Of all the party then taken only one suffered. He was sentenced to be hanged, but that sentence was commuted to penal servitude, under which he died. The isolated farm-houses in the eastern part of Upper Canada and in Lower Canada suffered severely from the wanton attacks of rebels and sympathisers; and as for the terrors, the woes, the tears of the Lower Canadian women and children at the hands of the military, what pen can tell, what tongue describe them. On the island of Tanti a band of Bill Johnston’s marauders attacked the lonely farm occupied by a family named Preston. The mother, of truly heroic mould, regardless of numbers and the sentinels at her doors, contrived to get abroad to alarm her few neighbours. All her worldly goods, money, provisions, arms, were taken, one son died of his wounds, and the husband barely escaped with his life. What could such islanders do? Hickory Island had as its tenant one lone widow. On a night early in November, ’38, a rising took place in Lower Canada at Beauharnois and La Tortu. La Tortu was a small village near La Prairie; the chief sufferers were two farmers, Vitry and Walker. The outlying situations of the farms gave the marauders ample chance to have their own way, and one “_voluntary_” contribution to the patriot cause, at Pointe à la Mule, was made at the instance of a party of masked men who emptied the farmer’s savings-box, and comforted him by saying that he had helped on the Cause. Vitry and Walker were murdered. The wife of the latter arrived with her child in Montreal on the following Sunday, the day of the great illumination and the issue of Sir John’s proclamation, in which he announced his intention to destroy every town where rebels were gathered or where they might be taking shelter. The proclamation added that he would deal with cases of conspiracy or rebellion according to martial law, “either by death or otherwise, as to me shall seem right and expedient.” Like the dreaded Duke of Burgundy, the motto “I have undertaken it” might be seen in his eyes. Even the peaceable Lord Durham had just said, deprecating a renewal of the rebellion, that to those who should succeed in producing lamentable results like to the scenes of ’37 would the responsibility belong. The sight of Mrs. Walker, literally covered with her husband’s blood, and her description of what was evidently her heroic resistance, did not tend to allay the excitement. Montreal had now a strong picket guard surrounding it, two thousand men besides the militia were under arms, and the times, instead of having a depressing effect, tended to exhilaration as well as illumination. Agreeably to orders, the inhabitants placed two lights in every window to assist the troops in case of attack. It is hard to credit that the soldiery then in Canada was close upon the number of the pith of the allied forces at Waterloo.