2 Thb Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



seat or the District. lie also found related many stirring as well 

 as pathetic incidents of the early days on the Bay, and, as he 

 read, discovered himself becoming a link with this dim past, 

 but strangely separated from it by his surroundings. The 

 house had grown silent, his wife and daughters having retired; 

 the friends they had been entertaining had gone, and the two 

 older sons of the family had not yet come in. There, out of 

 the pages before him, stood his great-grandparents. His great- 

 grandfather had in 1775 come to the shores of Boston Bay from 

 England and bought state lands in Massachusetts; but, finding 

 only war and confusion had abandoned all, set out for Canada, 

 at length reached the Richelieu and Montreal, where he had 

 become an active officer in the militia during the American 

 Revolution. In 1793 he had pushed westward and, after diffi- 

 cult journeyings, had come with a party and taken up the 

 Crown grants, which were given them as loyalists, on lands in 

 Murray and Cramahe Townships, named after the first 

 military governor and his secretary located at Quebec, after 

 the British occupation in 1760. Each settler brought with him 

 such seed grain and implements as the Government agreed to 

 provide to all newcomers, during the first three years of settle- 

 ment. The chronicles told, too, of their hardships for the first 

 few years of settlement; of the clearing of the forest and build- 

 ing the log houses, and waiting for their first wheat crops; and 

 of their dependence meanwhile on the abounding fish of the 

 bays and creeks and upon the deer and other game of the forests 

 and swamps. 



All this strongly contrasted with the present surroundings of 

 Joseph Keeler, Esq. his elegant town house, and his study 

 fitted up with the quiet luxury afforded by a wealthy city mer- 

 chant. There was pictured the heroic old mother of the race, 

 and here the mother of his family, a leader in society, with her 

 two daughters proudly lending their elegant support to the 

 aristocratic head of the house. For the moment Mr. Keeler 

 felt a sense of unreality in his environment and, yet more, an 

 association with that past of which his great-grandmother was 

 the chronicler and of whom his father had told him, but who 

 till now had been but an indistinct memory. He seemed to see 

 the old lady sitting in her silk dress and lace cap, rehearsing 



