[BOURINOT ] DUNDURN AND BURLINGTON HEIGHTS 2 
headquarters at Hamilton. The race was then over! Soon the water-weeds 
began to encroach on the Desjardins Canal, and the very name was begin- 
ning to get unfamiliar, when the frightful accident of the 12th of March, 
1857 [which the present writer can well recall, as he was then at Trinity 
College, Toronto], gave the place a renewed and a most tragic interest. The 
afternoon passenger train from Toronto, after entering on the drawbridge 
that spanned the canal at Burlington Heights, was heard to give a piercing 
shriek, and a moment afterwards was seen to crush through the bridge and 
plunge into the canal forty feet below. The evening was bitterly cold. 
All through the night and through the next day, and next night, the doleful 
task proceeded of breaking up the sunken cars and removing the now heed- 
less passengers. What spectral vision of death the engineer, Burnfield, saw 
before him on the bridge when he sounded that piercing cry will never be 
known; for, with a heroism worthy of Curtius and old Rome, he plunged 
with his iron steed into the abyss. 
“When it became apparent that railroad enterprise had altered ‘the 
manifest destiny ’ of Dundas, the town wisely devoted itself to manufactures 
rather than to navigation, selecting those manufactures which form the great 
staples of commerce and the prime movers of industry—cotton manufacture, 
paper manufacture, the building of engines and boilers, the making of wood- 
working machinery, or carding machines, and of steel and iron tools, from 
the axe to the giant lathe. A fraternal relation has been established with 
its old commercial antagonist, Hamilton, by the laying of a steam tramway 
[now an electric railway in 1900]. No vicissitude of fortune can deprive 
Dundas of the greatest of her ancient glories, and that is her glorious 
scenery, which involuntarily brings every tourist to his feet as the train 
sweeps along the mountain terrace. Since the day, more than two centuries 
ago, when La Salle, first of Europeans, gazed upon this scenery—the ravine, 
the neighbouring cascades, the whole valley—there has been but one verdict, 
and against that verdict Dundas need fear no appeal.” 
Some interesting sketches of Ancaster and Dundas can be read in *“* Went- 
worth Landmarks,” ‘ Pioneers of One Hundred Years Ago,” and “ Programme 
for Military Encampment,’ already mentioned in these notes. The first 
pamphlet contains a number of illustrations of old landmarks and buildings 
in both places. 

