— 199 — 



thunder : colonial grievances of three generations. Some 

 hundreds of alert young French Canadian horsemen, 

 neat in their home-spun coats, mounted on their Nor- 

 man ponies and armed with their long duck-guns, sur- 

 rounded the banquet tables festooned with maple leaves, 

 and spread al fresco, with abundance of good rustic 

 fare, but bereft of all dutiable wine and liquors. The 

 sparce French colony, forgotten a century previous on 

 the shores of the St. Lawrence, had resolved to give a 

 lesson to Old England, kill off her export trade, and 

 thus dry up this source of mercantile profit ! There 

 were unfriendly lips which whispered that the Bois de 

 Boulogne reformers would have difficulty in keeping 

 up to fever-heat their patriotism on the national bever- 

 age, spruce-beer. The wearers of home-spun were to 

 receive important accessions to their ranks, by the 

 arrival in the city of Quebec of the Montreal members 

 of parliament, habited also in home-spun — says the 

 historian of the period, Eobert Christie — for the meeting 

 of parliament, which took place on the 8th August. 

 This was a humorous incident in a very serious drama. 

 When the last puff of smoke from the chasseurs' fow- 

 ling-pieces had cleared away, the dictator, accompanied 

 by prominent patriotes, Dr. (later Sir) E. P. Tache, 

 Messrs. Letourneau, Tetu, Valine, and others, drove 

 down in open carriages, to meet, at Kamouraska, other 

 active sympathisers. The writer, an eye-witness, vividly 

 recalls the whole scene (1). 



Four days previous to this festival, on the 20th 

 June, 1837, there was lying cold in death, in his 

 turreted castle, at Windsor, the late sovereign of the 

 realm, King William IV. Fifty years previous, as 

 Duke of Clarence, he had landed in our midst on 

 the 14th August, 1787, from the frigate Pegasus, a 

 roistering midshipman. The City still retained the 



(1) Vide Explorations of Jonathan Oldbuck, pp. 121-31. 



