ests with the sap
trickling from the trees to the scooped-out troughs; with the grown-ups
working over the huge kettle where the molasses was being boiled to
sugar; with the young of heart, big and little, gathering round the
huge bonfires at night in the woods for the sport of a taffy pull, with
molasses dripping on sticks and huge wooden spoons taken from the pot.
There were threshings when the neighbors gathered together to help one
another beat out their grain from the straw with a flail. There were
"harvest homes" and "quilting bees" and "loggings" and "barn raisings."
Clothes were homemade. Sugar was homemade. Soap was homemade. And
for years and years the only tea known was made from steeping dry
leaves gathered in the woods; the only coffee made from burnt peas
ground up. Such were the United Empire Loyalists, whose lives some
unheralded poet will yet sing,--not an unfit stock for a nation's
empire builders.

At the same time that the Loyalists came to Canada, came Joseph
Brant,--Thayendanegea, the Mohawk,--with the remnant of his tribe, who
had fought for the English. To them the government granted some
700,000 acres in Ontario.

[Illustration: JOSEPH BRANT]

{316} It is not surprising that the United Empire Loyalists objected to
living under the French laws of the Quebec Act. They had fought for
England against Congress, but they wanted representative government,
and the Constitutional Act was passed in 1791 dividing the country into
Upper and Lower Canada, each to have its own parliament consisting of a
governor, a legislative council appointed by the crown, and an assembly
elected by the people. There was to be no religious test. Naturally
old French laws would prevail in Quebec, English laws in Ontario or
Upper Canada. By this act, too, land known as the Clergy Reserves was
set apart for the Protestant Church. The first parliament in Quebec
met in the bishop's palace in December of 1792; the first parliament of
Ontario in Newark or Niagara in September of the same year, the most of
the newly elected members coming by canoe and dugout, and, as the
Indian summer of that autumn proved hot, holding many of the sessions
in shirt sleeves out under the trees, Lieutenant Governor Simcoe
reporting that the electors seem to have favored "men of the lower
order, who kept but one table and ate with their servants." The
earliest sessions of the Ontario House were marked by acts to remove
the capital fr