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surface, puffing smoke.
In his youth he had been a gay blade and had kept his family
on their toes with the various scrapes he got into while sowing
his wild oats, especially in Europe where he lived for a few years after
graduating from college. It was during this period that he married a
young woman from London. Family records fail to mention this marriage,
but I have seen a letter from the wife
to Uncle Andrew Fiske listing all her grievances and complain-
ing bitterly about Uncle George's unreasonable behavior. Even
as they were leaving the church after the wedding, she wrote,
Uncle George saw somebody he owed money to, dropped her arm and
bolted. A few years later he bolted again, this time
from Weston when he learned that Aunt Johanna, for such was
the name of his British wife, had arrived unexpectedly in Ameri-
ca and was coming to find him.
Under cover of darkness he disappeared from the Weston
scene and turned up a day or so later in Pictou, Nova Scotia, where my
Great Uncle William Dickson, by prearrangement,
met him at the railroad station with the intention of taking him
on a fishing trip in the deep wilderness and keeping him there
until my erstwhile Great Aunt Johanna had been bought off
and sent home, and the marriage presumably annulled.
They went to the dining room in the station hotel for break-
fast. There Uncle George met the proprietor's daughter and be-came so
enamoured of her that the whole escape scheme was nearly blown to bits.
But somehow Uncle William persuaded him to
carry on with the fishing trip as planned, and I have no doubt
there were tears in the poor girl's eyes as she bade goodbye to her
newly found Lochinvar. During the sojurn in the wilder- |
