The old market was a curiously ugly and ill-contrived erection. Low brick shops surrounded three sides of the square, with cellars used for slaughtering sheep and calves; the centre space was paved with rubble stones, and was rarely free from heaps of cabbage leaves, bones and skins. The old City Hall formed the fourth or King Street side, open underneath for fruit and other stalls. The owners of imaginary vested rights in the old stalls raised a small rebellion when their dirty purlieus were invaded; and the decision of the Council, to rent the new stalls by public auction to avoid charges of favouritism, brought matters to a climax. On the Saturday evening when the new arcade and market were lighted with gas and opened to the public, the Market committee walked through from King to Front Street to observe the effect. The indignation of the butchers took the form of closing all their shutters, and as a last expression of contempt nailing thereon miserable shanks of mutton! Dire as this omen was meant to be, it does not seem to have prevented the St. Lawrence Market from being a credit to the city ever since. There is a historical incident connected with the old market, of a very tragic character. One day towards the latter end of 1837, William Lyon Mackenzie held there a political meeting to denounce the Family Compact. There was a wooden gallery round the square, the upright posts of which were full of sharp hooks, used by the butchers to expose their meat for sale, as were also the cross beams from post to post. A considerable number of people--from three to four hundred--were present, and the great agitator spoke from an auctioneer's desk placed near the western stalls. Many young men of Tory families, as well as Orangemen and their party allies, attended to hear the speeches. In the midst of the excitement--applauding or derisive, according to the varying feelings of the crowd--the iron stays of the balcony gave way and precipitated numbers to the ground. Two or three were caught on the meat-hooks, and one--young Fitzgibbon, a son of Col. Fitzgibbon who afterwards commanded at Gallows Hill--was killed. Others were seriously wounded, amongst whom was Charles Daly, then stationer, and afterwards city clerk, whose leg was broken in the fall. I well remember seeing him carried into his own shop insensible, and supposed to be fatally hurt. The routine of city business does not afford much occasion for entertaining details, and I shall therefore only trouble my readers with notices of the principal civic events to which I was a party, from 1849 to 1853. CHAPTER XLIII. LORD ELGIN IN TORONTO.