As summer settles over the farms, towns and villages of Mono and Amaranth townships, one remembers that their respective names came from the Gaelic word 'monadh' meaning 'hilly' and from the "immortal amaranth" (John Milton's phrase), a wildflower that legend claimed never dies. There have been other theories about those origins but this is as good a place and time as any to settle the matter. So consider it settled.

Considering the tidal waves, floods, earthquakes and annual hurricanes elsewhere, is there any place you would rather be? The Costa del Sol and the French Riviera may tempt those who have the resources to pamper themselves by vacationing abroad but the quiet concession roads, the treed meadows and hillocks of County Dufferin are agreed by many to be "Earth's foremost part".

In ancient times the Roman calendar began with the month of March. Mars was the god of war, which could then be resumed after the winter recess. Back then July, since it was the fifth month of the year, was called Quintilis After 44 B.C. it was renamed in honour of Julius Caesar whose wife, according to Wayne and Schuster, called him "Juli". There are not many Juliuses

Julii?) now and no pope in Rome has taken the name since Julius III who was the patron of Michelangelo but a bellicose personality and the pompous opponent of necessary reforms.

What a month is July. Here in Ontario's highest county we enjoy the highest of high summers. It is the "good old summertime", words that used to be included in every sing-song. Just as service clubs have given up "Be present at our table, Lord", they have abandoned the post-prandial singing that once was de rigeur. The more's the pity.

The summer of '08 began in our family last weekend with Adrienne's 25th wedding anniversary celebration. That used to be called a Silver Anniversary but the term was not mentioned in any of the toasts or speeches. One of them recalled Agatha Christie who had said on a similar occasion that she was glad she had married an archaeologist and that more women should seek a spouse of that profession. Why? Because the older she gets the more interested he is in her. She turned her relationship to good advantage in such novels as Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile and They Came to Baghdad.

Speaking of novels, one thinks of The Yellow Briar by Patrick Slater. It should be read by all who live in the hills of Mono. "Slater', a fictional name, was really John Mitchell (1880-1951) who was born on the 5th Line farm where the old Methodist chapel still stands. The story is about an Irish orphan, Paddy Slater, whose mother succumbed to cholera in Toronto in the summer of 1847. "Of the 97,933 emigrants who sailed from Irish ports for Canada that year, 18,625 souls did not live to feel the frost of a Canadian winter" Paddy recalled in the historical fiction that Mitchell published in 1933.

The little Catholic boy was taken into the Methodist Marshall family whose father, William, had in 1837 cleared seven acres of Mono hardwood bush, built a cabin and piled field stones in the places where they still mark the boundary of his homestead. The first survey of the township had been done in 1823. By 1840 there was a population of 1,000. A century ago, in 1908, there were 3200 people where there are still just over 7,000 residents outside of Orangeville. But Mono and Amaranth are due for boom years as more people flee the metropolitan sprawl.

According to Paddy Slater's story, a young lady from south of the border arrived at the Marshall farm one day in the 1920s. She wanted to see where her mother's parents had been pioneers back n the '40s. Paddy remembered three generations of Marshalls. He showed her a yellow briar bush that was in full bloom. It had been planted long ago by the little girl who became the visitor's grandmother.

The story and, perhaps, the yellow briar, were the products of Mitchell's imagination. He and his mother had moved in 1894 to Toronto where after Harbord Collegiate and Victoria College he had read law at Osgoode Hall. By the 1930s he was specialising in the legal problems of those seeking refuge here from Europe and Asia. In those Depression days he was often paid in kind or, too often, not at all. He did not pursue his debtors. What was worse. his accounts were in chronic disorder. He had moved with his mother to a farm at the Forks of the Credit but she had died in 1928.

After he death he began to put her memories of a childhood spent in Mono Township together with an imaginary account of an Irish immigrant orphan who had been rescued from the streets of Toronto by being transplanted to the hills 50 miles north. The book was published by Thomas Allen in 1933 and was reprinted twice within a year but its success did not solve John Mitchell's mounting financial problem.

In August, 1935 he sent a letter of self-accusation to a friend who was a Toronto inspector of police. It was addressed to the Attorney General of Ontario. In the effort to solve his problem he had both mortgaged the Inglewood farm and "borrowed" clients' funds. "I am without finds or means of any kind. My defalcations exceed the sum of $20,000". Multiply that by ten for today's equivalent. He was convicted, sent to prison and disbarred.

Although he served only six months of his sentence he was at age 60 without property, income or kinsfolk and lived for another 11 years on funds provided by professional friends to supplement the royalties on his book. A special fund, "Roses for Paddy", laid him to rest in Spring Creek cemetery in Clarkson, near Port Credit, and provided his monument there.

Having first read The Yellow Briar when I was 12, I have intended for years to visit and lay some flowers from Mono on that grave. I have not yet done so.