moment, Toronto had become a booming frontier town. For fifty years previously, the obscure, isolated little place had been struggling within its muddy self to keep up the smart military and social swagger of the capital of Upper Canada. Its trade had been obliged to play second fiddle to high-hatted policies of Crown government. Things had moved slowly. To amount to anything in those days, a person required an official job or an official connection of some kind.
But rapid changes were now setting in. The magnetic telegraph had arrived; and railroads were things actively thought about. The Canada Company was pushing settlement with vigour. There had been a crop failure in Europe in the summer of 1846; and the rot or curl in the praties that brought woe to the thatched cottages of Ireland and the shieldings of the Highlands gave better prices for farm produce to the log cabins of Canada. A flood of immigration set in, which in one season dumped 35,000 new-comers at the port of the placid little, official town — mostly wild Irish, but many people, also, from the Highlands and the English counties. Hammers rang early and late, in all directions, cracking up frame dwellings and lodging places. In 1847, Toronto was a town of small creeks, tanbark, and taverns. With 17,000 residents, the little city had 136 fully-licensed taverns and thirty-two stores with liquor-shop licences. Some of the immigrants brought little gear with them, but they had plenty of hatreds and ugly suspicions packed in their settlers’ effects as they crossed the ocean.
A few days after my mother and I arrived, I knocked up an acquaintance with a young lad by the name of Jack Trueman, whose father kept the Tavern Tyrone, a small public house on the south side of Queen Street, just around the second corner. He was a man of great strength both in deed and word. When his temper was stirred, he tossed his beard about with his hand; and he could bandy great oaths with the best of men. John Trueman was a teetotaller, and always wore a boiled shirt. Jack told me he wore it to bed. Himself was a stocky, middle-aged man; and no doubt he died in the honest belief that he had always been the complete master of his household. The family were Protestants, and attended the Church of St. George the Martyr, on John Street. The tavern was a decent, tidy, well-kept lodging place; and those who frequented the small tap-room facing the street were Irishmen whose views agreed with those held by Himself of the boiled shirt. He had a tart, bitter tongue for the views of all others; and they went elsewhere for their liquor.
I got along first-rate with young Jack Trueman, because I let him boss me around to his heart’s content. I split kindling willingly for him, and I slopped in buckets of water for use in the kitchen. He was a harsh taskmaster over me, and many a time I got a smart clout on the lug and was told to take that for a dirty little dogan. But, at other times, he was open-handed enough and a good sharer. I liked to hang around the Tavern Tyrone; and I paid cheerfully for the privilege. It was young Trueman who showed me the town; and at first I believed everything he told me.
What appealed strongly to my young mind about the Trueman place was a narrow alleyway to the east of the tavern, leading back to a stable in the rear where two cows and pigeons were kept. I liked the job of chivying the cows along Queen Street to a pasture field in the west. One evening, the cows got in the way of the carriage of His Lordship, the Chief Justice, and I got a wicked cut from the coachman’s whip.
All Trueman’s cows were breachy by nature; and for years they were headstrong in the notion that a cow-path should be made across the field in front of Osgoode Hall. The heavy and formidable iron fence along Queen Street stands to this day in front of the law courts as a memorial to John Trueman’s cows. The law, they say, is tender in its treatment of established customs and ancient ways. For generations, the Bench and Bar of Ontario have continued to sidle and dodge themselves into the precincts of Osgoode Hall through curious stock-yard openings that were specially designed in Europe to keep out Trueman’s cows. Some monument to a woman’s milk-pail! And, by the way, the young lady from Baltimore got her blue-grey eyes as an heirloom from Sarah Trueman of the Tavern Tyrone.
On my rare visits to Toronto, years back, one of my pleasures was to take my stand a little before dinner-time at the head of York Street, and watch Her Majesty’s justices negotiate those barricaded openings in their haste to start a heavy day’s work. But, latterly, I haven’t been in Toronto much. The last judge I saw doing the trick was His Lordship, the late Chief Justice, Sir Glenholme Falconbridge. The ageing judge was toting a green bag and getting through seemed quite an effort. What a master Falconbridge was of the English tongue, and how sparingly he used it! He liked to catch speckled trout up our way, also — if his companion rowed the boat. But if he left it to others to write the long judgments, he did into English an exquisite lyric:
Come, Lesbia, while we may;
Let’s live and love our lives away:
And care not what the old folk say.
The sun that sets will rise again as bright:
There is no rising for our little light;
It sets in never ending night.
Count me a thousand kisses o’er.
Count me a thousand kisses more,
And then, we’ll count them o’er and o’er again!
CATULLUSV
If getting along agreeably with young Trueman was sometimes a problem for me, young Jack often had occasion to scratch his head over problems of his own. His father was a stern, arbitrary man of harsh temper, and sorely set on ruling his son. Many a good beating he gave the boy. One morning I was viewing one of these affairs from the corner of the alley. Jack was hollering blue murder.
His mother Sarah, a quiet, kindly woman, and a simple soul after all, stepped out into the yard to do something about it.
“Are you aware, sir,” she remonstrated, “that you are beating the boy unmercifully?”
“Aye, madame!” said Himself between the welts, “I am trying hard to do that same.”
The mother’s pent-up feelings hurried her away quickly through the kitchen door. Jack’s collie was also objecting; but he stood his ground, and showed his teeth. After a moment, his feelings got the better of him. He went right in and took a biting hold on the man’s calf. The dog meant business, and the North of Ireland let out a grand howl. The three of us scuttled down the alley.
On the morning of the twenty-fourth of May, the guns at the fort spoke; and the 81st Regiment of Foot paraded in honour of the young Queen. It was a gala day for the local gentry. Upper Canada had the spirit and turn of mind of a small Crown colony. It had been founded by families who suffered on the king’s side in the old colonies. It had justified its very existence as a protest against American ways and methods. It had grown slowly, leaning heavily on England for spiritual and economic support. But free trade in England had recently knocked the prop from under the Canadian flour-barrel. There was the smell, moreover, of radical political changes in the local air. And now people of no account were flocking into the country, more concerned with making a living than with supporting the established order. How necessary that a strong demonstration of loyalty be given!
And the old order extended itself. That evening, the people around York Street got full and felt happy; and the gentry drove their ladies in open carriages to a fancy-dress ball. Of a sudden it rained cats and dogs. There were many yards of material in a lady’s costume in those spacious days; and when one considers the undies they wore, it is a problem how the young creatures got their things dried out that night to dance the light fantastic.
The festival of St. John the Baptist arrived. Young Jack confided to me there would be great goings-on at the Trueman place that night. Himself and Mr. William Cassidy — him that kept the gaol — were forming a secret society; and the first meeting would be held in the front room upstairs. Some Mr. Grand Lodge in Dublin had written letting
