_MAP OF THE NIAGARA FRONTIER_ _MAP OF THE DETROIT FRONTIER_ {1} CHAPTER I HIS BIRTHPLACE "Thou Guernsey! bravely crowned With rough embattled rocks ...." --_Drayton._ "Sévère et douce."--_Victor Hugo._ "In that corner of the old Norman land where live the little people of the sea, in that island of Guernsey, stern yet mild," Isaac Brock was born. It was a rough cradle, yet not an unkind one. Though for countless ages its shores have been beaten about and broken by its relentless enemy the ocean, yet behind that bold and serried front lie peaceful glens and valleys carpeted with heather and gorse, and fair fields full of lovely ferns. Cruel reefs lie around the island--the terror of sailors, and out from the sea fog that hovers over them loom giant rocks, strange and grotesque shapes, into which the sea has hollowed many a cavern, haunted, as old legends tell, by the evil spirits of the deep. Guarded by those granite cliffs, apart from the world--for in the eighteenth century there was but little communication with either England or France--the simple folk of the island lived. The women were famed for their beauty, blue-eyed and {2} rosy-cheeked, a combination of Saxon fairness and Norman freshness; the men were hardy, bold and daring, as became those who gained their living in such a precarious way as sailors and fishermen and smugglers of the Channel Islands In addition to the fishermen and the sailors there were the country people who lived on and cultivated their own estates, the largest of which did not exceed seventy-five English acres. Wheat was the principal crop, and dairy products the chief source of profit. Beside the country people there lived in or near St. Peter's Port, the capital, another distinct set of inhabitants, who may be called the upper or governing class. To this class the family of Brock belonged.