Right well can the writer of these lines
remember the truculent trident.
But if, even in the days of that excellent landlady, Mrs. Hammond, it
meant to the wearied mariner boundless cheer, the latest London
papers, pipes and soothing rum punch mixed by a comely and cheerful
bar-maid, to the unsophisticated Canadian peasant, attracted to the
Lower Town on market days, it was of evil portent.
With honest Jean Baptiste, more deeply read in the Petit Catechisme
than in heathen mythology, the dreaded god of the sea and his
truculent trident were ominous, in his simple eyes, they symbolised
the Prince of Darkness, "Le diable et sa fourche," the terrors of a
hereafter.
This did not, however, prevent Neptune from standing sentry, in the
same exalted spot, for close on forty years, until in fact, having
fallen to pieces by natural decay, it was removed about the time the
Old Neptune Inn became the Morning Chronicle office; the whereabouts
of its dejecta membra are now a dead secret.
The origin of the famed statue had defied the most recondite searchers
of the past. For the following we are indebted to the retentive memory
of that eminently respected authority, the "oldest inhabitant." The
statue of Neptune, says the octogenarian, Robert Urquhart, so well
remembered at the foot of Mountain Hill, was presented to the landlord
of the hotel, George Cossar, formerly butler to Hon. Matthew Bell, who
then owned the St. Lawrence Chambers. It had been the figure-head of
the Neptune, a large king's ship, stranded in 1817 on Anticosti.
Would the stranded Neptune of 1817 be the same as the flagship of
Admiral Durell in 1759, the Neptune of 90 guns, to whom the large
bell bearing the word "Neptune, 1760," inscribed on, belonged? This
bell, which formerly stood on the Royal Engineers' workshop at Quebec,
was recently taken to Ottawa. The wreck had been bought by John
Goudie, of St. Roch suburb, then a leading ship builder, and, having
to break it up, the figure-head was brought to Quebec, and presented
as above stated.
The following respecting press gangs and the presence of Lord
Nelson, whilst at Quebec in 1782, was contributed by one of the
"oldest inhabitants" to QUEBEC PAST AND PRESENT, but reached too
late for insertion: -
MY RECOLLECTIONS OF THE PAST.
J. M. LEMOINE, Esq., Spencer Grange.
DEAR SIR, - I have much pleasure in acceding to your request to
send you a note of some circumstances connected with the city, in
which seventy-one years of my life - now verging towards eighty -
have been spent. I am familiar with no part of Nelson's career,
except what I heard from my mother's own lips respecting this
brave man.
