Dinner Horn

A crude wind instrument used by pioneer farmers in 19th-century Upper Canada to call field workers home for meals. 'In the more remote parts of the woods, where schools are unknown...a belle...will employ her leisure hours in learning to play - not the piano-forte - but the dinner-horn, a bright tin tube sometimes nearly four feet in length, requiring the lungs of that almost obsolete animal, an English mail-coach-guard; and an intriguing mamma of those parts will bid her daughter exhibit the strength of her throat and the delicacy of her musical ear, by a series of flourishes and ''mots'' upon her graceful ''tooting-weapon,'' enough to deafen a whole club of bell-ringers' ('A chapter on chopping,' The Maple-Leaf, Toronto 1849; repeated in Samuel Thompson's Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the Last Fifty Years, Toronto 1884). A specimen is displayed at Upper Canada Village, Morrisburg, Ont.