and death in the southern stockades, would require a narrative which could hardly be comprised within the compass of a whole volume; but one may form some idea of it, however, when the names of the following prisons wherein he was successively detained are mentioned: Bell Island and Parmenton building at Richmond, Andersonville in Georgia, and Charleston’s race ground and Florence in South Carolina. After thirteen months of indescribable sufferings, he at last found himself free at Charleston on the day when the city was evacuated by the Southern troops in the spring of 1865. After the war was over, Mr. Saint-Pierre returned to his native country, where he was greeted as one who had risen from the dead. In March, 1866, he resumed his legal studies, and was first articled to the late Sir George Etienne Cartier, but a year afterwards he became a student in the office of the Hon. J. J. C. Abbott, where he remained up to the time of his admission to the bar on the 12th of July, 1870. In 1871 Mr. Saint-Pierre entered in partnership with the Hon. Gédéon Ouimet, then attorney-general, and some time afterwards prime minister for the province of Quebec; and on that gentleman’s appointment as superintendent of education, after his having resigned his office as prime minister, Mr. Saint-Pierre found himself at the head of his law office and the sole possessor of his large clientèle. Mr. Saint-Pierre soon reached the foremost rank in his profession, and to-day the firm of Saint-Pierre, Globensky & Poirier, is one of the leading firms in the district of Montreal. But it is more particularly as a criminalist that Mr. Saint-Pierre has distinguished himself. Few lawyers have been so successful in the practice of that branch of the law; and whether it be in the often arduous task of bringing conviction to the minds of juries, or in that no less difficult one of unravelling a knotty point of law, he has few equals and no superior in his native province. He has frequently acted as Crown attorney and as substitute of the attorney-general for the province of Quebec, both in Montreal and in the adjoining districts. In politics Mr. Saint-Pierre is a Liberal. He was selected to run as the Liberal candidate in Jacques-Cartier, in 1878, for the local house, but was defeated by the former member, L. N. Lecavalier, who succeeded in securing his re-election by a small majority. Since that date Mr. Saint-Pierre has taken very little part in active politics. At the general elections for the federal house in 1887 he was selected as the Candidat National, first in the county of Laprairie, in opposition to Mr. Tassé, the Conservative nominee, and afterwards in the county of Jacques-Cartier, in opposition to Mr. Girouard, but declined in both instances. Mr. Saint-Pierre was married in 1874 to Adeline Albina Lesieur, eldest daughter of Adolphe Lesieur, merchant, of Terrebonne. She is a niece of the late Hon. Thos. Jean-Jacques Loranger, of the Hon. L. O. Loranger, a judge of the Superior Court, and of J. M. Loranger, Q.C. Mrs. Saint-Pierre is a handsome and accomplished lady and an excellent musician. She is often seen at charity concerts, contributing, by her distinguished talent as a pianist, to the enjoyment of the evening; whilst her husband, Mr. Saint-Pierre, who is the possessor of a splendid bass voice, and a cultured singer, varies the entertainment by his singing. Mr. and Mrs. Saint-Pierre were both born and brought up Roman catholics, and they have a family of five children, the eldest of whom, Master Henri, is only nine years old. In 1856 Mrs. Saint-Pierre, the elder, was married to John Wilson, a wealthy farmer of Isle-Bizard. He was a widower and the father of several boys. Two of those boys were married to two of Mrs. Saint-Pierre’s daughters. The youngest of those gentlemen was recently elected deputy-reeve of the county of Prescott, in Ontario. Mrs. Saint-Pierre has survived her second husband, who died in 1858. She has now reached the ripe old age of seventy-nine. She is yet strong and hearty, and lately was invited to the christening of an infant (a girl) who was the grand-daughter of her own grand-daughter. She was thereby given an opportunity seldom offered, even to very aged grand-mothers, that of seeing her fourth generation.
Hemming, Edward John, D.C.L., ex-M.P.P., Advocate, etc., Drummondville, province of Quebec, is the third son of the late Henry Keene Hemming, estate agent, and for many years lessee of extensive brick-fields at Gray’s, Essex on the Thames; and Sophia Wirgman, daughter of Thomas Wirgman, from Stockholm, Sweden, and aunt to Lieut.-Colonel Wirgman, late of the 10th Hussars, in their lifetime of London, England, and Lismore, Ireland (in connection with the Duke of Devonshire estates), and latterly (where they died and were buried), of Great Marlow, Bucks, having previously lived farming near Drummondville, P.Q., for a few years, when they returned to England. There is every reason to believe that his father was directly descended from John Hemming, Shakespeare’s associate and literary executor. An uncle of his father, the Rev. Samuel Hemming, D.D., was chaplain to the Royal Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, and as such intimate with all the then royal dukes, the Duke of Sussex standing godfather to two of his children. His father was also uncle to the late Hon. Judge Dunkin, member of the Privy Council of Canada, etc., etc. (his sister being the judge’s mother), and also cousin to the late Charles F. Smithers, president of the Bank of Montreal. After the lapse of about a hundred years, the two families of Hemming and Smithers have intermarried again, Walter G. A. Hemming, of Toronto, a nephew of the subject of this sketch, having lately married a daughter of Charles F. Smithers. Edward John Hemming was born on the 30th August, 1823, in London, England, that is to say Clapham, Surrey, and was educated at the Clapham Grammar School, under the Rev. Charles Pritchard, M.A., a Cambridge wrangler. Among his schoolmates who have since achieved distinction may be mentioned the Rev. Dr. Bradley, dean of Westminster Abbey; Sir George Groves, of Sydenham Palace fame; and his brother, George Wirgman Hemming, of Lincoln’s Inn, Q.C., lately of Hyde Park, now of South Kensington, London, late fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, senior wrangler of the university—one of the commissioners named by the Imperial Parliament for revising the statutes of Cambridge University;—editor of the “Equity Law Reports” under the council of the English bar, etc., who married his second cousin, a grand niece of Sir David Baird, the hero of Seringapatam and Corunna. To show the heredity of genius we may mention that one of his sons, now in the Royal Engineers, not only came out first at the final examination at the Royal Military College, Woolwich, but surpassed the one next to him by more than a thousand marks. On leaving school in 1839, Mr. Hemming went to sea as a midshipman, making his two last trips to India in the old East Indiaman, Herefordshire, commanded by Captain Richardson, a cousin. He left her at Bombay in 1843, to join the Seyd Khan, opium clipper trading to China with a Lascar crew, as second officer, under Captain Horsburgh, a nephew of the famous Captain Horsburgh of East India Directory fame. During his voyages, he visited the Cape of Good Hope, Isle of France, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Batavia, Hong Kong, Canton, Amoy, Chusan, Woosing and St. Helena, this latter before the removal of the great Bonaparte. After remaining in China a couple of years, he returned home to his father in Ireland in 1845, where he remained studying farming till 1851. During his residence at Lismore, the Smith O’Brien rebellion broke out, and he then made acquaintance with Nicholas O’Gorman, once secretary to the Catholic Emancipation League, under O’Connell, but then a loyal subject; also of Richard O’Gorman, his nephew, one of the Young Irelanders; who had to flee the country in order to escape prosecution for his action in that rebellion. Richard O’Gorman is now a judge in New York. Liebig’s work on agricultural chemistry, then lately published, having caused a great sensation, he turned his attention to the subject, and the Royal Agricultural Society of England having offered a prize open to all the world on the occasion of the International Exhibition of 1851, for the best essay on chemistry applied to agriculture, Mr. Hemming entered the competition and carried off the prize. This essay may be found in the Parliamentary library at Ottawa. While attending the International Exhibition in 1851, he met his cousin, afterwards Judge Dunkin, who prevailed upon him to enter his office in Montreal as a law student, and he commenced his legal studies in the office of Bethune & Dunkin in the fall of that year. Among his fellow students were the Judges Ramsay, and Papineau, and Julius Scriver, the M.P. for Huntingdon; and he also entered the law course of McGill College, and in 1855, took his degree of B.C.L., being first in honours; and in 1871, took his degree of D.C.L. in course. While he was a law student he was elected president of the Law Students’ Society, succeeding the late Judge Ramsay of the Court of Queen’s Bench; Judge Baby, now of the same court, being elected secretary-treasurer. Shortly after, in May, 1855, he was admitted to the bar, and immediately returned to England, where, on the 19th July, 1855, he was married to Sophia Louisa Robinson (a cousin), eldest daughter of the late Thomas Robinson, of London and Norwood, merchant, and returned to Montreal the same year, and commenced practising law in partnership with A. H. Lunn. He was employed by G. W. Wickstead, Q.C., law clerk of the Legislative Assembly of Canada, on behalf of the government, to compile a digested index
