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You could stay overnight, if you were a stranger, for $1.00 meals and all. One lady stayed for two nights but at first was secretive. She was not recognized as she had left her husband twenty years before, and wandered to Chicago, leaving behind two small daughters. She said finally that she wanted to know if her girls were all right. Maybe the poor lonely, broken down, old lady was only reaching for a home. Uncle Billie drove her around all one day in a buggy. The total bill for two nights, buggy and all, was $2.00. One day a lady landed in from Sault St. Marie. She was a sister of Ern Gould, the local hermit. She cried profusely and said she was concerned over Ern and wanted to see him. The famous Killbear Park is named after the bear that killed Ern's father. At fiften Thomas Oastler Graham was sent eighteen miles back over lonely trails in the bush to fetch out Ern. When he caught up with him he said, "Em, your sister in the Sault wants to see you". Ern said: "Tell her to go to hell". It was learned later that Ern had sold standing timber to the Parry Sound Lumber Company for $6000. As he was an alcoholic he was afraid to pick up this money for fear he would start to drink. After four years elapsed the Lumber Company insisted he take the money. Ern went to old Doctor Stone who owned the Parry Sound hospital. Stone told him to buy a bottle of liquor and put it on his window sill. He said: "Ern, as long as you know you can have this liquor handy you can fight the booze". Fortunately, for the hermit when he picked up the money this cure worked. Era's sister for her meals, a stay of two nights, and the previously mentioned long trip on foot through the bush was charged by grandmother Oastler the total sum of $2.00. 15 With wood stoves how did grandmother keep a large uninsulated home warm? As an example, in the winter she wore four petticoats as well as a skirt. She wore in the house (and out) four pairs of stockings on each foot. She knitted these herself from Canadian shorn wool. Grandmother Oastler had every reason to hate lumbermill owners although she told old Dr. Stone that she knew that this was a mortal sin. She once refused to sell a lumbermill owner a virgin block of white pine on the west side of Long Lake. The next year the mill and adjacent lumber yard burned down. Spring Watts said: "Mrs. Oastler, what started the fire?" Grandmother Oastler said: "It was friction caused by a heavy mortgage rubbing up against a fire insurance policy". This brings up the subject of sex as considered in the early years of Parry Sound District. It was best expressed by John Crabbe on the main street of Parry Sound. He fell in love with a very fine woman. Jack was a hard working, long headed, practical fellow and not the type a woman might fall for, at first. Well, his attractive choice married another man. Jack was badly hurt. Six months later she met Jack on the Main Street, put her head on his shoulder, and started to cry. "Jack," she said, "I have married a sex fiend. What am I to do?" Jack said, "You have buttered your own bed and now you can lie in it".