SASKATCHEWAN AND ITS PEOPLE
1924

         
PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE EARLY EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT.  
    
 THE FINNS. {con't}

trast her with her neighbor Mrs. Lakki and forever after beware of
arguing from the particular to the general. Judged by the standard of
Mrs. Lakki the Finn women are dirty; but by the standard of her next
neighbor Mrs. Haulm they are the cleanest in the world.

	My first night at Haulm's was not without incident. At two or three
in the morning I was suddenly awakened by Haulm shaking my shoulder.
His bearded face was bent over me and he was saying something in what
appeared to me to be a savage and truculent manner. Frankly I was, well,
startled; but it was airight. The hospitable fellow was only saying "Drink
coff". He had awakened me to have a cup of coffee with him, which he
had prepared before starting to town in the black night,-twenty miles
to go with a load of wood. This wood he would sell for two dollars. Think
of i~to cut a load of wood in the bush, haul it twenty miles at forty be-
low zero and get two dollars for it; and if there happened to be competing
loads of wood perhaps he would take a dollar and a half rather than
not sell it at all. There was always some one ready to buy wood at fifty
cents below market price, so that a load of wood never left town. In order
to get back the next evening with the ox-team the Finns and others had to
leave home in the middle of the night. It was largely by hauling wood
that the Finns got the comparatively little cash they needed.

	My stay at Lantilaus' was interesting, but before I come to him I
should like to say a word in praise of the Finn coffee. There may be
beverages of which I am a better judge than of coffee, but I will always
maintain that the Finns made the best coffee I ever tasted before or since.
Every house had a small copper kettle in which to make coffee, but in only
one of the houses where I stayed did I see a coffee grinder. The coffee
beans were bought green, parched at home, and the coffee grinder was a
whiskey bottle used as a rolling pin. As a general thing I found they
drank tea, but on any special occasion, it was coffee. If a visitor called,
coffee-and fresh coffee at that, was made; and it was not made in a hurry
either. I should say it took at least twenty minutes or half an hour to
make the coffee. First the beans had to be pulverized with the whiskey
bottle, and the coffee seemed to undergo a pretty long process of distilla-
tion. The result was almost divine. I think they put a little salt in it.

	Lantilaus had a relatively large house of two rooms, but being winter
only the large room was used. Here we ate, drank and slept, Lantilaus,
his wife and several children. Lantilaus was another stern, whiskered,
old bandit of a man, but he was the soul of hospitality and kindness. It
was here I learned to smoke home-grown tobacco.

	A remarkable peculiarity in this house was its heating device. The
other houses had stoves. There was no stove at Lantilaus' but a large clay
open hearth, over which had been built a thick and massive chimney of
stones and mud.  The mouth of this chimney positively yawned. The
family slept in bunks alongside the wall. When it came bed time one of
the boys picked the half-burned sticks off the fire and stood them up
against the wall, leaving a thick and glowing mass of red hot coals, with-
out a trace of smoke. While I was discreetly gazing up the chimney the



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