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. [Illustration: 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.