Of course, a dozen love stories clung round the Colonel’s early days; there were speculations as to what could have induced such a self-burial, but they were all of the hearsay order. One was that he was jilted at the altar, set sail, and we know the rest. Another, that in the sylvan court of George III. the young princesses, aides, equerries and courtiers made hay together, and, in spite of the Royal Marriage Act, also fell in love. One of the princesses--the name does not transpire--it was said cared for the dapper little lieutenant. Among the never-ending romances, heartbreaks and silent partings which haunt the walls of royal palaces and the pathways of royal parks, may be the love story which resulted in the determination--“Here, General Simcoe, will I rest and will soon make the forest tremble under the wings of the flock which I shall invite by my warblings around me.” However, “I never saw but one woman I ever really cared anything about,” was his own admission, “and she wouldn’t have me; and, to use an old joke, those who would have me, the devil wouldn’t have them.” The one lady was no princess, but owned to the name of Johnstone. Whatever his ideal had been, Mrs. Jameson, wandering about the country without a maid and in a lumber-waggon, as he called it, was not to his taste. She on her part was very proud of her contrivances, and unstrapped her mattress to show him how comfortable she could be at all times when beds were not forthcoming; but he gruffly turned his back and muttered something he would not say aloud. Mrs. Jameson’s observations on Canadian society, as it was then, are by no means bad, and it is easy to believe them; but when she allows such distaste or her own painful position to overshadow her cheerfulness and express nothing but regret at seeing Niagara--she would have preferred it a Yarrow unvisited--she need not be taken altogether at her own valuation as a prophetess. We can sympathise with her “By the end of the year I hope, by God’s mercy, to be in England,” but no further. But, generally speaking, she must have been a fascinating woman; plain at first sight, her mind, manners and accomplishments obliterated the impression, and the charm was heightened by beautiful hands, a sweet voice, and fair hair of a reddish tinge. The voice she used with great effect in singing, but the hair she allowed to be seen in curl papers when she received her callers in the new Canadian London in the year ’37, when en route from the Colonel’s to the omega of her “wild journey,” Mackinaw.