It was while the city was passing from its second to its third stage that I first knew it. You landed from the Grand Trunk at a little brick building in the centre of a long platform at the foot of York Street. This was the predecessor of the new Union Station that is to be opened in the sweet by and by. You at once knew you were in a great metropolis for at the slip running into the Bay, which at that time had not been filled in, and came up nearly to Front street, were the carts loading with barrels of water for distribution among the citizens. It was a sort of primitive water works system, with the wells and distilleries to supplement it for drinking purposes. Up York Street and along Front were some of the old-fashioned villas. York to Spadina on Front and Wellington Streets had been the fashionable section of the second city of Toronto, with the Parliament Buildings half way along. Here, Sandfield Macdonald, the first premier, ruled the new Province of Ontario. Sandfield’s Government was noted for its unconventionality—from the physical point of view. The Prime Minister was said to have but one lung. The Provincial Treasurer, E. B. Wood, had but one arm, and the Provincial Secretary, M. C. Cameron, had but one foot. No wonder the first Ontario administration did not make a good run. [Illustration: TORONTO EIGHTY YEARS AGO. Above, Waterfront; below, Fish-market. ] The Leader’s Drill Shed Story. Just east of the Parliament Buildings was the huge wooden drill shed built during the Trent excitement when every town in Canada was running to drill sheds instead of to good roads or prohibition. One night this far from elegant structure collapsed under the weight of a fall of snow. The old _Leader_, of which more anon, made a front page sensation of the accident. Multifarious headlines, nearly a column in length, told the harrowing story, and a single sentence stating that the roof of the shed had fallen in formed the body of the report. Jimuel Briggs was then writing the comic Police Court for the _Telegraph_, a rival paper. He arraigned a supposititious tramp before the “Beak” on the charge of drunkenness and vagrancy. “What was the last piece of work you did?” asked the magistrate. “The _Leader’s_ report on the drill shed,” the prisoner replied. “Six months with hard labor,” was the penalty promptly imposed. This was the first rebuke I know of to the headline as a newspaper artifice.