Speaking in his paper of the spirit of the “faction” towards the press, Mackenzie indulged in a prophecy of an event at which the same aged mother was a pained witness. In connection with the trials of a Canadian editor of a different political stripe, he says: “By the implied consent of King, Lords and Commons, he is doomed to speedy shipwreck, unless a merciful Providence should open his eyes in time, and his good genius prompt him to hurl press and types to the bottom of Lake Ontario.” Mackenzie lived quite close to the lake, and his evil wishers must have taken the hint. Every one knows the story of how _noblesse oblige_ was construed into the necessity for an invasion of the printing office, at an hour when no man would be there; how the raiders, in age from thirty-four years downwards, were the flower of that “Canadian nobility” against which the editor never wearied hurling his radical sayings; and how Mrs. Mackenzie, then in her seventy-eighth year, stood trembling in a corner of the office--for the building was home as well--while she witnessed, with fear and indignation, the destruction of her son’s property and the means of her own livelihood. As if the tale could be improved upon, some romancers, telling of the rise of Canada from barbarism to civilization, have adorned it with gross maltreatment of the aged lady by these gentlemen who, with her only to stay them, were naturally _sans peur_. They should also be without this one reproach, for they were too intent upon pi-ing type and throwing the contents of the office into the bay to trouble about her. Someone says that a good and true woman is like a Cremona violin; age but increases the worth and sweetens the tone. In the words of Disraeli, this woman’s love had illumined the dark woof of poverty; fate had it in store that that love should “lighten the fetters of the slave” before she died.