Happy Easter Weekend ~   The Neat Little Bookshop is CLOSED on Good Friday.  Reopening for Saturday, March 30.  We wish you a safe and happy weekend.

Smile for Today ~

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something."
~ Plato (427? - 348?) Greek Philosopher.

"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
~ Robert Benchey (1889 - 1945) American humourist, newspaper columnist.

Suggested conversational icebreaker:  "Do you hunt your own truffles or do you hire a pig?"  ~Jean McClatchy

~ The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, Robert Byrne, A Fireside Book, 2006.

Progress on the Bridge ~



Loading the Barge



 

Photos taken Tues., March 26.  (For larger image click on photo.)

Thought for Today ~

"I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.  I love to have the river closed up for a season and a pause put to my boating, to be obliged to get my boat in.  I shall launch it again in the spring with so much more pleasure.  This is an advantage in point of abstinence and moderation compared with the seaside boating, where the boat ever lies on the shore.  I love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other times.  It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.  I find it invariably true, the poorer I am, the richer I am.  What I consider my disadvantage, I consider my advantage."

~ Henry David Thoreau, An American Landscape.  Selected Writings from His Journals, Edited by Robert L. Rothwell.Paragon House, 1991.



 Rum Running on Lake Erie ~

Ian Bell, Curator/director of Port Dover Harbour Museum

will present "Blind Pigs, Midnight Herring" 

 Tuesday, April 2, 1:30 p.m.

Haldimand County Museum, Cayuga.

Peaceful Port Dover Today

For more information, contact Margaret at 905-768-5525 or Betty at 905-899-3859.  Haldimand County Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society.

FAREWELL TO THE FARM
by Robert Louis Stevenson

The coach is at the door at last'
     The eager children, mounting fast
And kissing hands, in chorus sing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow-gates we swang upon,
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

And fare you well for evermore,
O ladder at the hayloft door,
O hayloft where the cobwebs cling,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Crack goes the whip, and off we go;
The trees and houses smaller grow;
Last, round the woody turn we swing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

~ A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885. RLS was born in Scotland (1850 - 1894) Regarded as classics:  Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae and Kidnapped.

A Child's Garden of Verses was slowly put together by Stevenson as a diversion from his fictional work ~ as his wife comments, he "plucked a blossom here and there..." Based largely on his own childhood it is an inspiring collection which has captured the imaginations of children for generations.

"Honest Winter, snow-clad, and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; But that long deferment of the calendar's promise, that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May how often has it robbed me of heart and hope?"

~ George Gissing (1857 - 1903) English novelist.