The language of the early _Provincial Gazetteer_, published by authority, is as follows: "The Don empties itself into the harbour, a little above the Town, running through a marsh, which when drained, will afford most beautiful and fruitful meadows." In the early manuscript Plans, the same sanguine opinion is recorded, in regard to the morasses in this locality. On one, of 1810, now before us, we have the inscription: "Natural Meadow which may be mown." On another, the legend runs: "Large Marsh, and will in time make good Meadows." On a third it is: "Large Marsh and Good Grass." At all events, hereabout it was that York, capital of Upper Canada, began to rise. To the west and north of the site of the Houses of Parliament, the officials of the Government, with merchants and tradesmen in the usual variety, began to select lots and put up convenient dwellings; whilst close by, at Berkeley Street or Parliament Street as the southern portion of the modern Berkeley Street was then named, the chief thoroughfare of the town had its commencing-point. Growing slowly westward from here, King Street developed in its course, in the customary American way, its hotel, its tavern, its boarding-house, its waggon-factory, its tinsmith shop, its bakery, its general store, its lawyer's office, its printing office, its places of worship. Eastward of Berkeley Street, King Street became the Kingston road, trending slightly to the north, and then proceeding in a straight line to a bridge over the Don. This divergency in the highway caused a number of the lots on its northern side to be awkwardly bounded on their southern ends by lines that formed with their sides, alternately obtuse and acute angles, productive of corresponding inconveniencies in the shapes of the buildings afterwards erected thereon; and in the position of some of them. At one particular point the houses looked as if they had been separated from each other and partially twisted round, by the jolt of an earthquake. At the Bridge, the lower Kingston road, if produced westward in a right line, would have been Queen Street, or Lot Street, had it been deemed expedient to clear a passage in that direction through the forest. But some way westward from the Bridge, in this line, a ravine was encountered lengthwise, which was held to present great engineering difficulties. A road cut diagonally from the Bridge to the opening of King Street, at once avoided this natural impediment, and also led to a point where an easy connection was made with the track for wheels, which ran along the shore of the harbour to the Garrison. But for the ravine alluded to, which now appears to the south of Moss Park, Lot Street, or, which is the same thing, Queen Street, would at an early period, have begun to dispute with King Street, its claim to be the chief thoroughfare of York. But to come back to our original unpromising stand-point.