Mrs. Hubbard, she lived in New Bedford in Massachusetts, and she wrote and asked me to take the place off her hands, that she’d never come home here anymore. She was the last surviving one of the 13. I still have the two farms. But I’m retired now. Norman Gillis is cropping it now to keep the bushes down.

Well, I married this girl, Janie Penny. Her father was a tailor, Penny at Eldon... Her mother died in 1910. She took what they call the painters’ colic. She got a fella in, a painter, and papered the house and painted. But there used to be a lot of white lead, as they called it. You could take painters’ colic if you stayed in the house while this paint was spread around. And she took this painters’ colic and they couldn’t get a doctor... . They got Dr. Collins, but he came too late. She died before he got there.

When I went to school, Janie used to befriend me, you see. And we kinda formed up, I guess. Well, from 1910 to 1922 we was always pretty close together. So then, in 1922 we got married... . There was no minister here at the time and I went up and got McKeoughan. McKeoughan was married to a Murchison...and my wife was related to the Murchisons. It was on the 12th of July 1922 and he was the head speaker at the Orange Parade in Charlottetown, so he had to marry us at seven o’clock in the morning... . We had a wedding breakfast and then I hitched up the horse and headed for Charlottetown. We went to Charlottetown and went to a theatre in there and then came home. We got home about one o’clock at night to Dr. MacSwain’s house.

There was nine [children] altogether. But it didn’t seem to be such a problem as it would be today. See, there was no money in them times. If you had a dollar you were like a millionaire. If you had a dollar you could go places.

All Things Considered

Oh, when I first came to this place it was different to what it is now. What struck me was all the Christmas trees. You see, in the Old Country it was all oak trees, but here it was all these spruce trees. And the woods: all the woods. And the roads was only about 14 or 15 feet wide although this road here was surveyed 60 feet. But you had 18 feet of woods on both sides of it.

The Trans Canada has changed all that. You haven’t got a tree on it. It used to be great in the wintertime you know — you’re going to school, you could get in, you’d get the shelter of these trees. But now you have no

shelter at all.

George Davies 1 13