How Many Vicissitudes In The Destinies Of Places, Men, Families, Nations!
See Yonder Mansion, Its Verdant Leaves, With The Leafy Honours Of Nascent
Spring Encircling It Like A Garland, Exhaling The Aroma Of Countless Buds
And Blossoms, Embellished By Conservatory, Grapery, Avenues Of Fruit And
Floral Trees.
Does not every object bespeak comfort, rural felicity,
commercial success!
When you enter that snug billiard-room, luxuriously fitted up with fire
place, ottomans, &c., or when, on a balmy summer evening, you are seated
on the ample verandah, next to the kind host, do you not my legal friend,
feel inclined to repeat to yourself "Commerce, commerce is the turnpike to
health, to affluence, the path to consideration." But was the scene always
so smiling, and redolent of rustic enjoyment.
If so, what means yon stately column, [276] surmounted by its fat,
helmetted Bellona, mysteriously looking round as if pregnant with a mighty
unfathomable future. Ask history? Open Capt. Knox's Journal of the
Siege of Quebec, and read therein how, in front of that very spot
where you now stand, along that identical road, over which you emerged
from the city, war once threw her sorrows, ask this brave British officer
to retrace one of those winter scenes he witnessed here more than one
hundred years ago: the howling blast of the north sighing through the few
remaining gnarled pines and oaks spared by Albion's warriors; add to it
tired teams of English troops, laboriously drawing, yoked eight by eight,
long sledges of firewood for Murray's depressed, harassed garrison, and
you have something like John Knox's tableau of St. Foye Road on the
7th December, 1759.
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