March 4, 1917
It’s Sunday and it seemed like everyone wanted to visit me today. I didn’t go to church in the morning and was hoping for a day of solitude. I still go to church but I don’t make a regular thing of it. I go to different churches so I can offer the excuse that if I don’t show up at one I could tell them I was at another. If I’m too regular I’m worried about being pulled into the clutches of the congregation because someone has decided to save my soul, or to recruit me to save the souls of others. Being an unmarried male churchgoer, the inevitable question arises why you aren’t fighting in the war.
My first visitors were Jim MacDonald and Dr. MacCallum. They are still trying to convince me to enter a painting into the Ontario Art Society’s Spring Exhibition.I’ve been telling them that I am not interested. Jim said he would delay sending the program to the printers if I changed my mind but I sain I’d rather burn my paintings than enter them into the Exhibition. That’s not true, but that’s how I feel right now.
After our discussion, Dr. MacCallum pulled out a sketch from my piles and set it beside his bag. Before he and Jim left, Dr. MacCallum, pulled out his billfold and without saying a word put $25 on the table. Dr. MacCallum and I have an unspoken arrangement – when he knows I’m in need of money, he obliges and selects a sketch for his remuneration.
Later in the afternoon, I made myself supper, and in the early evening went for a snowshoe in the Rosedale Ravine. I went to the Governor’s Bridge Lookout where I could see the Brickworks. The kilns were on full fire. They no longer shut down for Sundays, like the munitions factories, because of the War.
Tom Thomson's Last Spring 