in Great Britain HERE AND THERE IN THE HOME LAND By CANNIFF HAIGHT Author of Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago " WITH BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION By E. B. BIGGAR PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS 1904 THE NEW ASTOR LIBRARY TILDEN LENOX Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five by CANNIFF HAIGHT, at the Department of Agriculture. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. Since the first edition of this work was issued the author has passed away, leaving behind him two monuments that do honor to his name as a patriot Canadian and a descendant of the United Empire Loyalists. Canniff Haight made no pretensions to the profession of literature, and yet many a writer who has devoted a life to literature may envy the faculty he possessed of telling a story, or sketching a scene. He was not only a close observer, with a good memory, but in general he put on record only those events and scenes which were worthy of being remembered by his fellow-countrymen. The thousands who have read Mr. Haight's first book, "Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago," and who know anything of the social history of Canada, will require no confirmation of the truthfulness of his picture of life in Ontario in the early part of the nineteenth century. Every page carries internal evidence of a true story, and it is this evident fidelity to fact, added to his good choice of subject, which explains the praise bestowed upon the book by such men as the poet Whittier, Sir John Macdonald and John Lovell. It was not a digestion and assimilation of previously published histories, but "a round, unvarnished tale" of events with which he was personally associated, or derived froin the lips of an earlier generation who passed through the scenes and suffered the vicissitudes he depicted. The same qualities mark the present work, and while, of necessity, the author has made more use of history such as he found in books, in buildings, in monuments and traditions, his comments and deductions are original, and they show a discerning mind. To those who have been over the ground travelled by Mr. Haight, the book will recall pleasant memories and perhaps bring a fresh fund of information; it will be still more agreeable |