We didn’t have that much farm work to do. We only had a small place. But we had another place up the road about two miles. I think there was 14 acres in that. Well, we had to drive the cows up there every morning before we’d go to school... . But we’d go from there to school, you see; it was another mile over to the school. Do the same in the evening coming home: take them home with us. Oh yes, we minded that chore. We didn’t like it.

I guess I was six or seven, perhaps, [when I started school]. I got sick, you see, and I had to leave school. Appendicitis. Them times, they didn’t know much about it. I was five months in the old Prince Edward Island Hospital. Ruptured appendix. Gosh, Icame home and never went to school that year.

I was sick a long time before they knew what it was... . It was old Dr. MacIntyre at Montague, the old man; he found out that’s what I had. It was after rupturing, but I pulled through it. Charlie Gillis, now, Risdon’s* brother, was sick the same time. It ruptured, and he died. I didn’t do anything for a year or more. Then I went back to school a little while.

[The teachers] were great. There was one old fella wasn’t too nice: he was a kind of a rough old fella. Me and Johnnie MacEachem’d* always sit together; we were always getting in trouble. But this old fella — Shaw was his name, Dan Shaw. He went out one day, and the inside door of the school, he shut it. Then he pretended he opened the door of the other one and shut it, but he never went out: he stayed in the porch. He could see in through the keyholes. ‘

Whenever he went out, we thought he went out and we got over in the seats with the girls. After a while, he rattled the outside door and we thought we were dead safe, and he opened the inside door and we were back in our own seats sitting pretty quiet. But boy, oh boy, he came up, boy, and he just took our two heads and cracked them together. Oh, my God, we could see stars! So, that was one rough time I had in school.

We got into lots of trouble. Oh Lord. Hallowe’en night was the worst. We always got into bad trouble Hallowe’en night. We did pretty near everything you could think of. Stealing everything we’d dare to come across. Hiding it, and a bunch of them’d go looking for it in the morning. We called [trick-or—treating], “striking the houses.” We’d go with a stick, thump the side of the house, and read a rhyme,

Get up, aula’ wife, and shake your feathers, Dinna think that we are

beggars.

Baxter Ross 231