The Town Is Built Upon Very Low And Aguish Ground, At The Foot Of A
Peculiar And Steep Eminence, Which The Inhabitants Dignify With The Name
Of The Mountain.
I ascended this mountain, which might better be called a
molehill, by a flight of a hundred and thirty steps.
The view from the top
was very magnificent, but, as an elevated building offered us one still
more extensive, we ascended to the roof by six flights of steps, to see a
camera obscura which was ostentatiously advertised. A very good camera
obscura might have been worth so long an ascent in a house redolent of
spirits and onions; but after we had reached the top, with a great
expenditure of toil and breath, a ragged, shoeless little boy very
pompously opened the door of a small wooden erection, and introduced us to
four panes of coloured glass, through which we viewed the town of
Hamilton, under the different aspects of spring, summer, autumn, and
winter!
Dundurn Castle, a handsome, castellated, baronial-looking building, the
residence of the present Premier, Sir Allan M'Nab, is near Hamilton, and
it has besides some very handsome stone villa residences. There I saw, for
the first and only time in the New World, beautifully kept grass lawns,
with flower-beds in the English style. One very fine morning, when the
maple-leaves were tinted with the first scarlet of the fall, my friends
took me to see Ancaster and Dundas; the former, an old place, very like
some of our grey, quiet Lancashire villages - the latter a good type of the
rapid development and enterprising spirit which are making Canada West to
rival the States in rapidity of progress.
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