Surveyors were now at work plotting out the townships, and settlers were coming very rapidly to occupy the lands which were surveyed. Readers will bear in mind that the Family Compact was still in full power. All grants for lands had to come through them. A story of a famous old land surveyor is in order in this place. He had been surveying for many seasons, and, about quarterly, came to York to make his reports and show the plots of the new townships laid out. It so happened that an uncle of the author’s was chain-bearer (whose office Fenimore Cooper, the novelist, has immortalized) to this long-winded surveyor. At the time of his service as chain-bearer this uncle was only a lusty young man, and was not supposed to know the very first elements of surveying. Among other things it was his duty to erect the tent for the nightly bivouac, and make a fire at the tent mouth. Before the dancing, fitful flames, lights and shadows in the forest primeval, he nightly sat with the lordly surveyor, and saw him prepare rude maps of the past day’s work. And, without any sort of knowledge of surveying, he saw him just touch a parallelogram here and there (which would represent 100 acres) with the point of his red pencil; but ever so light was the touch. Night after night he saw dots go down on the parallelograms, and when the quiver was full of sheets of survey, to York he went with the surveyor, to report at the Crown Lands office. He said that in the office he noticed the officials in charge scanning very intently for the red but faint dots. We all now know the result: friends of the government officials had secured hundreds and hundreds of acres of the best lands in the region surveyed, while the surveyor became a mighty land-owner of most choice lands, and died a very, very wealthy man. As may be surmised, he had marked the choicest 100-acre lots with faint red dots, and he and the officials grabbed the very choicest lands in that surveyor’s district. Should a would-be purchaser ask for any certain lot, he was put off for a day in order that they might see in the surveyor’s map if it really was a choice one, as they surmised, since he asked to buy it, in which case some friend immediately entered for it, and consequently that choice lot the settler could not purchase. Using a fictitious name to illustrate, it is said, and truly, too, that Peter Russell, Governor, deeded to Peter Russell, Esquire, many choice lots of 100 acres each of the public domain in Canada, in the days of the Family Compact. But here one can justly remark that the eternal fitness of things comes pretty nearly correct after all, for, although that surveyor was fabulously wealthy, none of the property to-day is in any of his descendants’ possession, nor are there offspring of any of the Family Compact with enough pelf to-day, severally or collectively, to cause any comment. “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small,” in