My welcome was not only cordial, but courtly. The Colonel, taking me under his arm, and ordering the boy and his horses to be well taken care of, handed me into the hall or vestibule, where sacks of wheat and piles of sheepskins lay heaped in primitive fashion; thence into a room, the walls of which were formed of naked logs. Here no fauteuil, spring-cushioned, extended its comfortable arms—no sofa here "insidiously stretched out its lazy length;" Colonel Talbot held all such luxuries in sovereign contempt. In front of a capacious chimney stood a long wooden table, flanked with two wooden chairs, cut from the forest in the midst of which they now stood. To one of these the Colonel handed me, with the air of a courtier, and took the other himself. Like all men who live out of the world, he retained a lively curiosity as to what was passing in it, and I was pressed with a profusion of questions as well as hospitable attentions; but wearied, exhausted, aching in every nerve, the spirit with which I had at first met him in his own style, was fast ebbing. I could neither speak nor eat, and was soon dismissed to repose.
With courteous solicitude, he ushered me himself to the door of a comfortable, well furnished bed room, where a fire blazed cheerfully, where female hands had evidently presided to arrange my toilet, and where female aid awaited me;—so much had the good Colonel been calumniated!
COLONEL TALBOT.
---- You shall Go forth upon your arduous task alone, None shall assist you, none partake your toil, None share your triumph! still you must retain Some one to trust your glory to—to share Your rapture with. Browning's Paracelsus.
Port Talbot, July 10.
"Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope. He has no other possession but hope. This world of his is emphatically the place of hope:"[12] and more emphatically than of any other spot on the face of the globe, it is true of this new world of ours, in which I am now a traveller and a sojourner. This is the land of hope, of faith, aye, and of charity, for a man who hath not all three had better not come here:—with them he may, by strength of his own right hand and trusting heart, achieve miracles: witness Colonel Talbot.
Of the four days in which I have gone wandering and wondering up and down, let me now tell you something—all I cannot tell you; for the information I have gained, and the reflections and feelings which have passed through my mind would fill a volume—and I have little time for scribbling.
And first of Colonel Talbot himself. This remarkable man is now about sixty-five, perhaps more, but he does not look so much. In spite of his rustic dress, his good-humoured, jovial, weather-beaten face, and the primitive simplicity, not to say rudeness, of his dwelling, he has in his features, air, and deportment, that something which stamps him gentleman. And that something which thirty-four years of solitude has not effaced, he derives, I suppose, from blood and birth, things of more consequence, when philosophically and philanthropically considered, than we are apt to allow.
He came out to Upper Canada as aide-de-camp to Governor Simcoe in 1793, and accompanied the governor on the first expedition he made to survey the western district, in search (as it was said) of an eligible site for the new capital he was then projecting. At this time the whole of the beautiful and fertile region situated between the lakes was a vast wilderness. It contained not one white settler, except along the borders, and on the coast opposite to Detroit: a few wandering tribes of Hurons and Chippewas, and the Six Nations settled on Grand River, were its only inhabitants.