Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Mariposa, Ontario: a bank clerk in love, a sinking steamer in six feet of water, a church that burns profitably, an election nobody can lose. Leacock ran the economics department at McGill by day and claimed the humour paid better; he wrote this in 1912 about the town he actually lived beside, and its people never entirely forgave him. The affection and the knife are in the same sentence throughout. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Tom Thomson and James McNeill Whistler follow the lake, its wharves and its weather through the book.