mark the spot. I maintain that these farms comprise the actual block of land selected by La Salle. No other on the road named between the eastern boundary of the old English king's post and the present Windmill has any pretensions to being called La Salle's intended homestead, except this one particular block. It is not to be supposed La Salle lived altogether at his intended homestead during his short residence in Canada of three years. He was preparing it for a permanent home, and dwelt part of his time in a log house in his palisaded village, a fifteen minutes' walk distant, or thereabouts. Our best authority on Canadian history, particularly on old French Canada, is Parkman. He says, "La Salle set apart a common two hundred arpents in extent, for the use of the settlers, on condition of the payment by each of five sous a year. He reserved four hundred and twenty arpents for his own personal domain. He had traced out the circuit of a palisaded village and assigned to each settler half an arpent, or about the third of an acre, within the enclosure." These facts cannot be disputed; the reserved homestead must have been as wellknown to La Salle himself as the common ground is now publicly known, and to a man of La Salle's taste for the beautiful, what more attractive spot could he have chosen? Here, be it remembered, was a trading post fifty years old, and the most important one on the continent.

Between the years 1673 and 1676 Cuillerier converted the old fur post into a fort constructed of wood, and later on, between 1689 and 1713, the present stone building was constructed and used as a trading post by the Cuilleriers. At this important place in 1689 Vaudreuil on his return from the scene of the massacre of Lachine rested with his five hundred men before going to Montreal. Imagination fondly stoops to trace the picture of those far-off days nearly three centuries ago, when Champlain stood at the foot of the present Fraser hill, at the head of that once beautiful little bay-now destroyed by the water works' basin-which stretched down to the eastern boundary of the English king's posts, and was the first smooth water from which a canoe could shoot out to reach the channel of the river above the rapids. We see him surrounded by his escort band of wild Iroquois, their canoes hauled up on the quiet shore beneath the shade of the far-spreading primeval elms, ready to embark, to sail down the Lachine rapids. There was not a foundation stone then laid in this now great city of Montreal. The novelty and the excitement of the perilous voyage must have made him oblivious to its danger.

La Salle was seigneur of Lachine and the founder of the palisaded village consisting of fourteen acres, seven acres front by two deep, between the present crossroad and the windmill. To this village he transferred

the fur-trading business from Champlain's old fur post. But from all we can gather it does not appear that La Salle was a man of business or of trade. Jean Millot, a trader of Ville Marie, Montreal, was the leading spirit and afterwards purchased La Salle's rights to the village. It is a curious fact that after La Salle departed and the attempt by Millot to establish the fur trade in the palisaded village had failed, Cuillerier arrived and re-established the business at Champlain's old post, and the Cuilleriers and their successors carried it on for nearly a century. There is not now, and there has not been for the past hundred years, a vestige remaining of the "palisaded village" of 1666; buildings and palisades were all constructed of wood, and have long ago crumbled and mingled with the dust of ages.

Who planted those almost giant pear-trees, said to have been two hundred years old in 1814, when my grandfather took possession of this old homestead? How old were they in La Salle's day, and did he partake of their fruit? They must have been planted by the people in charge of Champlain's trading post long before the days of the Cuilleriers. I can easily mark the spots on which fifty-two of these trees stood in my young years. One was so large and so open in the heart that the largest man on the farm could stand upright inside of it. I have never since seen elsewhere such pears-French pears-as that tree bore. They ripened about the middle of August, and the pomme gries were double the size of any now produced; the famues, and the Bourasa with its leather-like skin, were a treat in midwinter; and the bon Chretin pear was delicious.

During my grandfather's lifetime, as well as my father's, this old home was known to every Highlander in Canada and the far north. It was the resort of the Scotch gentlemen of the Hudson Bay company; and the Simpsons, the Raes, Mackenzies, Mackays, Keiths, Rowands, and McTavishes, for some years during my mother's life used to walk down to the old homestead on a Sunday afternoon, after service in the Scotch kirk, to enjoy a real Highland treat of "curds and cream and oaten bread," with pears and apples in season. And the young gentlemen could there expatiate freely over the scenes of their early homes in the Highlands of Scotland, in their own mother tongue, the Gaelic. My mother was courteous to them because she had a brother, Paul Fraser, serving in the northwest, who afterwards became a chief factor in the Hudson Bay company. The Highlanders of Glengarry made this their stopping-place when they came down to Montreal in winter-time with their sleigh-loads of butter and pork. I have seen six double sleighs arrive at once. The men would leave their loads until they found sale for them in Montreal, then drive in and

deliver the goods. There was always plenty of food for man and beast, with a true Highland welcome. Such were the grand old days of Canadian hospitality. Captain Allan, the father of all the Allans and the founder of the Allan's line of steamers, for several years paid annual visits to the old Fraser home, obtaining his supplies of pomme gries, which he carried to Glasgow, then to the West Indies, back again to Glasgow, and to Montreal the following spring, the apples keeping quite sound. Few people are now living who saw that antique homestead before the west end kitchen addition was built in 1829, with its "Normandy stairway" (outside) and its old French window, or door, opening into the flower garden and pear orchard. The old "slave house" stood within thirty feet, to the west of the house; and the stone building now used as a barn, standing behind the house, was a mystery to all visitors, as it had gun-holes on the front, rear, and sides. It was formerly a storehouse we suppose, but why the gun-holes? There were remains of palisades behind that old building, which ran down to the rear of the ruins of Fort Cuillerier. The front of the farm, three acres by two in depth, must have been palisaded in 1689, when Vaudreuil encamped there with his five hundred men the night after the massacre of Lachine. The old stone wall, ten feet high, three acres in front by four deep, seems to have been built in the days of the Cuilleriers.

The writer is preparing, after an absence of nearly fifty years, to return to the old homestead, to seek shelter within its antiquated walls, to live under the shadow of its far-spreading ancestral elms, and to watch over the growth of a promising young pear orchard, as the exiled Acadians of old returned to live and die amid the scenes of their young days upon the shores of the Basin of Minas.

Johnthaser

A TYPICAL OLD-TIME MINISTER

REV. BENJAMIN TAPPAN, 1720-1790

The Puritan minister was a marked man in his day and generation. There was about him something of that "divinity that doth hedge a king." He was the centre not only of the religious but of the intellectual and educational influences of the neighborhood. Distinguished from his fellow-citizens by a clerical garb, and usually characterized by a dignified not to say somewhat austere bearing, he was universally respected, and by many, more especially of the younger sort, held in something like awe.

The ministers of the Puritan churches were required to be collegeeducated men, and were thus placed at quite a remove from the major part of the community in an age when opportunities even of a commonschool education were limited. They were often, too, men of wealthy or aristocratic connections, and generally persons of weight of character. Their position in the community, their influence in public affairs, and their life-long term of settlement served to make them a distinct class, especially in the country towns. Accustomed to a deference which it is almost impossible for us to conceive, it is no wonder if their manners seemed sometimes haughty and repellent, except with equals or near friends.* They were men, however, almost without exception, who did honor to their profession by their studious, frugal, exemplary lives. As a rule, they

were

"The support and ornament of virtue's cause.”

If here and there one found entrance into the ministry whose abilities were below mediocrity, there were others, like Thomas Shepard of Cambridge and Nathaniel Ward of Agawam, whose scholarship was known and recognized not only throughout the colonies but in the mother country, and who were the peers of jurists and statesmen. On the whole, the Puritan ministry was entitled to the veneration which was accorded it.

* Memoir of the Rev. Samuel Hidden, Tamworth, N. H., ord. 1792. “At one time, going to Ossipee to preach, he passed some men laboring near the roadside. They saw him passing, and took off their hats in token of respect. One man, however, did not observe him until he had passed beyond him. He felt that he had offered an indignity to the man of God. Observing Mr. Hidden to stop some ways beyond to converse with a stranger, he ran along the field beyond him, and there busied himself until he should pass by. Soon he rode up, and the man made a most respectful bow, 'hat in hand.'"

The Rev. Benjamin Tappan of Manchester, Essex county, Massachusetts, whose ministry of forty-five years closed by his death one hundred years ago, was a good representative of the best type of a Puritan clergyman. He was the son of Samuel Toppan of Newbury, Massachusetts, born in 1720.* He was graduated from Harvard college when it was a veritable "school of the prophets," in 1742, settled at Manchester as successor to Rev. Ames Cheever, December 11, 1745, and died May 6, 1790. As in all similar instances in that province at the time, and for many years afterward, Mr. Tappan was called and settled by vote of the town. The time of the separation of church and state in Massachusetts was still far in the future. The town called the minister, voted his salary, built the meeting-house and parsonage, set apart ministerial lands, made arrangements for ordinations, even to the supply of rum deemed necessary on such occasions-in short, transacted all the business involved in ecclesiastical relations that was afterward transferred to the parish. The ministerial tax was levied on the taxable property, irrespective of creed or religious preference.

Mr. Tappan's relations to the church and town appear to have been cordial throughout his ministry. As a mark of confidence and esteem, he was voted for three successive years a gift in addition to his salary, amounting in 1769 to £46. The records show a mingled dignity and consideration on the part of both pastor and people.

As Mr. Tappan's ministry covered the troublous period of the Revolution, with many years before and after, when the country was in an extremely depressed financial condition, it is not surprising to learn that at one time the impoverished people were unable to pay the stipulated salary. To the credit of the minister, we are told that "he maintained uninterruptedly and with faithfulness the ministrations of his pastoral duties." Such a course must have strengthened the ties that united pastor and people in those "times that tried men's souls."

His theology was evidently of the type generally prevalent in the standing order" in New England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He appears to have belonged to the more conservative school. As none of his sermons are extant, all that is known must be a matter of inference. About 1760 a controversy arose between Mr. Tappan and

* Thus the name is spelled on the records until altered by Benjamin Tappan. Samuel was grandson of Abraham Toppan, who came from Yarmouth, England, to Newbury in 1637, and died in 1672. He married a daughter of the celebrated Rev. Michael Wigglesworth of Malden, the author of a lugubrious poem on The Last Day."

The original documents respecting the call, now yellow and worn with age, are in the possession of a great-grandson, Mr. William H. Tappan of Manchester.