The Honorable William Smith, a son of the learned chief Justice of New York in 1780—of all Canada in 1785, was indeed a prominent figure in Quebec circles for more than half a century; his high, confidential and official duties, his eminent position as member of the Executive Council, to which his powerful protector Earl Bathurst had named him in 1814—his refined and literary tastes, his tireless researches in Canadian annals, at a time when the founts of our history as yet unrevealed by the art of the printer, lay dormant under heaps of decaying—though priceless—M.SS. in the damp vaults of the old Parliament Buildings; these and several other circumstances surround the memory, haunts and times of the Laird of Longwood with peculiar significance.
But for the Honorable William one bleak autumn came, when the trees he had planted ceased to lend him their welcome shade—the roses he had reared, to send perfume to his tottering frame—the garden he had so exquisitely planned, to gladden his aged eyes. He then bid adieu forever to the cherished old spot and retired to his town house, now the residence of Hon. Chas. Alleyn, Sheriff of Quebec, [250] where those he loved received his last farewell on the 7th December, 1847, bequeathing Longwood to his son Charles Webber Smith, who lived some years there as a bachelor, then decked out his rustic home for an English bride and retired to England where he died in 1879. Desolation and silence has reigned in the halls of Longwood for many a long day, and in the not inappropriate words of Swinburne,
Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not.
As the heart of a dead man the seed plots are dry;
From the thickets of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Chief Justice Smith [251] concerning house-keeping, house-furnishing château ceremonies, etc, at Quebec in 1786, wrote thus in a letter to his wife:
QUEBEC, 10th Dec., 1786.
Mrs. Janet Smith, New York.
My dear Janet,
"Not a line from you yet! so that our approach to within 600 miles is less favourable to me hitherto, than when the ocean divided us by three thousand. It is the more vexatious, as we are daily visited by your Eastern neighbors, who, caring nothing for you, know nothing of you, and cannot tell me whether McJoen's or the Sopy Packet is arrived. If the latter is not over, there will be cause for ill boding respecting Mr. Lanaudière, who, I imagine, left the channel with the wind that brought us out.
If the packet is on the way for Falmouth, get my letters into it for Mr. Raphbrigh, it contains a bill for £300 sterling to enable him to pay for what you order. You have no time to spare. A January mail often meets with easterly winds off the English coast, that blows for months, and we shall be mortified if you arrive before the necessary supplies, which, to be in time, must come in the ships that leave England in March or on the beginning of April.
I have found no house yet to my fancy. None large enough to be hired. We shall want a drawing-room, a dining or eating-room, my library, our bedroom, one for the girls, another for Hale and William, and another for your house-keeper and hair-dresser. Moore and another man servant will occupy the eight. And I doubt if there is such a house to be hired in Quebec. To say nothing of quarters for the lower servants who, I think must be negroes from New York as cheapest and least likely to find difficulties. My Thomas's wages are 24 guineas and with your three from England will put us to £100 sterling per annum.