith in the great pot is expressed in her tones. To her mind
the pot is indispensable on every well-regulated farm, an absolute
necessity in every household. The very children take it for granted.
The wood-pile and the pot-by-the-running-brook are to them as natural
objects of the landscape as the blue mountains or _La Chute de
Montmorenci_.
Moreover, the pots are more than this in their _enfant_ days. The
youngest child of Old Quebec looks upon work _avec plaisir_. To little
French Canadian children, what we are pleased to call “work”, is the
highest form of play. Every child, and nearly every grown-up, loves to
build and keep going, a wood-fire out-of-doors. The great pots of Quebec
and Nova Scotia give children an opportunity to serve at a fire and to
serve with pleasure. They run about and gather the chips and the flotsam
and jetsam yielded by the nearby stream, or fallen branches from the
trees, while an older girl pushes the various contributions of wood into
the bright and cheery bonfire under the pot that, with the strange
faculty of inanimate things, often takes on a look of enjoying it all as
much as the children. Thus, wash-day or soap-making day becomes to these
eastern households a sort of picnic. Many hands make light work, and
madame of the _grande famille_ of sixteen or eighteen children
accomplishes her wash of seventy-five to a hundred pieces with signal
ease and entirely without complaint through the pot’s assistance--the
pot that hangs under the blue skies above the glowing coals--the
out-of-door pot that magnetizes the willing hands of normal children.
Dye-pots, wash-pots, soap-pots are essentially and quite naturally
enough presided over by women. These things come under “women’s work”.
Such pots, as I have hinted above, have their positions determined by
the presence of some small brook that runs through the farm. The place
of the pot, of necessity, follows the vagaries of the brook. (“If the
mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain”.)
Thus it follows that the eastern Canadian wayside pot may be situated
near the house or several hundred yards away, in some pasture through
which the brook flows. The pot is carried to the water, but the water is
never brought to the pot, which is a thing to remember. Canadian women
are canny! And, the farther away from home the pot stands, the more of a
picnic soap-making day becomes for both mother and children. The ways of
these wayside pots are past finding out to the casual man or woman
driving over these rural ribbon-roads of the Laurentides, unless this is
remembered. For one pot may be so close to the road as to cause his
horse to shy, while the next may be off in a field with no house
[Illustration:
A WAYSIDE POT.]
in sight, and still another may be lost to sight down some stony
river-gorge, the ascending smoke alone telling the tale. But, apart from
the dye-pots and their sisters, there is yet another class of pot found
near the coast regions, pots that play an equally important part in the
upbuilding of Canadian life. These are the tar-pots, the lead-pots, the
seal-oil pots, etc., necessary to the fishing industry of our extensive
Gulf of St. Lawrence and Atlantic coast. These pots differ, too, from
the first class, in that these are presided over by men and boys. From
Percé to Digby, the shore-road throughout its many hundreds of miles via
Cape North and Halifax is “the way of the out-of-door pot” no less than
“the road of fish”.
When the magnitude and the significance of this is realized, it is
easily seen that these out-of-doors pots hold in their iron sides
considerable power over national industries and national life.
The sea-side pot is a sort of freelance. It is a man’s affair, often
wearing a sort of devil-may-care expression, no doubt produced by
environment. When the Nor’easter freshens to a gale it may strike the
old pot abeam, just as at sea it strikes his master’s schooner. But the
pot never capsizes any more than the schooner’s seams, which the tar-pot
tarred, open. So the old pot squints an eye to windward and laughs in
the face of the dun cloud and the freezing spume, knowing the dory will
come again to him for tar.
What fisherman can go after King Cod or any other fish without “a
sinker,” and a heavy one, for his deep-water lines?
So the beach-pot is also a lead-pot. Any bit of lead, sheet-lead that
lines tea-boxes, any old scrap however small, the old-timer saves and
consigns to the magic pot.
The king of the sea-board pots, in point of size is the dye-pot, in use
for cooking the concoction of spruce-bark employed to dye the seines the
pretty art-brown, which coast-fishermen consider the perfection of
camouflage against the piercing “submarine eye” of the silver
herring--so necessary as bait.
A pot of net a-soak, or men and boys spreading the wet net from the pot
on the beach-stones to dry, is a common sight on any fishing-beach of
the Maritime Provinces.
These pots presided over by the men are never kept as neat as the inland
out-of-door pot presided over by the women and children of the family,
but their usefulness is by no means inferior.
Up in the Bay of Fundy, nature in the great tides of that region aids
the work of the tar-pot. When the tide goes out, leaving the bottoms of
the plaster-carriers bound New Yorkward hard-and-dry, then the tar-pot,
aiding the indispensable oakum of the caulker, closes once for all and
to a certainty, the seams that open, insuring the delivery of the cargo,
aiding in its humble way the success of Canadian trade, no less than the
tar-pot of the Atlantic coast and its brother-worker the lead-pot aid
Canadian production.
The seal-oil pot of _Les Iles des Madeleines_ approaches nearest to our
idea of the witches’ cauldron. Standing on a narrow sandpit by the road
to Havre Aubert, the black-smoke and the dancing figure of the man
stirring the oil, the odour, and the gray sea, a stone’s throw away on
either hand, make a dramatic picture such as, I am sure, would be
encountered on no other highway in the world.