Wilfrid Laurier’s mother, née Marcelle Martineau, was a relative of the mother of the French-Canadian poet Frechette, one of the most gifted sons of Lower Canada, and it may be that the same family strain which produced the poet, showed itself in another way in the unusual qualities of the French-Canadian statesman. Five years after Wilfrid Laurier was born his mother passed away. Some time after Carolus Laurier married Adelaine Ethier, and she brought up young Wilfrid. The second offspring of the first marriage, Malvina Laurier, died at an early age. Of the second marriage, three sons were born: Uheld, a physician, who died at Arthabaska in 1898; Charlemagne, merchant, and until his death in 1907, member for the county of Ottawa, and Henri, prothonotary of Arthabaska, who died in 1906. Carolus Laurier, the father, died in 1881. Young Laurier commenced his studies in the parochial school of St. Lin, where he learned reading and writing and the rudiments of arithmetic. His father then decided to extend his son’s horizon so as to permit of his seeing something of the life and learning the language of his English compatriots. About eight miles west of St. Lin, and on the bank of the river Achigan, is the village of New Glasgow. This settlement was established about 1820 by a number of Scotch Protestants who came to Canada with English regiments. Carolus Laurier had done surveying in this neighbourhood and was well acquainted with many of the families, and thus an arrangement to have his son resident among them for a period was easily brought about. Shortly after young Wilfrid Laurier was a figure in the intimate life of the Murrays, the Guthries, the Macleans, the Bennetts and other families of the settlement. For a time he boarded with an Irish Catholic family, named Kirk, and later he lived with the Murrays, giving, in return for lodging and food, his services as a clerk in the general store kept by the head of the household. The school which young Laurier attended for two terms, 1852-53 and 1853-54, was brusquely closed during the first term because of the departure for other parts of the teacher, one Thompson. He was quickly replaced by a man of considerable rough talent, one, “Sandy” Maclean, who possessed a pronounced and good taste for literature, and who in many ways made an admirable teacher. His young French-Canadian pupil, learning English at play, at work, at home and at school, aroused in the good Scot a kindly concern, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier in later years never failed to attribute his knowledge of English literature to the man who first opened his eyes to the wealth of English letters.