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CANADIAN LOCAL HISTORY. 



TORONTO OF OLD: 



A SERIES OP COLLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS. 



BY THE REV. DR. SCADDING. 



XLVI.— YONGE STREET— PROM CARLETON STREET TO YOnKVlLL^— (Continued). 

 The residue of the Sandhill-rise that is still to be discerned westward of Yonge Street has its 

 winsome name, Clover HiU, from tlie designation borne by the home of Captain Elmsley, son of 

 the Chief Justice, situate here. The house still stands, over-shadowed by some fine oaks, relics 

 of the natural woods. The rustic cottage-lodge, with diamond lattice windows, at the gate 

 leading in to the original Clover Hill, was on the street a little furtlier on. At the time of his 

 decease. Captain Elmsley had taken up his abode in a building apart from the principal residence 

 of the Clover Hill estate ; a building to which he had pleasantly given the name of Barnstable, 

 as being in fact a portion of tlie oiitbuildings of the homestead turned into a modest dwelling. — 

 Barnstable was subsequently occupied by Mr. Maurice ScoUard, a veteran attache of the Bank 

 of Upper Canada, of Irish birth, remembered by all frequenters of that institution, and by others 

 for numerous estimable traits of character, but especially for a gift of genuine quiet humour 

 and wit, which at a touch was ever unfaDingly ready to manifest itself in word or act, in some 

 unexpected, amusing, genial way. Persons transacting business at the India House in London, 

 when Charles Lamb was a book-keeper there, must have had the solemn routine of the place 

 now and then curiously varied by a dry '"aside" from tlie direction of his desk. Just so the 

 habitues of the old Bank, when absorbed in a knotty question of finance, affecting themselves 

 individually, or the institution, would oftentimes find themselves startled from their propriety 

 by a droll view of the case, gravely suggested by a venerable personage sure to be somewhere 

 near at laand busily engaged over a huge ledger. 



They who in tlie mere fraction of a lifetime have seen in so many places the desert blossom as 

 the rose, can with a degree of certainty, realize in their imagination what the whole country will 

 one day be, even portions of it whicli to the new comer seem at the first glance very unpromising. 

 Our Sandhill here, which but as yesterday we beheld in its primeval condition, with no trace of 

 human labour upon it except a few square yards cleared round a solitary Indian grave, to-day 

 we see crowned along its crest for many a rood eastward and westward with comfortable villas 

 and graceful pleasure-grounds. The history of this spot may serve to encourage all who at any 

 time or anywhere arc called in the way of duty to be the first to attack and rough-liew a forest- 

 wild for the benefit of another generation. If need were to stay the mind of a newly-arrived 

 immigrant friend wavering as to whether or not he should venture permanently to cast in his 

 lot with us, we should be inclined to direct his regards, for one thing, to the gardens of an 

 amateur, on the southern slope of the rise, at which we are pausing, where choice fruits and 

 flowers are year after year produced equal to those grown in Kent and Devon ; we should be 

 inclmed to direct his regards, perhaps likewise, to the amateur cultivator himself of those fruits 

 and flowers, Mr. Phipps — a typical Englishman after a residentership in York and Toronto of 

 half a century. 



On p. 267, the substance of the last ten lines of tlie upper p.aragraph relating to Mr. Durand, sen., 

 should be modified as follows : — Nearly the whole of the eastern moiety of the present city of 

 Hamilton was originally his. He represented the united counties of Wentworth and Halton in 

 several Parliaments up to 1822. A political journal, entitled The Bee, moderate and reasonable 

 in tone, was, up to 1812, edited and published by him in the Niagara District. Mr. Durand, 



