continued
throughout the Revolution. Early, however, in the present century, he
quitted Detroit and repaired to the Canadian shore, where on a property
nearly opposite, which he obtained in exchange, and which in honor of
his native country he named Strabane--known as such to this day--he
passed the autumn of his days. The last time I beheld him was a day or
two subsequent to the affair of the Thames, when General Harrison and
Colonel Johnson were temporary inmates of his dwelling.

My father, of a younger branch of the Annandale family, the head of
which was attainted in the Scottish rebellion of 1745, was an officer
of Simcoe's well-known Rangers, in which regiment, and about the same
period, the present Lord Hardinge commenced his services in this
country. Being quartered at Fort Erie, he met and married at the house
of one of the earliest Canadian merchants a daughter of Mr. Erskine,
then on a visit to her sister, and by her had eight children, of whom I
am the oldest and only survivor. Having a few years after his marriage
been ordered to St. Joseph's, near Michilimackinac, my father thought
it expedient to leave me with Mr. Erskine at Detroit, where I received
the first rudiments of my education. But here I did not remain long,
for it was during the period of the stay of the detachment of Simcoe's
Rangers at St. Joseph that Mr. Erskine repaired with his family to the
Canadian shore, where on the more elevated and conspicuous part of his
grounds which are situated nearly opposite the foot of Hog Island, so
repeatedly alluded to in "Wacousta," he had caused a flag-staff to be
erected, from which each Sabbath day proudly floated the colors under
which he had served, and which he never could bring himself to disown.

It was at Strabane that the old lady, with whom I was a great favorite,
used to enchain my young interest by detailing various facts connected
with the siege she so well remembered, and infused into me a longing to
grow up to manhood that I might write a book about it. The details of
the Ponteac plan for the capture of the two forts were what she most
enlarged upon, and although a long lapse of years of absence from the
scene, and ten thousand incidents of a higher and more immediate
importance might have been supposed to weaken the recollections of so
early a period of life, the impression has ever vividly remained. Hence
the first appearance of "Wacousta" in London in 1832, more than a
quarter of a ce