Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald (1857-1940)

Interesting Reminiscences Penned by Miss Wetherald.

The following reminiscences were written by Miss Wetherald and sent to John W. Garvin who included them in his foreword of Miss Wetherald’s bound volume of the 1931 edition of lyrics and sonnets.

As a child I was never robust enough to enjoy outdoor exercise, although I took pleasure in all-day excursions after wild raspberries among the hills of Rockwood, usually accompanied by several of our household. Large pails were brought back brimming with the perfumed fruit, which was “put down pound for pound”,(a pound of sugar to each pound of berries) to ensure freedom from mould.

Long walks through the woods, which never had enough mosquitoes to frighten me away were always a delight… I am very fond of countrylife; less enthusiastic over farm activities. I was seven years old when we left Rockwood. Hills and rocks, woods and the smell of cedars all come back in the name. (At the age of eight accompanied by my sister and three brothers, I watched the slow-moving train draped in black passing by the railroad station near Haverford College bearing the dead body of President Lincoln. The aura of intense grief, nation-wide, and the sorrowful face of my father, made a deep impression.

Disliked Mathematics

At school I had no love of mathematics and have always thought that for me to go beyond the multiplication table was a waste of time…I have studied French and have taken private lessons from a native Frenchman, who shook his head over my hopelessly British accent. I attended Pickering College and shall never forget the endless patience of my favorite teacher, who would take me into her room in the evening and go over and over the mathematical puzzle that perplexed me, in a usually vain attempt to make it clear. Really in the realm of figures I am a hopeless moron…

The very first cheque I received for verse was when I was seventeen and sent a string of stanzas to the St Nicholas of New York, in which I described some of the antics of my two brothers, Lewis and Herbert, aged four and two respectively. I have forgotten the words. It was a mere rhyme, so I don’t regret its oblivion; But I have some poems that I should have kept copies of. One was called “The Fire Builders,” which appeared in Youth’s Companion in 1890—I think in July of that year. Another contribution to Youth’s companion—I’ve forgotten the year dealt with the misunderstanding between two children, a Canadian and an American, one praising the “glorious fourth” the other protesting it was the “glorious first,” and correcting each other very frequently. There was an editor’s note at the end explaining that July 1^st was Confederation Day in Canada..Most of the poems in The House of the Trees appeared first in that periodical.

Just before moving to London, Ontario in 1890, I sent “The Wind  Death” to the Travellers Record, when I showed the ten dollar cheque received for it to my fellow-boarders they were openly astonished. To get real money for a string of verses seemed absurd.

The impulse to write verse became irresistible between 1893, when I returned home, and 1896, when The House of Trees appeared .

A humorous poem sent to Munsey’s Magazine has been lost. The editor returned it with a note saying it was a dreadful mistake to make “swan rhyme with “dawn”, but if I would remove that defect he would gladly accept it.

Horseback Riding

Nearly all the verse I have had printed appeared between 1890 and 1900.. While I was in London, Ontario, I took lessons in horseback riding—the old fashioned side-saddle, and my friends and I often went for a twenty-mile ride in the moon light. No mere motor-car could give such pleasure as that.. Part of the summer of 1888 I spent with cousins on a large prairie farm in Iowa. There were two boys and three girls in the family, hospitable parents numerous horses. My favorite cousin, Clara, and I had many a horseback ride over the prairies. The farm and the congenial society of my relatives gave me a sense of peace and freedom.

Most of my journeys were in company with my brother Sam who was six years my senior. When he suffered from a nervous breakdown, I was his nurse, private secretary, companion and closest friend. When he recovered we went together to Florida, to Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Washington, on a ‘pay trip’ to Devil’s Lake, while he was paymaster on the Great Northern, and to California.

I also wrote a host of brief stories and articles for agricultural papers all of which brought modest sums. But I cared little for the work and much more enjoyed sending aphorisms and pointed paragraphs to the Detroit Free Press, to Smart Set, and to Puck, Judge and Life of New York. The Star Weekly of Toronto accepted a weekly column entitles Reflections of an Old Maid.

The house in the tree was built in March, 1910, and was blown down in the high gale in the fall of 1920. The old willow, being very much alive and steadily growing seemed to work itself loose from the house fastened to its branches. The last nights I slept in it were memorable. Every joint and ligament shrieked and groaned in the wind; so finally when it was pulled away by the gale and fell to the ground, roof downward, I saw that Finis had been written. It was taken apart, but the old willow still survives. It is a lovely memory, Sam called it Camp Shelbi, a name made up of the first letters of the kinds of wood used: chestnut, ash, maple, pine, spruce, hemlock, linden, birch and ironwood. These and  these only were the woods represented in my dear little tree house.

How Name Originated

“The Tall Evergreens,” the name of the Wetherald homestead came very naturally by its name. So many times friends of the family, coming for the first time to this neighborhood and inquiring for us, would be told at the station (Fenwick), “Take the next road south and go east till you come to some tall evergreens; that’s the place” My father and Sam planted these spruces and pines in 1867.

I frequently met James J. Hill when I lived in St. Paul with my brothers Sam and Charlie. They were employed in the Great Northern Railway office. Mrs Hill’s splendid team of blacks made a sensation in our quiet street on the occasion when she called on me. We spent pleasant evenings in their home. I recall the great gallery of famous paintings and the admonitory gesture with which Mrs Hill checked her husband’s rather too audible conversation, while her three youngest children were saying their evening prayers at their mother’s knee.

When I was nineteen I visited friends in New York who took me to their Unitarian Church to hear Dr. Bellows preach. I was less impressed by his discourse than by the fact that William Cullen Bryant was seated in the pew before me. I was thrilled by the thought that at my age he had written the wonderful poem”Thantopsis”.

One of my class mates at Pickering College was the later internationally known Dr. Barker of Johns’ Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was a small, slight, white-faced boy, known to all of us as Lewy Barker. He was first in everything, simply ate knowledge, like a child at a candy box. His father, a Quaker was superintendent at Pickering and often preached in meeting.

Another noted man whom I know was Lyman Abbott, successor to Beether, who lectured in London in the fall of 1890, and was entertained by the Camerons when I was with them. When Wilfred Campbell happened to be in London he called on me several times and read aloud to me from a sheaf of his poems. We had considerable argument, as I could not agree with his estimate of Lampman as a “carver of cherry stones.

Disliked Dr. Johnson

I have always prized the friendship of Paul Peel. His was a very charming personality. I have an autograph on a picture he gave me. I have been asked, frequently about my favorite books.. In my teens I was fond of Emerson, Carly and Matthew Arnold, and can truthfully say that they have never wearied me. The New England poets, essayists, Holmes and Lowell always delighted me. I had read all of Dickens before I was fifteen and all of Shakespeare before I was twenty. I always enjoyed the prose of Addison, but disliked Dr. Johnson because of his rough ways, the pleasure he evidently took snubbing others.

My chance to assist one of the editors of The World’s Best Literature came about through correspondence. He had written in praise of my “Wind of Death” and we had corresponded for years before we met. If ever there was a human cyclopeadia it was Forrest Morgan. He put a tremendous amount of work in “The World’s Best”.When the mother of his assistant was so seriously ill that the girl had to give up her work and go home, Mr Morgan wrote, urging me to take her place. I acted as his assistant for nearly a year, when the thirtieth and last volume of the series was published, his final volume consisted entirely of verse, and Charles Dudley Warner, editor-in-chief, included in it five or six little poems of my own. I was paid eighteen dollars a week.

When the work was finished Mr.Morgan offered me a position as first-class proofreader at a larger salary, but I longed for home. I was not homesick but there was an indefinable feeling that too much “learned lumber in the head” must crush out whatever repressed spontaneous growth of my own was still surviving. Our correspondence ceased in 1923, just after his physician had told him he had only a few weeks to live. Certainly to know him was a liberal education.

Among the most memorable weeks of my life are two spent at Pinehurst, Helena Coleman’s island home in the St. Lawrence, near Gananoque. It was an ideal spot for a vacation in that exceptionally hot July of 1911, as it consisted of a three-acre island, satisfyingly rough and rocky with paths leading from the wide-verandaed residence to the boat-house and bathing pool. We were a group of women and girls. Miss Coleman., her two nieces, a literary friend from Australia, Marjorie Pickthall and myself, not to mention the cook, who produced the outdoor meals we so much enjoyed. These were movable feasts, as when the wind was fresh from the west we moved t the east veranda and when the sun was hot at the east the table was set at the other side. My sleeping-room was open on one side to the St. Lawrence, and when a great steamer moved past in the night, the impression was unforgettable. My choicest pleasure came in the morning, for, as the early light awakened Marjorie Pickthall in the room next to mine and Helena Coleman just across the hall we fell into frequent talk and discussion before arising.How I wish I had taken notes of these impromptu exchanges of thought, fancy and opinion. I remember distinctly that Marjorie Pickthall did not argue. She questioned , mused awhile, differed gently or expressed her differing attitude by a little laugh that was charming as it was free from self-consciousness. She was a poet, the innermost fibre of her beautiful and totally unaffected nature. Her Three Island Songs I am confident were written at Pinehust.

The amusements of these harmonious housemates were boating and bathing, rambles after wild berries, fishing, five-o’clock tea, discussion of just-read books and visiting of picturesque points of interest. I remember in particular the Sunday morning when the cook wished to go to church. Miss Coleman and I  rowed her across to Gananoque and while she went to her place of worship, we waited outside in the boat and talked of churches, creeds, of Christianity and the meaning of existence, of things that remind us we are infinite. The best of herself is what Helena Coleman gives in her talk as in her written prose and poetry.