Joseph Keeler Visits the Home of his Ancestors 17 



briar rose and honeysuckle to tell him not only that there, 

 "The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep"; 



but also, what to him was of intense importance, that there 

 lay his forefathers. The strong self-complacent man shed 

 silent tears at what seemed a life-long neglect and a permitted 

 sacrilege, where cattle and sheep had broken through the 

 decayed stone wall of the neglected graveyard. Speaking very 

 quietly to his son, Mr. Keeler said: "Ernest, we must find some 

 way of caring for the graves of these dear old folks, who were 

 your ancestors as well as mine." The lad cried, too, wonder- 

 ing much at it all, for though he had read of the glorious deeds 

 of soldiers in English history, and had been compelled to learn 

 the dates of the battles of Queenston Heights and Lundy's 

 Lane and Stony Creek, the English masters at Upper Canada 

 College were almost as ignorant of, as they were indifferent to 

 the heroic efforts of either Brock or De Salabury, who had held 

 Canada for her sons and the Empire. 



In the afternoon they took a carriage and drove around the 

 Bay shore road to near the Carrying Place and along the tow- 

 path of the canal, which was one of the living witnesses to the 

 local patriotism and endeavors for his native county of the 

 Hon. Joseph Keeler, who had lived and died in it and who, as 

 he was to learn later, had been financially ground between the 

 upper and the nether mill-stone of new economic conditions 

 brought in by the railways, which have meant commercial 

 tragedies in Upper Canada, as elsewhere, which have wiped 

 out in truth thousands of family names in the older border 

 counties of early settlement, once the synonym for local 

 progress, commercial integrity and social success. Of such 

 local history, the sessional papers of the Legislature, and even 

 the portraits of the halls of Parliament all tell of a time when a 

 single name spoke the glory of a whole county, whose where- 

 abouts was known best from the fame of its representative. 



