Chapter 30.
One day towards the end of August two gentlemen appeared at our door. One was short, fair and talkative and said his name was Venables. His companion, tall, dark and very silent, was called Yenning. They brought a letter of introduction from the Hon. William Cayley, and claimed some distant connection to him. It goes without saying that we gladly entertained them, and they remained the night. Now Mr. Venables, it appeared, had a wife and three little sons the ages of our boys. They had come from England with him and were waiting for him to find a resting place for them. It did not take Major Boulton long to invite them all to come to our house and remain while he looked for land. The invitation was quickly accepted and our new friends went off. Then we faced the problem of where to stow them away. But Mrs. Gilly was never stuck. She had an old sleigh dragged upstairs and for this she somehow found a mattress. Mrs. Venables and the youngest boy were to have this and the two older boys were to have my bed, I sleeping in the ever useful hammock. Before finally bringing up the “new bed”, Mrs. Gilly and I undertook to scrub the floor. We found it very hard work, but were more than pleased with ourselves when it was finished.
Soon afterwards our guests arrived and our trials began. The gentlemen slept in a tent and were very pleasant, but Mrs. Venables seemed to consider our house simply a boarding house and ourselves her servants. She never offered to help in any way and at the table they handed one another the best of everything, completely ignoring us. The children too were very trying, and if we told them not to do a thing their mother would immediately tell them to do it. So our lives which had been hard enough before became insupportable. Soon a new difficulty arose which capped the climax.
We lived as I have said on the banks of the Assiniboine River, and round us were many house swallows with a natural instinct, I suppose, for building near and on houses. These birds one and all built their nests round our eaves; I counted over 250 nests. “A good sign,” said Mrs. Gilly, and would not have the little habitations disturbed. But alas one day we began to find painful and extremely irritating bites on our persons. They were not mosquito bites and we soon traced them to small flat insects, and then someone exclaimed, “The birds”. An order went forth at once to demolish the nests, but it was too late. We felt as if the plagues of Egypt had come upon us. Imagine eight children under nine years of age all crying and scratching; we sat up one whole night rubbing and consoling poor little Heather.
Just at this time, when we had the house to ourselves and Major Boulton and Graham happened to be at home, we called a Council of War, to discuss what was to be done. The Venables had no idea of going further and the burden of them was more that we could stand. Our house in Russell was rented to a Presbyterian minister but, as Major Boulton pointed out, there were only two of them and they were extremely pleasant people. “So,” said he, “would it not be better to share four rooms with them than two rooms with these extremely objectionable guests?” We all agreed to this, but still the problem of how we could fit in seemed difficult to solve. At last a happy thought struck us. Mrs. Boulton had a friend about half way to Russell, Mrs. Deark, and she had several times invited me to come and pay her a visit and bring the little boys. Why not take advantage of this opportunity. No sooner said than done. We began to pack up next day and were soon ready to go. “What a relief it will be when you are gone,” was Mrs. Venables’ comment! Early in the following week we all packed into a large wagon and I was safely deposited at Mrs. Denmark’s with my two little charges.
I shall always look back to that visit as a bright one. The Denmarks were middle aged people with a large family and a large farm. They were all extremely tall—Mr. Denmark and his two sons, Alec and John, well over six feet and there was a cheerful homelike air about the place which put you at your ease at once. There were three girls, Fanny, about my age, and two younger ones. I shared all their work, but it was not hard; the house was well organized and directed, and everyone did his share. In the early morning the lads often went out shooting ducks and partridges and prairie chickens, the girls stripped them of their feathers, and you may be sure our tongues were not idle as we worked. In the afternoon we often had the use of a horse and went for a drive. But the three happy weeks passed altogether too quickly and one day Major Boulton arrived, saying the minister had moved into his own house, which was now finished, and we could now return, so we said a long farewell to our kind friends and drove home.