The famous Flora McDonald, whose husband was a captain in that regiment, spent a winter in Fort Edward, the old blockhouse of which still overlooks the village of Windsor.
The house at Douglas was built in the middle of the last century, like a Norwegian lodge, of solid timber covered with boards. When Mr. Haliburton’s father removed from Douglas it was floated down the river, and was placed on the bank of the Avon, where the town of Windsor now is, and in it Mr. Haliburton was born. The tide there is very remarkable, as it rises over thirty-six feet; and while at high tide hundreds of Great Easterns could float there, when the tide is out the river dwindles into a rivulet, lost in a vast expanse of square miles of chocolate. The village early in the century consisted of one straggling street along the river bank, under green arches formed by the meeting of the boughs of large elms, a pretty little Sleepy Hollow, the quiet of which was only at times disturbed by the arrival from Halifax of a six-horse stage-coach at full gallop, or by the melancholy whistle of a wheezy little steamer from St. John, New Brunswick. The limited society of the place, a bit of rural England which had migrated, was far more exclusive and aristocratic than that now found in Halifax, or any Canadian city (for a shop-keeper or retailer, however wealthy, could not get the entrée to it), and was composed mainly of families of retired naval and military officers, “U.E. Loyalists,” professional men, Church of England clergy, and professors at the College, and also one or two big provincial dignitaries, with still bigger salaries, who had country seats where they spent their summers. The officers, too, of a detachment of infantry stationed there largely contributed to break the monotony of the place.
Clifton, Windsor, N.S.
The migratory house was in time succeeded by a much more commodious one, built almost opposite to it; and this, in its turn, soon after Mr. Haliburton was made a Judge, was deserted for what was his home for a quarter of a century, Clifton, a picturesque property to the west of the village, consisting in all of over forty acres, bounding to the eastward on the village, to the north on the river, and to the south on the lands of King’s College. Underlaid by gypsum, it was much broken up and very uneven; and the enormous amount of earth excavated in opening up the gypsum quarries was all needed to make the property a comfortable and suitable place of residence. Lord Falkland, a Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia, used to say that he had never seen any place of its size that had such a variety of charming scenery. One precipitous, sunny bank, about one hundred and fifty feet long and thirty feet high, became a dense thicket of acacias, and when they were in bloom, was one mass of purple and white blossoms, while pathways wandered up and down through gleaming spruce copses and mossy glades.
One of its special points of interest was the “Piper’s Pond,” so named after a probably mythical piper of a Highland regiment, who, having dropped his watch into the water, dived after it, and never came up. It was one of the few “punch-bowls” in gypsum regions that are not found dry.
The Piper’s Pond.
As a landscape gardener, he was greatly aided by the thorough art training his assistant had obtained at the best ladies’ school of her day—one at Paris supported by the old Noblesse. Her history, from early childhood to the time when she arrived at Windsor, the youthful bride of Mr. Haliburton, who himself was still a minor, was a singular succession of romantic incidents. She was a daughter of Captain Laurence Neville, of the 19th Light Dragoons, and as she was very young when her mother died, her father, having made provision for her support and education before rejoining his regiment in India,[[4]] left her in charge of the widow of a brother officer, a sister of Sir Alexander Lockhart, who subsequently, unknown to him, married William Putnam McCabe, a man of means, who became the Secretary of “the United Irishmen” of ’98. When he escaped to France in an open smuggler’s boat, he took with him his wife and also her ward, Miss Neville; and in 1816, the year the latter was married, in spite of the ten thousand pounds placed on his head he secretly went to England to bid her good-bye.
Long before the thrilling tales of his escapes from the troops in pursuit of him, and other adventures, appeared in Madden’s “History of the United Irishmen,” they had been household words in the nursery at Clifton.