Chapter IX. Brother and Sister - Page 2

evenings. It was Margaret who carried home from the little Methodist mission near by, the illustrated paper and the library book, and thus set him a-reading. It was Margaret that brought both Simon and Lena, his wife, to the social gathering of the Sunday School and of the church. It was thus to little Margaret that the Ketzels owed their introduction to Canadian life and manners, and to the finer sides of Canadian religion. And through little Margaret it was that those greatest of all Canadianising influences, the school and the mission, made their impact upon the hearts and the home of the Ketzel family. And as time went on it came to pass that from the Ketzel home, clean, orderly, and Canadian, there went out into the foul wastes about, streams of healing and cleansing that did their beneficent work where they went.

One of these streams reached the home of Paulina, to the great good of herself and her family. Here, again, it was chiefly little Margaret who became the channel of the new life, for with Paulina both Simon and Lena had utterly failed. She was too dull, too apathetic, too hopeless and too suspicious even of her own kind to allow the Ketzels an entrance to her heart. But even had she not been all this, she was too sorely oppressed with the burden of her daily toil to yield to such influence as they had to offer. For Rosenblatt was again in charge of her household. In a manner best known to himself, he had secured the mortgage on her home, and thus became her landlord, renting her the room in which she and her family dwelt, and for which they all paid in daily labour, and dearly enough. Rosenblatt, thus being her master, would not let her go. She was too valuable for that. Strong, patient, diligent, from early dawn till late at night she toiled and moiled with her baking and scrubbing, fighting out that ancient and primitive and endless fight against dirt and hunger, beaten by the one, but triumphing over the other. She carried in her heart a dull sense of injustice, a feeling that somehow wrong was being done her; but when Rosenblatt flourished before her a formidable legal document, and had the same interpreted to her by his smart young clerk, Samuel Sprink, she, with true Slavic and fatalistic passivity, accepted her lot and bent her strong back to her burden without complaint. What was the use of complaint? Who in all the city was there to care for a poor, stupid, Galician woman with none too savoury a reputation? Many and generous were the philanthropies of Winnipeg, but as yet there was none that had to do with the dirt, disease and degradation that were too often found in the environment of the foreign people. There were many churches in the city rich in good work, with many committees that met to confer and report, but there was not yet one whose special duty it was to confer and to report upon the unhappy and struggling and unsavoury foreigner within their city gate.

Yes, there was one. The little