It looked like a recruiting station or like a crossing point on the border. It had once been a Post Office, and still seemed an official, semi-public sort of place, because Uncle Craig was the clerk of Fairmile Township, and people came to him to get marriage licences and other kinds of permits; the Township Council met in his den, or office, which was furnished with filing cabinets, a black leather sofa, a huge rolltop desk, other flags, a picture of the Fathers of Confederation and another of the King and Queen and the little Princesses, all in their coronation finery. Also a framed photograph of a log house which had stood on the site of this large and handsome, ordinary brick one. That picture seemed to have been in another country, where everything was much lower, muddier, darker, than here. Smudgy bush, with a great many black pointed evergreens, came up close around the buildings, and the road in the foreground was made of logs.“What they called a corduroy road,” Uncle Craig instructed me.Several men in shirtsleeves, with droopy moustaches, and fierce but somehow helpless expressions, stood around a horse and wagon.
