Student of Canadian Economics 45 



is the excitement in Canada over the Trent affair, when every- 

 where they began to form volunteer companies and start drilling. 

 Of course I knew nothing of what it meant; but I remember well 

 the great Review as early as 1862 when some 5,000 troops were 

 assembled on the Garrison Common, and when the Thirteenth 

 Hussars and the Rifle Brigade and batteries of artillery marched 

 and countermarched and skirmished all day, having associated 

 with them our own Queen's Own and Grenadiers. I was so 

 anxious to get near the horsemen as they marched off the field 

 that I found myself running along holding on to the stirrup of a 

 Hussar who talked to and petted me; but I finally got lost in the 

 crowd and was found crying by one who knew my father and 

 took me home. After that, every boy at school was a soldier, 

 and we boys formed a company and got our mothers to make us 

 red jackets trimmed with white braid, black forage caps with a 

 white band, and black trousers with a broad white stripe down 

 them. We cut and planed blocks of wood, painted them black 

 and put them on black polished belts for cartridge boxes and 

 even cut heavy blocks of wood and strapped them on as knap- 

 sacks. On a Saturday, more than once our squad of boys 

 assembled early at one end of the street, got the smaller boys 

 hitched to our play wagons, loaded with sheets, blankets and 

 clothes-horses borrowed from our mothers and marched in fine 

 form to a vacant lot, where we bivouaced for the day; took our 

 tin pails and boiled potatoes and fried eggs and meat in our 

 borrowed spiders; had the parade and sham fight after dinner 

 and marched home, tired and cross perhaps, but saturated with 

 the military enthusiasm of the time. We went further even and 

 became attached to a company whose drill quarters were nearby, 

 and they bought fifes and drums for us and, except on official 

 parades, we were the band to march out with them. You could 

 not know what it meant, for, toward the latter part of the war, 

 there were a lot of disreputable Irish soldiers across the Line 

 who stimulated the old antagonism to Great Britain amongst 

 the Americans, made the more acute by the Trent affair, and 

 the more or less openly expressed sympathy of certain British 

 papers for the South. Their emissaries came to Canada, and 

 stirred up a disaffection, which, perhaps never very serious, 

 caused reports of secret drillings and the hiding of thousands of 



