ians already showed a restiveness that
ended in open rebellion in 1837 and these misguided people now dreamed
of using the war with the United States as an opportunity for throwing
off the British yoke. At Murray Bay traitorous meetings were held.
Fraser watched them closely and caused a number of the habitants to be
imprisoned for a time on a charge of treason. For an old man of eighty
he showed amazing vigour. His neighbours of the Nairne household were
now in great trouble. Tom's elder sister by five years, Mary, the
sprightly "Polly" of his letters, had brought grief to her family. She
made a clandestine marriage with a habitant, the news of which, the
young man, in his last letter preserved to us, wrote, "nearly bereft me
of my senses." In those anxious days of domestic difficulty and of war
the old mother and her two remaining daughters at the Manor House had
assuredly enough to think of. Then came Fate's sharpest blow. The
tradition is still preserved at Murray Bay that on November 11th, 1813,
Mrs. Nairne, the Captain's mother, was in the kitchen at Murray Bay,
when suddenly a sound like the report of a gun came up as it were from
the cellar. She put her hands to her head, cried "Tom is killed," and
sank fainting into a chair. The day and the hour were, it is said, noted
by those about her.

By this time Thomas Nairne's regiment had passed from Burlington Heights
to Kingston, at the opposite end of Lake Ontario, some two hundred miles
away. The St. Lawrence River had now become the chief danger point for
Canada. On October 21st the American General Wilkinson, with 8,000 men,
left Sackett's Harbour near the east end of Lake Ontario, opposite
Kingston, in boats, to descend the St. Lawrence and attack Montreal--the
identical plan that the British had found so successful in 1760. In
addition, as fifty years earlier, another American force was to advance
through the country bordering on Lake Champlain so that the two armies
might unite before Montreal. From the first the American plans went ill.
The more easterly force met with ignominious defeat by a handful of
French Canadians at Chateauguay. Wilkinson did little better. British
troops, among them Nairne's regiment, were hurried down the river under
Colonel Morrison to harass, if possible, Wilkinson's rear and to fire
upon his 300 boats from the points of vantage on the shore. After a slow
descent, day after day, on the night of November 10th the rear of the
America