ot
allowed to address the court on behalf of the prisoner.

This erroneous impression leads me to say that a good deal of
misapprehension exists respecting the early manhood of Canada's first
prime minister. He left school, as we have seen, at an age when many
boys begin their studies. He did this in order that he might assist in
supporting his parents and sisters, who, from causes which I have
indicated, were in need of his help. The responsibility was no light
one for a lad of fifteen. Life with him in those days was a struggle;
and all the glamour with which writers seek to invest it, who begin
their accounts by mysterious allusions to the mailed barons of his
line, is quite out of place. His grandfather was a merchant in a
Highland village. His father served his apprenticeship in his
grandfather's shop, and he himself was compelled to begin the battle of
life when a mere lad. Sir John Macdonald owed nothing to birth or
fortune. He did not think little of either of them, but it is the {13}
simple truth to say that he attained the eminent position which he
afterwards occupied solely by his own exertions. He was proud of this
fact, and those who thought to flatter him by asserting the contrary
little knew the man. Nor is it true that he leaped at one bound into
the first rank of the legal profession. On the contrary, I believe
that his progress at the bar, although uniform and constant, was not
extraordinarily rapid. He once told me that he was unfortunate, in the
beginning of his career, with his criminal cases, several of his
clients, of whom Von Shoultz was one, having been hanged. This piece
of ill luck was so marked that somebody (I think it was William Henry
Draper, afterwards chief justice) said to him, jokingly, one day, 'John
A., we shall have to make you attorney-general, owing to your success
in _securing_ convictions!'

[Illustration: John A. Macdonald in 1842]

Macdonald's mother was in many ways a remarkable woman. She had great
energy and strength of will, and it was she, to use his own words, who
'kept the family together' during their first years in Canada. For her
he ever cherished a tender regard, and her death, which occurred in
1862, was a great grief to him.

{14}

The selection of Kingston by Lord Sydenham in 1840 as the seat of
government of the united provinces of Canada was a boon to the town.
Real property advanced in price, some handsome buildings were erected,
apart fr