But For The Honorable William One Bleak Autumn Came, When The Trees He Had
Planted Ceased To Lend Him Their Welcome Shade - The Roses He Had Reared,
To Send Perfume To His Tottering Frame - The Garden He Had So Exquisitely
Planned, To Gladden His Aged Eyes.
He then bid adieu forever to the
cherished old spot and retired to his town house, now the residence of
Hon.
Chas. Alleyn, Sheriff of Quebec, [250] where those he loved received
his last farewell on the 7th December, 1847, bequeathing Longwood to his
son Charles Webber Smith, who lived some years there as a bachelor, then
decked out his rustic home for an English bride and retired to England
where he died in 1879. Desolation and silence has reigned in the halls of
Longwood for many a long day, and in the not inappropriate words of
Swinburne,
Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not.
As the heart of a dead man the seed plots are dry;
From the thickets of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Chief Justice Smith [251] concerning house-keeping, house-furnishing
chateau ceremonies, etc, at Quebec in 1786, wrote thus in a letter to his
wife:
QUEBEC, 10th Dec., 1786.
Mrs. Janet Smith, New York.
My dear Janet,
"Not a line from you yet! so that our approach to within 600 miles is
less favourable to me hitherto, than when the ocean divided us by
three thousand. It is the more vexatious, as we are daily visited by
your Eastern neighbors, who, caring nothing for you, know nothing of
you, and cannot tell me whether McJoen's or the Sopy Packet is
arrived. If the latter is not over, there will be cause for ill boding
respecting Mr. Lanaudiere, who, I imagine, left the channel with the
wind that brought us out.
If the packet is on the way for Falmouth, get my letters into it for
Mr. Raphbrigh, it contains a bill for L300 sterling to enable him to
pay for what you order. You have no time to spare. A January mail
often meets with easterly winds off the English coast, that blows for
months, and we shall be mortified if you arrive before the necessary
supplies, which, to be in time, must come in the ships that leave
England in March or on the beginning of April.
I have found no house yet to my fancy. None large enough to be hired.
We shall want a drawing-room, a dining or eating-room, my library, our
bedroom, one for the girls, another for Hale and William, and another
for your house-keeper and hair-dresser. Moore and another man servant
will occupy the eight. And I doubt if there is such a house to be
hired in Quebec. To say nothing of quarters for the lower servants
who, I think must be negroes from New York as cheapest and least
likely to find difficulties.
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