PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE EARLY EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT.
THE FINNS. {con't}
They did not want them to learn bad English, and they would wait till
they went to school so that they could learn nothing but the "good Eng-
lish."
I noticed sometimes on coming in from the outfit, that the two chil-
dren would be leaning on the bed with a little book before them. The
elder would gabble in Finn and the younger would then gabble after her.
I am not a curious man but at last this bedside intermittent gabble led
me to ask a question. I found that the elder, not yet six, knew the Finnish
catechism by heart and was teaching her younger sister, not yet five.
The elder went to school next spring to the Forest Farm School. Being
in the district some time after I remembered the smart little gabbler, and
asked about her. Miss Wallace, the teacher, told me that when the child
came in the spring she knew no English. In the fall she had not only
learned English, but was ahead of the English speaking girls of her class.
This Finnish girl subsequently became a school teacher. Surely things
like this tell their own tale of the natural intelligence of the foreign born
child. If one had a low mentality to deal with I would say bar them out
at all cost; but being what they are I have every confidence in the second
generation, and I am glad to see Canada providing homes and a bright
future for these people, however backward some of them may appear in
the commencement when the social standards of our advanced civilization
are applied to them. To return to the colony proper. I went in at New
Year's. It was forty below. I bored for a man named Jacob Lakki; one
of the best men I ever met. He spoke fair English, having had some ex-
perience in the States. He had a wife and two children. He occupied
a one-room log house which contained little but a bed, a table, and a
stove, and what was really a big box in which the children slept. The
building had a cottage roof and was tied together with rafters. There
was no ceiling. There was not even a washtub and I never saw the
woman or the children give any evidence of having performed anything
in the nature of ablutions. One of the finest men in the settlement had
the sourest and most slatternly wife. Ultimately Lakki returned to the
States.
Of our day's work I remember nothing except that it was very cold
but I do recollect that after supper, as I was filling my pipe, Lakki
pushed a cigar box towards me filled with chopped up, home-grown to-
bacco and asked me to try it. I did so, and found it malodorous and
nauseous. Excusing myself I went out into the frosty air, rapidly scraped
Lakki's tobacco out of my pipe, cut and filled with old plug T. & B.,
lit it, went into the house and resumed my seat, puffing away.
PresentlyLakki said, "How you like tabac?" "Fine," I said, and so it was,
but it wasn't his "tabac."
I may pause here to say something about this home-made tobacco.
Canada grows some of the finest, if not the finest Burley in the world.
The foreigners grow and cure this themselves, and during the last forty
years they must have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in this way,
while the excise has been the poorer as of course this home-made weed
Bibliography follows:
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