Overlooking the harbour of the modern Toronto, far down in the east, there stands at the present day, a large structure of grey cut-stone. Its radiating wings, the turret placed at a central point aloft, evidently for the ready oversight of the subjacent premises; the unornamented blank walls, pierced high up in each storey with a row of circular-heading openings, suggestive of shadowy corridors and cells within, all help to give to this pile an unmistakable prison-aspect. It was very nearly on the site of this rather hard-featured building that the first Houses of Parliament of Upper Canada were placed--humble but commodious structures of wood, built before the close of the eighteenth century, and destroyed by the incendiary hand of the invader in 1813. "They consisted," as a contemporary document sets forth, "of two elegant Halls, with convenient offices, for the accommodation of the Legislature and the Courts of Justice."--"The Library, and all the papers and records belonging to these institutions were consumed, and, at the same time," the document adds, "the Church was robbed, and the Town Library totally pillaged."--The injuries thus inflicted were a few months afterwards avenged by the destruction of the Public Buildings at Washington, by a British force. "We consider," said an Address of the Legislative Council of Lower Canada to Sir George Prevost, "the destruction of the Public Buildings at Washington as a just retribution for the outrages committed by an American force at the seat of Government of Upper Canada." On the same site succeeded the more conspicuous and more capacious, but still plain and simply cubical brick block erected for legislative purposes in 1818, and accidentally burned in 1824. The conflagration on this occasion entailed a loss which, the _Canadian Review_ of the period, published at Montreal, observes, "in the present state of the finances and debt of the Province, cannot be considered a trifling affair." That loss, we are informed by the same authority, amounted to the sum of two thousand pounds. Hereabout the Westminster of the new capital was expected to be. It is not improbable that the position at the head, rather than the entrance, of the harbour was preferred, as being at once commanding and secure. The appearance of the spot in its primæval condition, was doubtless more prepossessing than we can now conceive it ever to have been. Fine groves of forest trees may have given it a sheltered look, and, at the same time, have screened off from view the adjoining swamps.