r they got the chance.
Fines, imprisonments, and other sentences, out of all
proportion to the offence committed, were heaped on every
redcoat in much the same way as was then being practised
in Boston and other hotbeds of disaffection. The redcoats
had done their work in ridding America of the old French
menace. They were doing it now in ridding the colonies
of the last serious menace from the Indians. And so the
colonists, having no further use for them, began trying
to make the land they had delivered too hot to hold them.
There were, of course, exceptions; and the American
colonists had some real as well as pretended grievances.
But wantonly baiting the redcoats had already become a
most discreditable general practice.

Montreal was most in touch with the disaffected people
to the south. It also had a magistrate of the name of
Walker, the most rancorous of all the disaffected
magistrates in Canada. This Walker, well mated with an
equally rancorous wife, was the same man who entertained
Benjamin Franklin and the other commissioners sent by
Congress into Canada in 1776, the year in which both the
American Republic and a truly British Canada were born.
He would not have been flattered could he have seen the
entry Franklin made about him and his wife in a diary
which is still extant. The gist of it was that wherever
the Walkers might be they would soon set the place by
the ears. Walker, of course, was foremost in the persecution
of the redcoats; and he eagerly seized his opportunity
when an officer was billeted in a house where a brother
magistrate happened to be living as a lodger. Under such
circumstances the magistrate could not claim exemption.
But this made no difference either to him or to Walker.
Captain Payne, the gentleman whose presence enraged these
boors, was seized and thrown into gaol. The chief justice
granted a writ of habeas corpus. But the mischief was
done and resentment waxed high. The French-Canadian
seigneurs sympathized with Payne, which added fuel to
the magisterial flame; and Murray, scenting danger,
summoned the whole bench down to Quebec.

But before this bench of bumbles started some masked men
seized Walker in his own house and gave him a good sound
thrashing. Unfortunately they spoilt the fair reprisal
by cutting off his ear. That very night the news had run
round Montreal and made a start for Boston and Quebec.
Feeling ran high; and higher still when, a few weeks
later, the civil