[ MAP OF THE NIAGARA FRONTIER ]
[ MAP OF THE DETROIT FRONTIER ]
CHAPTER I
HIS BIRTHPLACE
"Thou Guernsey! bravely crowned
With rough embattled rocks ...."
—Drayton.
"Sévère et douce."—Victor Hugo.
"In that corner of the old Norman land where live the little people of the sea, in that island of Guernsey, stern yet mild," Isaac Brock was born.
It was a rough cradle, yet not an unkind one. Though for countless ages its shores have been beaten about and broken by its relentless enemy the ocean, yet behind that bold and serried front lie peaceful glens and valleys carpeted with heather and gorse, and fair fields full of lovely ferns. Cruel reefs lie around the island—the terror of sailors, and out from the sea fog that hovers over them loom giant rocks, strange and grotesque shapes, into which the sea has hollowed many a cavern, haunted, as old legends tell, by the evil spirits of the deep.