place. Didn’t seem the circle was complete without her. And I went down one day in the spring. I said, “I just have to take the little one home. It just doesn’t seem right to be down here.” She was probably 14 months then.

Oh, they weren’t hungry. As long as those children were small the only thing I went to was choir practice at nights. I might have to go to the store for groceries but I wouldn’t be too long away and I’d be home with them. But I couldn’t stop — I just had to go to choir practice ’cause I just love

singing you know.

Harmony

My first wife [Emily Miller]... got the [Belfast] Quartette going a couple of years after we come up here. There was Cameron MacPhee* and Dan Ross and Jack LeStrange and myself. Annie MacRae was the organist in the church at Eldon. We had practice every week on Thursday nights. And it was a good crowd would attend practice then.

After we got going good we sang in Caledonia Church — we sang in several churches across the Island. We didn’t sing in Charlottetown but we sang in a lot of country churches. And up in Wiltshire; I remember being up there a couple of times. That’d be in the early ’30s.

We sang at a lot of funerals too. I know we were asked to sing at one particular funeral; it was Dr. Beaton’s down there [in Flat River]. I was busy at the time — I had a job on the highway — and I didn’t want to go, but they coaxed and coaxed. So we went down; we were supposed to sing one piece. And we got down there; we were all alone in the room with the organist there, and no other singers there at all. We had to do all the singing. It was a blistering hot day in the summer and the room was absolutely full of flowers. There wasn’t a thing to sit on; you couldn’t even sit on the window because it was full of flowers. And the smell of the flowers and the heat was just overcoming, really. When we got out of there, I said I’d never sing at another funeral, not as a quartette. And I don’t believe we did. Oh, it was terrible.

We sang at lots of concerts. Lots of concerts. We sang at every concert that was ever around here in them days, and. . . there’d be two or three every winter. Money—raising affair for some purpose. We never saw any of the money but we had the fun of singing there anyway.

Oh, there was a lot of good singers in those days and a great many of them could read music. My grandfather had a singing school, it was called in those days, and there was different older men around that used to teach singing. I never went to any of them. They were gone, out of date, before

246 BELFAST PEOPLE