46 The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



stands-of-arms, and preparations at a signal for a rising assisted 

 by Fenian invaders from the South to wrest Canada from per- 

 fidious Albion. The times were full of terrors for the young 

 and excitement for those older. I remember well looking over 

 my father's shoulder as he read aloud from his daily paper the 

 account of the assassination of President Lincoln, and recall the 

 still more serious affair of the Fenian Raid at Fort Erie. 



"All of us boys went to see the Queen's Own embark for Port 

 Dalhousie on June 1, 1866, and we waited in breathless excite- 

 ment for news of the fight which all the next day was taking 

 place at Ridgeway. Then too we followed with the crowd on 

 the Monday after, when the bodies of the dead, landed at Yonge 

 Street Wharf, were given a military funeral, and especially do I 

 remember the names of the men of Company K, your old Var- 

 sity Company, McKenzie, Mewburn and Tempest, who were 

 killed out of a total of forty in a few minutes in the Limeridge 

 part of the fight, and recall dear old Professor Vander who, 

 though badly wounded, is I still see on deck in the University. 



"Of course I joined the Cadet Company at Upper Canada 

 College, when old enough, and later recall how the martial 

 spirit stayed with us when one summer three of my Form stole 

 away and enlisted in the Queen's Own to go to Niagara Camp 

 and of old Principal Cockburn's translation of the Horatian 

 couplet as he satirically spoke of the runaways : 



"'Duke et decorum est, pro patria mori,'" 



"'How sweet and fine a thing it is to eat a mutton pie/" 



"We did not know then none in Canada knew that out 

 of this temporary ebullition of traditional Hibernian dislike 

 for the Anglo-Saxon, or, perhaps, more really owing to the ab- 

 sence of any occupation for the moment for disbanded soldiers, 

 was transmuted much more rapidly than in any other way 

 possible into a sturdy Canadian spirit, the various opposing 

 elements of the West and the East.'" 



