The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4). Dent John Charles

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СКАЧАТЬ expert, and still piques himself on it." Of the château itself and its immediate surroundings, she says: "It" (the château) "is a long wooden building, chiefly of rough logs, with a covered porch running along the south side. Here I found suspended, among sundry implements of husbandry, one of those ferocious animals of the feline kind, called here the cat-a-mountain, and by some the American tiger, or panther, which it more resembles. This one, which had been killed in its attack on the fold or poultry-yard, was at least four feet in length, and glared on me from the rafters above, ghastly and horrible. The interior of the house contains several comfortable lodging-rooms; and one really handsome one, the dining-room. There is a large kitchen with a tremendously hospitable chimney. Around the house stands a vast variety of outbuildings, of all imaginable shapes and sizes, and disposed without the slightest regard to order or symmetry. One of these is the very log hut which the Colonel erected for shelter when he first 'sat down in the bush,' four-and-thirty years ago, and which he is naturally unwilling to remove. Many of these outbuildings are to shelter the geese and poultry, of which he rears an innumerable quantity. Beyond these is the cliff, looking over the wide blue lake, on which I have counted six schooners at a time with their white sails; on the left is Port Stanley. Behind the house lies an open tract of land, prettily broken and varied, where large flocks of sheep and cattle were feeding — the whole enclosed by beautiful and luxuriant woods, through which runs the little creek or river. The farm consists of six hundred acres; but as the Colonel is not quite so active as he used to be, and does not employ a bailiff or overseer, the management is said to be slovenly, and not so productive as it might be. He has sixteen acres of orchard-ground, in which he has planted and reared with success all the common European fruits, as apples, pears, plums, cherries, in abundance; but what delighted me beyond everything else was a garden of more than two acres, very neatly laid out and enclosed, and in which he evidently took exceeding pride and pleasure; it was the first thing he showed me after my arrival. It abounds in roses of different kinds, the cuttings of which he had brought himself from England in the few visits he had made there. Of these he gathered the most beautiful buds, and presented them to me with such an air as might have become Dick Talbot presenting a bouquet to Miss Jennings. We then sat down on a pretty seat under a tree, where he told me he often came to meditate. He described the appearance of the spot when he first came here, as contrasted with its present appearance, or we discussed the exploits of some of his celebrated and gallant ancestors, with whom my acquaintance was (luckily) almost as intimate as his own. Family and aristocratic pride I found a prominent feature in the character of this remarkable man. A Talbot of Malahide, of a family representing the same barony from father to son for six hundred years, he set, not unreasonably, a high value on his noble and unstained lineage; and, in his lonely position, the simplicity of his life and manners lent to these lofty and not unreal pretensions a kind of poetical dignity.. Another thing which gave a singular interest to my conversation with Colonel Talbot was the sort of indifference with which he regarded all the stirring events of the last thirty years. Dynasties rose and disappeared; kingdoms were passed from hand to hand like wine decanters; battles were lost and won; — he neither knew, nor heard, nor cared. No post, no newspaper brought to his forest-hut the tidings of victory and defeat, of revolutions of empires, or rumours of unsuccessful and successful war."

      The faithful servant, Jeffery Hunter, came in for a share of this clever woman's keen observation. "This honest fellow," she tells us, "not having forsworn female companionship, began to sigh after a wife — and like the good knight in Chaucer, he did.

      'Upon his bare knees pray God him to send

       A wife to last unto his life's end.'

      So one morning he went and took unto himself the woman nearest at hand — one, of whom we must needs suppose that he chose her for her virtues, for most certainly it was not for her attractions. The Colonel swore at him for a fool; but, after a while, Jeffery, who is a favourite, smuggled his wife into the house; and the Colonel, whose increasing age renders him rather more dependent on household help, seems to endure very patiently this addition to his family, and even the presence of a white-headed chubby little thing, which I found running about without let or hindrance."

      In politics Colonel Talbot was a Tory, but as a general rule he took no part in the election contests of his time. His servant Jeffery Hunter, however, who seems to have had a vote on his own account, was always despatched promptly to the polling-place to record his vote in favour of the Tory candidate. The Colonel was a Member of the Legislative Council, but he seldom or never attended the deliberations of that Body. During the Administration of Sir John Colborne, when the Liberals of Upper Canada fought the battles of Reform with such energy and vigour, the Colonel for a single campaign identified himself with the contest, and made what seems to have been rather an effective election speech on the platform at St. Thomas. He traced the history of the settlement, and referred to his own labours in a fashion which elicited tumultuous applause from the crowd. He deplored the spread of radical principles, and expressed his regret that some advocates of those principles had crept into the neighbourhood. The meeting passed a loyal address to the Crown, which was dictated by Colonel Talbot himself. This, so far as is known, was the only political meeting ever attended by him in this Province.

      The Colonel was nominally a member of the Church of England, and contributed liberally to its support, though, as may well be supposed, he was never eaten up by his zeal for episcopacy. By some people he was set down as a freethinker, and by others as a Roman Catholic. The fact is that the prevailing tone of his mind was not spiritual, and he gave little thought to matters theological. During the early years of the settlement, as we have seen, he was wont to read service to the assembled rustics on Sunday; but this custom was abandoned as soon as churches began to be accessible to the people of the neighbourhood; and after that time, though he was occasionally seen at church, he was not an habitual attendant at public worship. He was fond of good company, and liked to tell and listen to dubious stories "across the walnuts and the wine." A clergyman who officiated at a little church about five miles from Port Talbot was his frequent guest at dinner, until the Colonel's outrageous jokes and stories proved too much for the clerical idea of the eternal fitness of things. "It must," says his biographer, "have been rather a bold venture for a young clergyman to come in contact with a man of Colonel Talbot's wit and racy humour, and a man who would startle at the very idea of being priest ridden; in fact, who would be much more likely to saddle the priest. The reverend gentleman bore with him a long while, till at length finding that he was not making any progress with the old gentleman in a religious point of view — on the contrary, that his sallies of wit became more frequent and cutting — he left him to get to heaven without his assistance. Colonel Talbot was never pleased with himself for having said or done anything to provoke the displeasure of his reverend guest, but being in the habit at table, after dinner, of smacking his lips over a glass of good port, and cracking jokes, which extorted from his guest a half approving smile, he was tempted to exceed the bounds which religious or even chaste conversation would prescribe, and came so near proving in vino veritas, that the reverend gentleman would never revisit him, although I believe it was Colonel Talbot's earnest desire that he should."

      Bad habits, if not checked in season, have a tendency to grow worse. As the Colonel advanced in years his liking for strong drink increased to such an extent that the in vino veritas stage was, we fear, reached pretty often. To such a state of things his solitary life doubtless conduced. He had an iron constitution, however, and it does not appear that his intemperate habits during the evening of his life materially shortened his days. He lived long enough to see the prosperity of his settlement fully assured. For many years prior to his death it appears to have been his cherished desire to bequeath his large estate to one of the male descendants of the Talbot family, and with this view he invited one of his sister's sons, Mr. Julius Airey, to come over from England and reside with him at Port Talbot. This young gentleman accordingly came to reside there, but the dull, monotonous life he was obliged to lead, and the Colonel's eccentricities, were ill calculated to engage the affections of a youth just verging on manhood; and after rusticating, without companions or equals in either birth or education, for some time, he returned to England and relinquished whatever claims he might consider he had on his uncle. Some years later a younger СКАЧАТЬ