The day was his, if it was anybody’s. He, above all others, had ensured its coming, and he had prescribed the order of its celebration. But the actual day—July 1—was not his first choice. For simple and practical reasons—he did not believe the preparations could be completed earlier—he would have preferred a date a fortnight later. But he was far away from London when the matter was finally settled; and on May 22 a royal proclamation announced that the union of British North America was to come into effect two weeks before his chosen date. “So you see,” he wrote off to Fisher of New Brunswick, “we are to be united in Holy Matrimony on 1st July—just a fortnight too soon.”1 There was certainly not a great deal of time to make the necessary arrangements. “Much has to be done before then—,” he told Tilley, “the members of the cabinet to be determined, the offices distributed, the policy considered, and the whole machinery set in motion.”2 But even with the weight of all these practical, political matters, he found time to give some attention to the day itself. Others would expatiate eloquently upon its significance—after he had done the work of bringing it about. He was neither an orator nor a prophet. And it was characteristic of him to speak of what was so largely his own creation with jocular understatement rather than with rhetorical hyperbole. “By the exercise of common sense and a limited amount of that patriotism which goes by the name of self-interest,” he wrote frankly to Shea of Newfoundland, “I have no doubt that the Union will be for the common weal.”3 He would never exaggerate any occasion or glorify any future; but he had the conservative’s feeling for historical continuity, for the stages in the process of national growth; and from the first he had determined that the day of the Dominion’s beginning should have its appropriate celebration. “On the 1st July, as you know,” he wrote Denis Godley, Monck’s secretary, “Confederation will be a fixed fact and we think it well that some ceremony should be used in inaugurating the new system.”4 It was decided to make the day a general holiday. The volunteers were to turn out; and Sir John Michel, the Commander of the Forces, was requested to make sure that, in the various garrisons throughout the country, “Royal salutes should be fired, and the Royal standard hoisted, with such other military show as is usual on festive occasions.”
He could prescribe the order of the day; but he could not determine the weather. Yet it did not disappoint him. Officially the northern hemisphere was ten days away from the summer solstice; but in the Maritime Provinces and along the St. Lawrence River valley there were as yet almost no signs that this long six-months’ period, in which the sun’s power had daily and majestically increased, had ended at last in its appointed fashion. The first of July belonged, by natural right, to the little group of the richest days of the year; and in 1867 no accident occurred to rob it of its birthright. On the previous night certain Canadians, watching the sky anxiously, had been disturbed by the appearance of a few ominous clouds; but by the morning these threats had vanished completely. All through the federation, the day dawned fair and warm, with a clear, cobalt-blue sky, and a little breeze that took the hottest edge off the bright sun. Everybody noticed the beauty of the day; everybody observed how auspicious was its splendour. “On aimera à se rappeler,” declared the editor of the Journal des Trois Rivières, “quand la Confédération aura subi l’épreuve du temps, combien a été beau le jour de son inauguration.”5
The day began long before Macdonald was up; in Ottawa it probably began even before he had gone to bed. Just after midnight struck, a long salute of 101 guns was fired, while all the church bells pealed, and a huge bonfire was kindled.6 Then, presumably, the people of Ottawa went to bed; but neither they nor Her Majesty’s loyal subjects in other parts of the new Dominion were permitted to enjoy too long a rest on that short summer night. Early in the morning, when the sky was hardly yet paling with the approach of sunrise, the royal salutes began. At Saint John, New Brunswick, the twenty-one guns in “honour of this greatest of all modern marriages” were fired off at four o’clock.7 At six, they sounded out from Fort Henry, just across the river from Kingston. And at eight, when it was now full day, the Volunteer Artillery of Halifax discharged a long salvo from the Grand Parade, which came back, as if in booming echoes, from the guns of the naval brigade on the Dartmouth side of the harbour.8 The bells were ringing also, in town halls, and clock towers, and church steeples. High Mass was sung in the cathedral at Three Rivers at seven o’clock in the morning; and all over the country, people dressed in their Sunday best were walking soberly along the streets to pray, in early church services, for the welfare of the Dominion.
By nine o’clock, the sun was already high. The air was warm; the sky’s benignant promise was unqualified. People thronged the streets of their own cities and towns, or crowded into excursion trains and steamers to join in the celebrations of their neighbours. The steamer America brought nearly 300 visitors across the lake from St. Catharines to swell the crowds in Toronto. And down in the Eastern Townships, the little villages of Missisquoi—Philipsburg, Bedford, Dunham, and Frelighsburg—arranged a common celebration to which people flocked from all over the county. All the shops were shut; the streets were bright with flags and bunting. “Bientôt,” wrote one correspondent of a French-Canadian town, “St. Jean disparut dans les drapeaux et les pavillons.”9 Down in the Maritime Provinces, where the anti-Confederates watched the bright day with sullen disapproval, a few shops stayed ostentatiously open; a few doors were hung with bunches of funereal black crepe; and in Saint John, New Brunswick, a certain doctor defiantly flew his flag at half-mast until a party of volunteers happened to come along, offered politely to assist him in raising it, and, on receiving a furious refusal, raised it anyway and went on their way rejoicing. But there were few enough such incidents; and everywhere it was a good-humoured crowd that pressed along, on foot and in carriages, under the banners, and triumphal arches and the great inscriptions and transparencies which, in English and French, offered “success to the Confederacy” and “Bienvenue à la nouvelle puissance”.
It was mid-morning—nearly eleven o’clock. The crowds were thicker now, and they pushed their way along more purposefully, as if towards an important objective. The day marked the greatest state occasion in the history of British North America, and now its solemn, official climax was at hand. The Grand Parade at Halifax, Barrack Square at Saint John, Queen’s Park at Toronto, and Victoria Square and the Place d’Armes in Montreal were rapidly filling up with waiting citizens. And all over the country, in scores of market squares, parks, and parade grounds, the little officials of Canada, the mayors, and town clerks, and reeves, and wardens, were about to read the Queen’s proclamation, bringing the new federation into official existence. In Kingston, the mayor and committee stood on a great scaffolding which workmen had been busily erecting in the market square since early morning.10 The town clerk of Sarnia carried the proclamation honourably in a carriage, while the Sarnia band and the volunteers paraded proudly in front, and behind came another carriage and four, with four young girls, all in white, representing the four provinces of the new Dominion.11 At the parade ground in Montreal, the troops, regulars and militia, formed the three sides of a great square. Sir John Michel, the Commander of the Forces, waited with his officers in its centre; and then the Mayor and the Recorder, bearing the proclamation, arrived resplendently in a fine carriage drawn by six white horses. The proclamation was read; the bands crashed into “God Save the Queen”; there were cheers for the Queen and the new Dominion. Then the Volunteer Field Battery began another royal salute; down on the river the guns of the Wolverine boomed their response. And, at every seventh explosion, the feu de joie “cracked deafeningly along, up and down the lines, from the new breach-loaders”.12
In Ottawa also, it had just turned eleven o’clock when the Mayor appeared at the entrance of the City Hall on Elgin Street to read the proclamation. There was a little crowd of listeners to applaud him; but most of the citizens of the capital were making their way along Rideau and Wellington Streets, and up Metcalfe and O’Connor, towards Parliament Hill. Macdonald, an early traveller along Rideau Street, had reached the parliament buildings in good time; and long before eleven o’clock approached he was ready and waiting in his office in the Eastern Departmental Building. The official inauguration was about to take place. He hoped everything was in order. It had taken him nearly three years to get the British North America Act passed, and over a month to prepare for the day when it was to go into effect. The work had been barely finished in time and his had been the major responsibility for its completion. The old thoughts of retirement had vanished now. He was to be the first Prime Minister of the new Canada. As far back as March 21, he had confided to his sister Louisa that Lord Monck had charged him “with the formation of the first Government as Premier”. He was the obvious choice. There was no method of discovering what individual possessed the confidence of a parliament which did not yet exist; and Monck had fallen back upon the fact that the delegates of all the British North American provinces, assembled in conference at London, had unanimously chosen Macdonald as their chairman. “In authorizing you to undertake the duty of forming an administration for the Dominion of Canada,” Monck wrote to him formally on May 24, “I desire to express my strong opinion that, in future, it shall be distinctly understood that the position of First Minister shall be held by one person, who shall be responsible to the Governor-General for the appointment of the other ministers, and that the system of dual First Ministers, which has hitherto prevailed, shall be put an end to.”13 The Provinces of Ontario and Quebec had replaced the old united Province of Canada; and with its passing had gone all those dual offices and dual departments which were the mark of its half-acknowledged federal system. Now, for really the first time, he was Prime Minister in form as well as in fact.
From the end of May, when Monck’s commission and the news of the royal proclamation had reached him from London, he had been struggling to complete the arrangements for his Cabinet. It was the old task—a little larger and more complicated than it had been, but essentially the same. A few more jagged and intractable pieces had simply been added to the original heap of the Canadian puzzle. There were, as there always had been, racial interests, religious interests, and territorial interests to be considered; and there was the additional and vastly complicating fact that the new government could only be a government of Confederates, a government which drew its support and its leadership from the unionists of both parties in every province of the Dominion. It was true that in Nova Scotia there was a certain unreality about this assumption of concord. And in Ontario, the great coalition, which had been an inspiring fact three years before, was now rapidly degenerating into a rather dubious fiction. George Brown, who had left the government eighteen months earlier, was now busily reorganizing the Grits for the coming struggle against the coalition; and at the great Reform convention, held in Toronto early in June, Howland and McDougall—the two ministers who were supposed to represent the Grits in the coalition government—were excommunicated and overwhelmed with anathemas, in the lavish manner of an early Christian council. To his colleagues, Macdonald tried to put the best face on these depressing developments. “McDougall and Howland have returned from Toronto in good spirits,” he wrote to one correspondent. “It is believed that they have made a great impression upon the members of the convention by their manly conduct there. The split in the Reform ranks seems to be permanent. . . .”14 A split was all he could hope for now, whereas Brown had brought a united party with him in June, 1864; and it must often have seemed that to regard Howland and McDougall as effective Grit leaders was simply to alienate good Liberal-Conservatives without even the hope of gaining much Reform support. Yet McDougall and Howland had fought for him as best they could. He was pledged to them —and to everyone, Grit or Tory, who had supported Confederation. And the coalition must go on.
At first it had seemed relatively easy to maintain its impartial spirit so far as the Maritime appointments to the Cabinet were concerned. Tupper was a Conservative; and Archibald, who had come to be recognized as his principal lieutenant, was a Reformer. “You will of course come on with Tupper,” Macdonald wrote to Archibald, urging both of them to be at hand in Ottawa for the first meeting of the future Cabinet on June 15.15 Tilley, another Reformer, was also a certainty; and there was only a small hesitation about the other New Brunswick representative. “I note your suggestion to bring an associate with me,” Tilley answered Macdonald’s letter of invitation. “At this moment I am a little puzzled who to ask.”16 It was a choice between two people only—Fisher and Mitchell; and Mitchell, who, to do him justice, probably had no very great desire for office, settled the matter by reminding Macdonald and Tilley that his section of the province, the northeastern section, which had always given its support to Confederation and the Intercolonial Railway, must have some representation in the Cabinet. Where was the Intercolonial Railway to run—by the St. John River valley or by the North Shore? Macdonald could easily appreciate Mitchell’s argument that his constituents would expect an advocate for their interests in the government. “It would certainly appear to me, on the first impression, as the lawyers say,” Macdonald wrote back to Mitchell, “that it would be politic to select a St. John’s river man and a northern route man for the Cabinet.”17 Tilley agreed. The Maritime contingent was complete; and towards the end of June, Tupper, Tilley, Mitchell and Archibald had arrived in Ottawa.
To their surprise, they found the whole matter of the Cabinet chaotically unsettled and Macdonald almost in despair of effecting a settlement. As far back as May 30, he had told Tilley that he had already made preliminary arrangements for Ontario and Quebec; but possibly even he did not expect the variety and the truculent strength of the demands that were made of him. Though McDougall could always fall back upon the need of maintaining the principle of the coalition, his bargaining power, as a Reform leader, was obviously in decline. Yet he demanded no fewer than three places for himself and his associates in the Cabinet. “You admitted,” he reminded Macdonald, “that if Ontario should be represented by five members in the Cabinet, the Liberal party should have three, your position as Premier equalizing the pre-ponderance of Liberals in that Province.”18 This would leave Macdonald only two places for his faithful Liberal-Conservatives. He was anxious to have Alexander Campbell, his old partner, in the Cabinet. But Campbell had always been regarded as a moderate “Rep.-by-Pop.” Conservative; and his inclusion would leave no room for a representative of the old Tories, the followers of MacNab and Hillyard Cameron, who up to a few years before had been such an important factor in the party. Still, as McDougall said, he would himself be Prime Minister. He had forced the poor Tories to accept a good many unpleasant things in the past two decades. Perhaps they would follow him grumblingly still.
The real difficulty was not in Ontario at all, but in Quebec. McDougall and Howland had insisted not only that Ontario must have five seats, and that three of the five should be given to Reformers, but also that Quebec would have to be content with one seat fewer than her sister province. This somewhat perverted application of Rep. by Pop. to the business of cabinetmaking instantly created the most awful difficulties. Cartier was ready to agree that Quebec could have only four cabinet ministers; but he would not consider for even a minute the suggestion that the French-Canadian membership should be reduced by one. Whatever happened, he and Hector Langevin and Jean Charles Chapais must be ministers. That would leave only one seat. But there were still two important interests in the province which were unrepresented—the English-speaking, Protestant minority, which had long looked up to Galt of Sherbrooke as its leader, and the Irish Roman Catholics, who had grown greatly in numbers in the past few decades, and who had fixed their affections upon Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Galt, however wayward and temperamental he might be, was undeniably one of the ablest men in Canadian politics. But McGee had been the chief public prophet of Confederation; and he was quite conscious of his enormous popularity. “I certainly have no desire to embarrass future arrangements which will naturally be under your direction,” he had written Macdonald as early as April 9, “but in a Confederation Government, founded on principles which I have always zealously advocated, I will, if in Parliament, give way neither to Galt, nor to a third Frenchman, ‘nor to any other man’.”19
There were demands, stubborn and unyielding demands, on all sides. How could he satisfy them? He was almost ready to throw the whole business up in disgust, when at nearly the last moment—it was one week away from July I—a way out was found. Charles Tupper, with his robust optimism and friendly good nature, was a man more generous in spirit than many of those who had gathered at Ottawa. He offered to give up his own strong claim to office, and suggested a method by which his withdrawal could be used to settle the difficulty. In his place there might be appointed another Nova Scotian who was also a Roman Catholic, a Nova Scotian who might thus satisfy both the claims of his own province and the aspirations of his co-religionists in Canada as a whole. Tupper’s resignation was essential to the success of this plan; but so also was McGee’s; and McGee, despite his pugnacious protestations of a few weeks ago, yielded his personal claims. On June 24 Macdonald wired offering a seat in the new Cabinet to Edward Kenny, who happened to be both a Nova Scotian and a Roman Catholic. He had few other claims to distinction or to office; but in the circumstances, he was apparently worth both the veterans, Tupper and McGee. The first Confederate government was complete.
As eleven o’clock drew close, they were all waiting—all except Edward Kenny, of course, who had hardly had time to collect his senses and his luggage, let alone make the long journey between Nova Scotia and Ottawa. A crowd of Ottawa citizens had gathered outside the Eastern Departmental Building, and people had even pushed their way along the corridors to the doors of the Privy Council chamber. Monck was expected at almost any minute. The Governor-General, in his characteristic easy-going fashion, had not sailed from England until the last possible moment, and had reached Quebec on June 25. “I bring out with me,” he wrote reassuringly to Macdonald, “my new commission and the Great Seal of Canada, Ontario, and Quebec, so that everything is ready to start the new coach on Monday next.”20 The new coach was indeed ready; but Monck was apparently unaware that he should contribute anything special to the pomp and circumstance of its send-off. “I hope the people of Ottawa,” he wrote anxiously to Macdonald, “will be satisfied to postpone any demonstration until I come to remain at Rideau Hall as I should like that my present visit should be considered one for business only.” To be told that the inauguration of Confederation was “business only” was a little depressing to the spirit. Yet Monck had some justification for looking rather coolly upon the visit to Ottawa that he was about to undertake. It was nearly three years ago that George Brown had described Rideau Hall as a “miserable little house”. “To patch up that building,” he had insisted to Macdonald, “will cost more than a new one. . . .”21 But, despite this advice, the government had decided to “patch up” instead of building anew, and even after three years the “patching up” process was not complete. Monck could camp out for a night or two at Rideau Hall; but permanent residence would certainly have to be deferred till later. He may have been slightly annoyed. He would hardly have been human if he had not been. But there was more than a little temporary irritation back of his casual attitude to July first. He had believed firmly in Confederation, and had done all in his power to strengthen it and forward its progress. But Carnarvon’s visions would have been quickly dissipated in his practical, workaday mind. A “good man”, Macdonald described him later, but quite unable, from the constitution of his mind, “to rise to the occasion”.
Along with a large crowd of people, Macdonald had waited on the dock for the steamer Queen Victoria, which had borne Monck up to Ottawa on Friday, June 28. He would have liked to see Lord Monck, as head now of the new state, in a role more imposing than his former one. In April, after the British North America Act had been passed, he had suggested that it would be gratifying to the people of Canada if the Governor-General could be styled Viceroy as in India.22 But such touches of purple had not been applied; if Canada could not be a kingdom, presumably she could not have a viceroy. And it was simply a very typical mid-Victorian gentleman, in civilian clothes, and with only his private secretary, Godley, as attendant, who had landed at Ottawa and driven away in a carriage to Rideau Hall.23 There had been no reception on Friday night, and no ceremony; and now, as he waited anxiously for the Governor on the morning of July 1, Macdonald knew very well that he could expect a repetition of the same kind of gentlemanly informality. He was not disappointed. Monck drove up to the East Block in plain clothes and with Godley as his only companion.24 The crowd of waiting people was hardly aware of his arrival, and there was no demonstration. He walked along the corridors to the Privy Council chamber. The prospective councillors, the judges, and a few officers in uniform were waiting for him there; and after he had entered the room, the doors were thrown open to the public.
The brief, business-like ceremony began. Godley read Monck’s new commission; and the judges—Chief Justice Draper, Chief Justice Richards, and Justices Mondelet, Hagarty, and Wilson—administered the oaths.25 The Governor, his hand resting on the Bible, spoke the solemn words in a clear, firm voice; and then, having shaken hands with the judges, he seated himself in the chair of state. Up to this point the proceedings had been unremarkable, and could easily have been anticipated; but now came an announcement which Macdonald could have foretold in only the most general fashion. Monck had determined that the coming of Confederation should be marked by the distribution of honours; and, in conformity with a custom which up to that time had been invariable, he and the Colonial Office officials had among them decided what the honours were to be. Cartier, Galt, Tupper, Tilley, McDougall, and Howland were to be made Companions of the Bath—there was no doubt about that. There was equally no doubt that Macdonald should be given a superior honour, for in Monck’s opinion he had unquestionably been the principal architect of federal union. But what form should this special royal favour take? At first Monck thought of a Baronetcy; but in the end he agreed with the new Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, that Macdonald should be made a Knight Commander of the Bath.26 It was a sharp distinction between the new Prime Minister and his colleagues; and, as Macdonald heard Monck make the announcement that morning, he must have realized instantly that it would be regarded as an invidious distinction as well. In one minute a grave political mistake had been made. But the public session was over; the onlookers withdrew from the Privy Council chamber—the newspaper correspondents among them; and in a few minutes the news of the awards would be speeding over the telegraph wires. The thing had been done; and a little while later Monck and his new councillors, including his new Knight, adjourned their meeting to review the troops on Parliament Hill.
It was high noon now, and for the last hour and a half, all through the four provinces, the military parades and reviews had been going on. At an early hour in the morning the citizens of Kingston had been streaming across the Cataraqui Bridge and up to the Barriefield Common to secure the choicest positions for the spectacle; and before half-past ten, when the review began in Toronto, the Torontonians had gathered in an “immense circle” round the reviewing grounds to the north-west of the city.27 In little places like Cayuga, where the 37th Battalion of Haldimand Rifles paraded—”the 37th cannot be surpassed by any Battalion in Canada”—it was the volunteers, of course, who made up the review.28 But in the larger towns of Halifax, Quebec, and Montreal, where there were imperial garrisons, the regular soldiers gave a smart professional air to the exercises; and at Toronto the most romantic feature of the whole day’s entertainment was the presence of the 13th Hussars, the “Noble Six Hundred” of Balaclava, who had newly arrived in town. For a couple of hours, while the bright day grew rapidly warmer, and the vendors of soda water, ice cream and confectionery did a roaring trade, the troops marched, and drilled and fought mimic battles. Cavalry crashed against hollow squares and “thin red lines”; the Hussars went by at the gallop in a blur of blue and silver; and everybody admired the wonders of the new Snider-Enfield breech-loading rifles. Then came the grand march past, and the general salute, and the review was over.
In Ottawa, the last of the troops marched down Parliament Hill and away, and the crowd, in search of its midday meal, began slowly to disperse. The square, with the fountain playing in the middle, was nearly empty. But Monck, Macdonald, and the other ministers, after only a brief interval, returned to the Privy Council chamber to complete the list of essential actions, without which government in Canada and its provinces could not have functioned at all. It was early afternoon —the climax of the long summer’s day. In the height of the sky, the sun seemed scarcely to have moved; and the whole earth sunned itself luxuriously in the careless assurance of the long hours of warmth that lay ahead. From the windows of the Privy Council chamber, one could watch the river, all splashed with sunshine, flowing smoothly away past the high cliffs of Major Hill Park towards the north-east. Beyond the far bank stretched the pale green river flats, and beyond them, rising abruptly in wave after long, low wave of pine trees, were the Laurentian hills. In that far country where all the colours seemed to darken so swiftly into sombre blues, there was, on most days and in most lights, the harsh suggestion of something vast and gnarled and forbiddingly inhospitable. But on this day of brilliant sunshine, the colours of the whole ragged landscape had mysteriously lightened and freshened; the dull blue had narrowed to a thin line at the horizon, and it was possible to distinguish clearings, and perhaps a village or a winding road—the signs of indomitable human life. It was warmer now—the heat of an unruffled summer’s day. And they must have felt it in the Privy Council office as they worked away, swearing in the ministers to their respective offices, appointing the Lieutenant-Governors of the different provinces, setting the coach in motion, in Monck’s own phrase.
In the meantime, most of the population of Canada had gone on holiday. The parades were over; the proclamation had been read; everything official—civil or military—was finished. And the people had packed up, left their houses, and gone off to sports, games and picnics. At Three Rivers, a large crowd of spectators watched the Union Club and the Canadian Club play “une partie de cricket”. There were games in the cricket grounds at Kingston, while the band of the Royal Canadian Rifles played faithfully on during the long afternoon; and out on the waters of the bay the competing sailboats moved gracefully along the course round Garden Island and back. The citizens of Barrie turned out to Kempen-felt Bay to watch the sailing and sculling races, and to amuse themselves at the comic efforts of successive competitors to “walk the greasy pole” which extended thirty feet beyond the railway wharf, with a small flag fluttering at its end.29 At Dunnville, down in the Niagara peninsula, a new race-course had just been laid out. People came from all around “to witness the birthday of the course as well as that of the nation”; and while “the Dunnville and Wellandport brass bands discoursed sweet music to the multitude”, the spectators watched the exciting harness race between Black Bess and Jenny Lind.
In dozens of small villages, where there were no bands or race-courses, and where there could be no water sports, the farmers and their wives and children thronged out early in the afternoon to the local fair grounds or picnic place. Sometimes this common occupied a piece of high ground just outside the village, where a great grove of maple trees gave a pleasant shelter from the heat; and sometimes it lay a mile or two away—a broad, flat stretch of meadowland, through which a shallow river ran. The waggons and buggies stood together in a row; the unharnessed horses were tethered in the shade of a group of tall elm trees; and out in the sunshine the young people and the children played their games and ran off their sports. For an hour or two the small boys who were later to drive the Canadian Pacific Railway across their country and who were to found the first homesteads in the remote prairies, jumped across bars and ran races. The long shadows were creeping rapidly across the turf when they all sat down to a substantial supper at the trestle tables underneath the trees. Afterwards they gossiped and chattered idly in the still calm evening. Then it grew slowly darker, and the children became sleepy; and they drove home over the dusty summer roads.
By nine o’clock, the public buildings and many large houses were illuminated all across Canada. And in Toronto the Queen’s Park and the grounds of the private houses surrounding it were transformed by hundreds of Chinese lanterns hung through the trees. When the true darkness had at last fallen, the firework displays began; and simultaneously throughout the four provinces, the night was assaulted by minute explosions of coloured light, as the roman candles popped away, and the rockets raced up into the sky. In the cities and large towns, the spectacle always concluded with elaborate set pieces. The Montrealers arranged an intricate design with emblems representing the three uniting provinces—a beaver for Canada, a mayflower for Nova Scotia, and a pine for New Brunswick. At Toronto the words “Cod Save the Queen” were surrounded by a twined wreath of roses, thistles, shamrocks, and fleur-de-lys; and at Hamilton, while the last set pieces were blazing, four huge bonfires were kindled on the crest of the mountain. In Ottawa, long before this, Monck and Macdonald and the other ministers had quitted the Privy Council chamber; and Parliament Hill was crowded once again with people who had come to watch the last spectacle of the day. The parliament buildings were illuminated. They stood out boldly against the sky; and far behind them, hidden in darkness, were the ridges of the Laurentians, stretching away, mile after mile, towards the north-west.