“I would rather be killed by a good Tory bullet than be singed by rebel gunpowder,” said this fire-eating slip of a girl to a crying friend. “What are you crying for--because you have no more brothers to send?” “No, I’m afraid they’ll be brought back dead.” “_I_ don’t care, provided mine are not shot in the _back_.” Of the said brothers, one was in a troop of cavalry and another met his death, as many did, through the sudden change from home comforts to campaigning. “Getting up out of a down bed and sleeping under waggons or on frozen ground with a carpet-bag for a pillow was a great change, and he died before he could be got home.” But another brother seems to have kept his health and spirits in a marked degree. The absences of the husband and father were now as long and trying as they had been in 1812, and the mother, whose name was the good old-fashioned Betsy, gave voluble tokens of her grief. This boy imitated his father’s handwriting and wrote a long and sympathetic letter, ending, “Do the best you can, Betsy, I don’t expect to be back till spring.” She threw down the letter,--“If you don’t come back till then, you need not come home at all.” The boys were delighted, but the mother discovered the forgery, and the scribe suffered severely. It was a custom with the father to give his daughter a birthday present of a roast of beef, every added year marked by an added pound of meat. In those days spinsterhood was not as fashionable a state of life as nowadays, and the father waxed annoyed: “Now, my dear,” he said, when the roast tipped considerably more than twenty pounds, “if you are not gone off within the year I shall have to drive in the whole beast.” Arnold somewhere says that according as the New or Old Testament takes hold of a nation, so do what he terms the religious humours in it differ. It would be hard to determine from the data procurable just what the influence in this case was. Some had anxious thoughts as to how things had “sped” and the division of spoil which old and new dispensations always allow as lawful. One old lady sent off her son with a blessing to join his corps, but called him back again to give him a large shawl. “Now, Willie, take this with you, and when you get to Toronto be sure to get it filled with the best Young Hyson tea. Don’t forget now, and bring the best. By the time you get there you’ll find plenty of it for the taking.”