The Water-Drinker (1937), a collection of poems; Robert Harding: A Story of Every Day Life (1938), a novel; and The Settlement of York County (1952), a work of local history published posthumously and very likely not entirely by Mitchell’s hand.
2. The Mitchell family in Canada began with its pioneer patriarch, John Mitchell (1815–1901), and his wife, Jane (1817–1875), both originally from Ireland. They had seven children, of whom William Mitchell (1847–1916), the second born, was the father of John Wendell Mitchell (1882–1951), creator of Patrick Slater and author of The Yellow Briar (1933).
3. The Mitchell family donated a parcel of land that was part of the Mitchell farm in the late 1840s for a Methodist church and cemetery plot, the first burials taking place in the latter in 1848. The church, known as the Mitchell Church, was served by a circuit missionary minister and remained as a Methodist congregation until the Methodist and Presbyterian churches were united in 1925. (See “The Mitchell Church Story” by Jack Brooksbank and Steven Brown in addenda to The Yellow Briar (1994).
4. Mitchell displayed his reformist and visionary tendencies in a tiny breviary-like booklet that he called The Kingdom of America: The Canadian Creed, which he published privately at considerable cost in 1930. In it Mitchell ranged over the story of Canada, the country’s links with England, and its prospects because of its proximity to the United States. But the heart of what Mitchell called “this curious little book” was concerned with Canada and its sense of itself. In holding up a mirror to the country, Mitchell exhibited the generosity of spirit and a forward-looking sensibility that are present in The Yellow Briar. As an example of his prescience, he says: “His Majesty’s Canadian government might occupy itself to good purpose in giving [Canadians] … a Canadian flag that will have at least the dignity of a registered trade mark.” He goes on to say with some irony: “Canadians were left until a recent date in use of a flag that carried on the fly a grotesque jumble of hieroglyphics, including among others, a dead fish, a live buffalo, an antediluvian ship, a field of grain and a marine sunset.” He goes on to growl that beasts and flowers will not be appropriate for a flag and, prophetic irony of ironies, thinks that the maple leaf will not do because it does not occur in all regions of Canada.
5. The extent to which John Mitchell managed to muddy the waters regarding himself is evidenced by the fact that there are two different years listed for his birth (1880 and 1882), and The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) refers the reader away from John Mitchell, the real person, to Patrick Slater, the fictitious creation, whose given dates are those of John Mitchell.
Out in the Ontario countryside, the late spring is a pleasing and soul-mellowing season of the year. It commences once the seeding is done and lasts until the chattering mower starts to mishandle its pitman shaft. In those sweet-smelling, warm, soft, juicy days of early June, the fields everywhere are bursting with fresh young life. After the dry fodder of a long winter, the cattle have had time to purge themselves with the rich, lush grasses; and their skins have been softened, and the dirty wartles on their flanks have been loosened by the warm spring rains. The air is as soaked with delicious hope as the meadows with the dew.
It is for such an inviting scene that the silent and wary thrush deserts the South; and it is the rapture of it filling his breast that turns him into the saucy and intimately friendly robin who insists on nesting in the most obvious places about my kitchen stoop. Plain for me to understand, he tells me the time is now at hand to “Cheer up! D’ye hear? Let joy be unconfined.”
Perhaps you think the mellow tones of the late autumn should make a stronger appeal to an old fellow like me. Faith no! Sure an Irish heart is always youthful. Before we grow old, we live in hope of things here: when we are grown old, we live in hope of things hereafter. The weight of years that burden the flesh presses lightly on the spirit of an old Irishman.
In this northern clime, harvest-time has always seemed to me a sere and gloomy season. I have seldom seen men come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves — and never in a barley harvest. The nights commence settling down early, and come upon us with an abrupt suddenness. The air bites a bit in the early mornings; and, here and there, the furtive rime marks the midnight prowlings of the frost king, who already plans to reassert his sovereign rights. If the crops have been poor, the scanty contents of the barns distress us; and, if Nature has been over-bountiful, the prices offered are more distressing still. The farmer’s is a gambler’s job. Old Mother Earth rolls the bones for him. In the spring, he has laid his wager, and his hope hangs high.
It is pleasant to watch the young gambol on the hillside pastures and punch the swollen udders of their dams. It is sweet to smell the pungent, homely earth in its creative mood. It is refreshing to feel the mild sunshine strike down, casual-like, filtering through a screen of opalescent emerald. This is the season for loafing a bit about an Ontario farm; and, in the afternoon that now concerns us, I beg to advise that, as for me and my household, we were busy loafing. The hired man was going through the slow motions of mending the orchard fence. His stomach must have stood the cooking we were getting better than mine, because he was whistling some tune about the murmur of a waterfall. I had been down to the lower hundred salting the young cattle. They looked to be doing fine.
About the old lawn and in the fence-corners, the stinking burdocks were sticking their miserable snouts up in the air — and looking healthy. It is a caution the things that require fixing about a farm; and continue requiring it. I got the axe from the wood-shed, and set about sinking its sharp blade well below the crowns of those burdocks with a view to destroying them utterly and in orderly detail. I have carried on a personal warfare against them on this farm, on and off, for over seventy years. Making rhymes was everyone’s foible at times, in the early days; and a red-headed hired boy once cracked a good one at my expense:
On Mono’s hills, the farmer grubs along,
And, like the Indian, chants a dismal song.
On rainy days, out you see him stalk
To tomahawk the healthy young burdock.
The young man’s Christian name was Wendell — we called him Pepper-top for short. He was discharged before his time was up — not because of the poetry, but because of grey cooties. He went into the milling business and in after years became a director of a chartered bank.
Several times, after absences of years, I have returned to reduce to complete subjection the burdocks on this farm. And it was all to do again. But, lately and right under my nose, they seem to be getting a little ahead of the old man. And this struck me as pitiable in a way. After my battles against her weeds and grasses crowding in upon me, Nature seemed to say: “Ah, ah, old thing! We’ve got you on the run at last.” Even the fields — my beautiful grain-fields — have become mere hay and pasture lands; and I have fallen to the low estate of a lean-necked, grass-land farmer. Father in Heaven, what have I done to deserve this? The soil of this farm has been a lifelong sweetheart of mine; and the glint of a ploughshare polished with use once helped me in my courting.
Scalping burdocks is a good job for an old man — if he will stick at it. All it requires is patience; and there is plenty of time for thinking. What a job it was, thought I, for a seedy old bachelor like me to get an orderly woman to stick at house-keeping on a farm. How could it be otherwise — so cold and draughty in the winter-time? Now here was the widow Wilkie. I did not like her sloppy porridge, or her sniffling ways. But she put up with my dog in the kitchen; so I put up with her on the farm. Well, anyway, I was master of a home of my own — such as it was — which was more than many the father of a large family could ever boast.
I glanced over my shoulder. Unbeknownst to me, a long, slim, low-hung car had come up the lane and was making a silent stop within a few feet of where
