McQuade's is merely a farmhouse on the main road. But in the usual condition of those roads it is the first stopping-place from Winnipeg, and McQuade's, or "Little Pointe du Chêne," as it is sometimes called, is familiar to all the engineers on the staff of that part of the Canada Pacific Railway. The yard was full of the teams which had left Winnipeg the day before, and the kitchen, or general living room, was crowded with teamsters, who, however, when we appeared, withdrew to a dark little cook-house a few yards from the door.
The room vacated for us was low-roofed, with unplastered ceiling, whose rafters were hung with bunches of garden herbs. Two narrow windows were set sideways in the wall, their deep window-seats serving as bookcase and sideboard: holding the Bible and almanac, the old lady's best bonnet, a pot or two of preserves, a nosegay of spring flowers, and a tea-caddy. An old-fashioned four-post bedstead stood in one corner, covered with a patchwork quilt; in another was an impromptu bed, spread on the floor, and occupied by a woman and two children, apparently asleep. A table, covered with oil-cloth, with some cups and saucers on it, stood between the bed and a dresser cupboard, containing rows of shining milk-pans, piled one on the top of the other and separated by a board. Behind the house door a flight of narrow steps led "up ter chamber," as the old woman in the rocking-chair informed us; and underneath these stairs was a primitive washing apparatus, consisting of a bench holding a basin and two wooden pails, with a long towel hanging from a stick.
The farmer bustled in and out, greeting some of us as old friends, summoning Alice, the maid-of-all-work--a down-trodden, stupid-looking girl of fourteen--to make up the fire and get the kettle boiling, and putting his head into the doorway, "just to tell the missus," as he ushered us in. "The missus," a kindly-looking old Irishwoman in a white cap and kerchief, wriggled over in her chair to greet us, for she was "set fast by the rheumatism," and could not rise. But from long confinement to her chair she had learnt to get about in it very well; her natural energy expending itself on shuffling all over the room, screaming to Alice to know "why that there kettle didn't boil?" and generally making us welcome in her way.