Produced by Marcia Brooks, Ross Cooling and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) TORONTO OF OLD [Illustration] H. SCADDING. D.D. [Illustration] Toronto of Old: Collections and Recollections ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE EARLY SETTLEMENT AND SOCIAL LIFE OF THE CAPITAL OF ONTARIO. By HENRY SCADDING, D.D. [Illustration] TORONTO: ADAM, STEVENSON & CO. 1873. Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year One Thousand Eight Hundred and Seventy-three, by Adam, Stevenson & Co., in the office of the Minister of Agriculture. Hunter, Rose & Co., Printers, Stereotypers and Bookbinders, Toronto. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE The Earl of Dufferin, K.C.B. GOVERNOR GENERAL OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, A KEEN SYMPATHIZER WITH THE MINUTE PAST, AS WELL AS THE MINUTE PRESENT, OF THE PEOPLE COMMITTED TO HIS CHARGE, This Volume, TREATING OF THE INFANCY AND EARLY YOUTH OF AN IMPORTANT CANADIAN CIVIC COMMUNITY NOW FAST RISING TO MAN'S ESTATE, IS (BY PERMISSION GRACIOUSLY GIVEN,) THANKFULLY AND LOYALLY DEDICATED [Illustration] PREFACE. It is singular that the elder Disraeli has not included in his "Curiosities of Literature" a chapter on Books originating in Accident. It is exactly the kind of topic we might have expected him to discuss, in his usual pleasant manner. Of such productions there is doubtless somewhere a record. Whenever it shall be discovered, the volume here presented to the reader must be added to the list. A few years since, when preparing for a local periodical a paper of "Early Notices of Toronto," the writer little imagined what the sheets then under his hand would finally grow to. The expectation at the time simply was, that the article on which he was at work would assist as a minute scintilla in one of those monthly meteoric showers of miscellaneous light literature with which the age is so familiar; that it would engage, perhaps, the attention for a few moments of a chance gazer here and there, and then vanish in the usual way. But on a subsequent revision, the subject thus casually taken up seemed capable of being more fully handled. Two or three friends, moreover, had expressed a regret that to the memoranda given, gathered chiefly from early French documents, there had not been added some of the more recent floating folklore of the community, some of the homely table-talk of the older people of the place; such of the mixed traditions, in short, of the local Past of Toronto as might seem of value as illustrations of primitive colonial life and manners. It was urged, likewise, in several quarters, that if something in this direction were not speedily done, the men of the next generation would be left irremediably ignorant of a multitude of minute particulars