In 1854, James Wilson, of Galt, came up to Leith and, after a survey of the village, bought out Mr. Telfer’s interest in it, lock, stock and barrel. The town plot at this time comprised four hundred and sixty acres, although only a minor portion had been surveyed into building lots. The consideration is said to have been sixteen hundred pounds, or nearly eight thousand dollars, and if this was the price actually paid, Mr. Wilson’s proper vocation should have been that of a real estate dealer, as we shall see a little further on. He was what might have been called an absentee landlord, as he returned to Galt and never looked near his purchase again until after he had sold it three years later.

Mr. Wilson was a native of Ayr—

“Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses.
For honest men and bonny lasses.”

and in his youthful years had gone to school there with William Veitch, who, at the time the former came to Leith, was following his trade of cabinet making in the new Ayr that had been founded in Ontario. Mr. Veitch came up to Leith with his old schoolmate, and while there bought the farm on Concession A about two miles below the village, then owned by Robert Grierson, and now by his son Walter. He then went back to Waterloo County and worked at his trade, until he had accumulated enough money to pay for it in full, in the interim renting the farm to Duncan Morrison. He returned to Leith in 1862, and took possession. He had been successful as a tradesman and was fully as successful as a farmer. Well versed in mechanics, he was an advanced mathematician who thoroughly understood the two-foot, or carpenter’s square, and could work out many intricate problems upon it.

Mr. Wilson seems to have taken little interest in Leith, and to have effected little improvement there. After selling the town plot three years later, or in 1857, he made a trip back to Scotland, and must have lived in regal style while away. He bought a costly gold watch while in the Old Land, and was wont to show it to friends after his return to Canada, with the remark that it was all that was left of his interest in Leith. In 1862 he came at last to Owen Sound, and was for several years in the hotel business there. Some old residents of the City still remember him.

In 1857 Adam Ainslie, then an attorney of Galt, became interested in the Sydenham village and its possibilities. With his cousin, George Ainslie, who had arrived in Galt from Edinburgh, he formed a partnership, and bought it just as Mr. Wilson bought it, with the difference that he had never seen it when he paid the purchase price. Mr. Wilson sold out for twenty thousand dollars, and as the whole amount was at once placed in his hands, it becomes apparent that his trip to Scotland must have been one of voluptuous and sensational luxury, for those days at least. Mr. Ainslie came to Leith in 1857, looked over the property, and returned to Galt. He moved up with his wife, a family of three, and all household effects, in the following year, but shortly afterward his relative, for some reason, dissolved the partnership, and Mr. Ainslie took over his share. He moved into the Mill House referred to in a previous chapter, and lived there several years. Then another move was made to a house on the opposite bank of the Water o’ Leith, and in this house he lived until he left the village in 1888.

These are the facts in connection with the two sales of Leith in the fifties, as far as it has been possible to ascertain them from a number of authorities who were not always in agreement upon a few minor details, but whose accounts of the transactions, taken in a general sense, agree pretty closely. The amount paid by Mr. Ainslie was paid down, as stated above, and there may have been further payments, but if there were nobody knows of them. It will be acknowledged, however, that the man who can more than double his money, in a deal of this kind, inside of three years, is born for some other profession besides hotel keeping. However, the times were in Mr. Wilson’s favor. We sometimes talk of good times now, as though in the past they never had anything but hard times. The truth is that the ten years following 185-5 were, for Canada, the most prosperous she ever enjoyed. The general flow of population was not then, as now, from the rural districts to the towns, but precisely in the opposite direction. The wilderness and the solitary places were being made glad by men from the towns and cities, who were moving out to the new settlements and taking up the new vocation of farming. Practically the whole Lake Shore Line was settled by men who left the towns and cities of Scotland to come to Canada and make new homes in the bush. They were doing the same thing in many Canadian cities too, though on a smaller scale, and it was what might be called a healthy movement of population. We can hardly conceive of such a movement at the present time, and we can imagine the roar of indignation that would go up from our cities which are striving might and main, by Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade, to increase their various populations if such a movement ever started. What will be the end of the present migration from the country to the cities, Heaven alone knows. Sydney now has a population of one million, or one fifth that of Australia. Buenos Ayres has two millions, or about the same proportion of the Argentine. The census of 1920, in the United States, showed fifty-three per cent of the population to be living in cities or towns of over two thousand five hundred, and a town that size can hardly be called a rural community. We find farmers of little more than middle age retiring to the cities, to settle down and enjoy life. Perhaps they do, after a fashion. But they could live much more cheaply—and securely—in the country, and find there the life most worth living if they only had the mental capacity to appreciate it. The old saying still holds good, that man made the town but God made the country, and we are speaking from a long experience in city life and the artificial pleasures and fleeting joys to be found there. There is a restlessness and craving for excitement in the young people of our cities that bodes ill for the future of the country. They value an education, but they value it only for the chances it affords them of entering some profession, where they will escape the—to them—degradation of having to soil their hands in the occupation of the mechanic or the farmer. This restlessness they naturally communicate to the young people of the country, and in consequence we find our universities crowded with young men and women who have no conception whatever of the true value of higher education, but who do have an unworthy and ill-concealed contempt for all forms of manual labor. They are loud in their denunciations of the exorbitant demands of the labor unions, yet many of them are satisfied to accept half the money earned by a mechanic in the building trades if only they are spared the indignity of honest labor with their hands. It is not a healthy symptom in the body politic, and thoughtful men are everywhere growing alarmed over it.

Turning again to the decade ending in the year 1866, it is not hard to trace the prosperity of those years in Canada, or the activity in the agricultural industry which was naturally reflected in such villages as Leith. In 1855 a reciprocity treaty was entered into between Canada and the United States, which included in its provisions practically all products of the farm, and a list of manufactured articles as well. It was of immense benefit to both countries, but particularly so to Canada. Those were the days when farms were paid off and mortgages raised in Sydenham, and the country in general prospered as never before. The Civil War of the sixties swelled trade to enormous proportions, but it was indirectly the cause of the abrogation of the treaty, in 1866. The feeling in the United States toward Britain, in that year, was a sore one, and prompted their statesmen in refusing to renew it for another ten years. This was, we believe, a mistake on their part, but it is a mistake that has since been copied, and with far less reason, by our own statesmen and people. In spite of all efforts to the contrary, on both sides of the line we have since had a barrier of customs duties between the two countries, just as senseless and irritating as would be a line of forts garrisoned by regiments of soldiers along the boundary from one ocean to the other. It is a constant source of vexation and heartburning to the people on each side of it. On one side the wall will be raised temporarily, to prevent the people on that side from buying where they can buy to the greatest advantage, as though this were a sin, and something to be shunned. On the other side, the wall is raised in places still higher in reprisal, and thus the game goes on, with the few in both countries encouraging it, and fattening at the expense of the many. The men of 1855 were wiser in their day and generation than we have ever been since, for at least they could see no sense in cutting off the nose to spite the face.

But to our story. Once fairly settled, Mr. Ainslie took a good look around him, and decided on a number of investments in his new possession which seemed to him as promising of profit. Before following him in these, it will be well to take a good look at the man himself. One is naturally interested in the man who, in 1857, risked twenty thousand dollars—equal to at least forty-five or fifty thousand dollars sixty-five years later—on a property he had never seen. Such a man would have made a heavy plunger in the Wall Street of our own times.

He was born on the 13th of April, 1807, at Begbie, in Haddington-shire, Begbie being the estate owned by Archibald Ainslie, his father, who was a gentleman farmer. Ainslie the elder was a man who could give his son every advantage, and the young Adam was sent to the Haddington Grammar School. Haddington is the county seat in the shire of the same name, and is only fifteen miles from Edinburgh. Here he had, for a school-mate, the future wife of the Sage of Ecclefechan, Thomas Carlyle, in the person of Jennie Welch. Of his personal opinion of that young lady we are left in ignorance, but it is well known that her married life with the cranky Thomas was not of the happiest description. When fourteen years of age he graduated from this school, and in November, 1821, he went up to London and was indentured in the study of law, with Weir & Smith, the former gentlemen being his uncle. The law course covered five years, and at its conclusion Mr. Ainslie, then a full-fledged barrister, went to Gibralter. Here he practised law for eight years very successfully, but a violent outbreak of yellow fever, of which he was one of the victims who happily recovered, led to his decision to quit the Rock and emigrate to Canada. He left in 1834, taking passage in the brig Williams, Captain Lamson, master. The voyage took nearly five weeks, and Mr. Ainslie paid one hundred dollars for his fare, which seems a large amount for passage on a sailing vessel. At last he arrived, and decided upon coming to Galt, which was then an active village of two hundred and fifty inhabitants. It did not have so large a population at the end of 1834, for in the summer of that year a travelling menagerie brought the cholera to the village, and in the week that followed nearly one fifth of the inhabitants fell victims to the scourge it left behind. The outbreak was long remembered as one of the worst of its kind that ever visited Canada. A history of the early days of Dumfries township and the town of Galt, written by the Hon. James Young and published in 1880, teems with references to Adam Ainslie, in that portion of the narrative covering the years 1834 to 1857, the latter being the year he first came up to Leith. Mr. Ainslie arrived in November, several months after the visitation, and one of the first 'difficulties he encountered was the fact that, under the laws of Upper Canada, he would not be allowed to practise his profession. This seemed a serious obstacle for a time, but the disability was removed by a special Act of Parliament, and the new shingle was soon hung out. In 1837 the MacKenzie rebellion happened along to add to the gaiety of nations, and Mr. Ainslie, always an intense loyalist, figured in it as a captain in the 11th Gore Militia. The rebellion roused intense excitement around Galt, as it was supposed that the unfortunate Lount and Matthews were concealed in a house there for a time, but this turned out to be incorrect.

Municipal honors came in due time to Mr. Ainslie. Galt was incorporated as a village in 1850, with a little over twro thousand inhabitants, and he was elected to the Council several times. In 1856 he was elected Reeve, and in the following year, Galt having in the interim been incorporated as a town, he was offered the mayoralty but declined, as his intention was then fixed to come to Leith. In 1837 the macdamizing of the Dundas and Waterloo road was commenced by the Provincial Government, and he was appointed as one of the commissioners to carry it out. He served twelve years on this commission, and was for some years its chairman.

It was shortly before his fortieth year before he decided that it is not good for a man to be alone, and took unto himself a wife. The lady in the case was Isabella Miller, also of Galt. She was a daughter of John Miller, who, before coming to America, had owned an estate near Hawick, that city in Roxburghshire which has figured so largely in our narrative. The Millers came first to the State of New Jersey, but later moved to Galt. Mrs. Ainslie, about the time of her marriage, is said to have borne a remarkable resemblance to Queen Victoria. The union was a happy one and three children were born to it.

Despite his many activities there, Mr. Ainslie’s law practise in Galt seems to have been an extensive one from the very beginning. In 1837 he was engaged as counsel for one of the parties thereto in litigation over a disputed title, the details of which are too lengthy for recital here. This lawsuit, which attracted a great deal of interest throughout Upper Canada, gave rise to an incident happening during the proceedings which illustrates the joviality of his disposition, and his love of always mixing pleasure with business when it was possible to do so without neglecting the interests of his clients. The Hon. James Young refers to it in considerable length in the history of Galt, referred to above, so it should be worthy of recounting here. At a certain stage in the lawsuit, Mr. Ainslie found it advisable to go to Elora in company with two other gentlemen, Messrs. Shade arid Chapman, in an effort to get confirmation of his client’s title. The three arranged to drive to Elora, and then, when the business had been transacted, build a raft and fish down the Grand River home again. It may be added that their mission was successful, and that for a consideration of $150 the Elora man they had gone to interview promised to come down to Mi-. Ainslie’s office and confirm the title of his client, a gentleman named MacKenzie.

However, it is with their journey back to Galt by raft we are concerned now. This was described many years later in a letter from Mr. Ainslie to Mr. Young, from whose history it is copied ad verbatim.

“We constructed a raft about four miles below Elora. A large stone tied to a rope served as an anchor, and we used it at the foot of the rapids. We were most successful in fishing. The dry cedar logs of the raft having become water-logged, and the raft inconveniently low, Mr. Shade determined to replenish it with an additional supply of logs from a large collection of drift stuff at the head of a rapid we were nearing. When we arrived at it he called on me to jump off, which I at once did, with my coat over my arm, a bottle of whiskey in my left hand, and my fishing-rod in my right. At the same instant Chapman threw the stone on the bank, but the current being very strong pulled it off, and before I could turn around Shade in a loud voice ordered me to jump on again but—

“Time and tide for no man bide.”

I fully realized on this occasion the truth of this adage. Suddenly wheeling to the right about face, I saw the raft rapidly receding from the shore. I made a desperate spring to regain it, but alas! merely touched it with my foot, and was then and there bodily immersed in the rapidly flowing fluid!

When I regained my feet my fellow voyagers were a long way down the rapid. On arriving at still water they came to anchor, and had their risible faculties intensely excited by seeing me wading to my middle down the rapids to rejoin them. I still, however, held onto my coat, the rod, and the bottle of whiskey, and I found the last most acceptable when I regained the raft. I thought I had been ill-used, and had a right to complain of somebody, but the more I complained the more they laughed, and replied to all my remonstrances by recommending me to take another pull at the bottle ! We took up our quarters that night at old William Davidson’s, in Woolwich, where I got my clothes dried at the kitchen fire. The next afternoon we reached home.”

“This brings to my mind another acquatic occurrence. Many years ago New Hope (now Hespeler) was a favorite place of resort to fish for trout. One day I was one of a party to go there. My companions were the three Messrs. Dickson. After fishing some time the Hon. Robert Dickson, in crossing the stream, slipped off a plank into the pond of Aberholtzer’s saw-mill. After scrambling out to the bank he deliberately divested himself of his clothing, which he hung up on stumps to dry. He then improvised a sort of Zulu costume, and with the utmost sang froid continued to pull the trout from the stream until his clothing was fit to put on again! Those were jolly days and they seem now to have passed all too quickly.”

From the tenor of this letter from the Galt attorney to the author of its history, it will be inferred that the former gentleman was a keen sportsman, as well as an excellent lawyer, and this inference is correct. Like father, like son. In later years, at Leith, his son John became one of the keenest sportsmen as well as one of the best all round athletes in Sydenham township.

One little detail of the history of the Waterloo County village will be of interest at this point. In 1838 William Dickson, who had founded it, disposed of two hundred acres of land covering what is now the best portion of Galt, on the west side of the Grand River, and an additional hundred acres in Dumfries township, with his entire interest in Dumfries Mills, to Absalom Shade, the consideration as stated in the deed amounting to two thousand five hundred pounds, or about $12,225.00. In deeding the aforesaid two thousand acres to Mr. Shade, among the reservations made by Mr. Dickson was one lot for Adam Ainslie, north of Main and east of Ainslie Street. Mr. Dickson and the jovial attorney were evident^ on intimate and friendly terms when the former not only reserved from the sale a lot for the latter’s benefit, but also honored him by naming what is now one of Galt’s leading throughfares after him. Galt must have had at this time between four and five hundred inhabitants, as the village was growing rapidly, having entirely recovered from the cholera scare. Yet Mr. Dickson disposed of the larger part of his interests there for about $8,000. less than Mr. Ainslie paid for a far smaller interest in the village of Leith, twenty years later, when the latter place had a population of about one hundred. Putting two and two together it becomes plain that in 1860 the prospects for future prosperity in Leith were pretty rosy.

In reference to what may seem rather an extended notice of Galt, it may be explained that from 1840 until 1860, and even later, that town occupied by far a larger place in the thoughts and interests of our first pioneers than it has since done in those of their children. Many of the first arrivals in Owen Sound came from there, and even in greater measure they came to the Lake Shore Line and vicinity of Leith. Not that they were encouraged to come by Galtonians, however. Those who remained behind had the most harrowing stories to tell the dear departing ones of the hardships and positive dangers that awaited them up in the region of Georgian Bay. The winters were pictured as being six months long and incredibly severe; their only neighbors would be roving bands of redskins. The Queen’s Bush was filled with wild animals of the fiercest description, and if they escaped starving to death these savage beasts would keep them in a constant dread worse than death itself. This story is not overdrawn. It is what many of the inhabitants of Galt in that day actually believed. Many of those who left did so with the pleasing assurance ringing in their ears that it would not be a year until they were back again. They themselves had some fearful and wonderful notions of the new home they were coming to. They never dreamed that, as an instance, fruit trees could be raised here at all. Those who made the first experiments in fruit growing were openly scoffed at. All this seems strange to us now, but ’twas ever thus. The stay-at-homes will always find some reason for continuing to stay there, and the adventurer who fares forth in quest of fresh fields to conquer, while he may not always succeed, at least should be given credit for being willing to take his chance.

What do we find now ? We find, for one thing, that we can raise as fine apples, plums and pears as are grown anywhere in the Dominion, in point of flavor at least. We find Owen Sound, in spite of its comparative isolation a larger city than Galt, although founded twenty-four years later. When compared with some of its sister cities having greater natural advantages, Owen Sound has made truly wonderful progress.

But to return to Mr. Ainslie. For many years after his coming to Galt in 1834 he had little competition in his practice of law. There was but one other barrister in the village, a gentleman named John Miller. As men in that day were just as fond of litigation as they are at present, and from all accounts even more so, and as, owing to land speculation, there was a vast amount of conveyancing, etc., fortune seems to have smiled upon him. He was in great demand at social events and as he had a keen appreciation of forensic talent was often heard in the debates of the village. In 1841 the theatrical fever struck Gait, with as much violence as the cholera had a few years earlier, and a dramatic society was organized. The first plays were presented in the Township Hall of Dumfries, a building no sooner finished than it began to assume an air of antiquity, and which was, in its last days, known as ‘'Noah’s Ark.” The opening performance was the well known Rob Roy; Mr. Ainslie acted as prompter, and wrote and delivered a clever prologue the night it was presented. He also composed a chorus, “Hurrah for the village of Galt, boys,” which described in glowing detail what a great place the village already was, and prophesied even greater and grander things to come. Those who remember the fine old Scottish gentleman himself can easily imagine how he must have enjoyed himself that night! He wielded at all times a trenchant and eloquent pen, and it has sometimes been a matter for surprise that he never adopted letters as a profession. In politics he was from the very time of his first landing in the country strongly conservative, and a strong admirer of Sir John A. MacDonald. There are not now many men in North Grey who attended the great Liberal meeting in Owen Sound in 1878, when the Hon. Alexander MacKenzie addressed the gathering in defence of his four years’ administration and asked for a further lease of power, and possibly some even of these have forgotten how, when Mr. MacKenzie had concluded his address, Mi. Ainslie rose from his seat in the audience and, with the utmost decorum, propounded a few questions to the Liberal Chieftan, which were received with the most respectful attention and given an equally respectful answer. The Honorable Alexander MacKenzie would have been honorable in any station in life; whatever his deficiencies were, he was nothing if not a gentleman.

Until the day of his death Mr. Ainslie always manifested the warmest interest in, and affection for, Galt. He spent twenty-eight years there, certainly the most prosperous, and possibly the happiest years of his life. When he came to Leith his attention was called to the need of a dock, and the building of this was his first undertaking. It was built straight out into the bay, on the j north side of the Water o’ Leith, in 1861. There wras a depth of ten feet at the outer end, which was ample for the light draught of the small steamers and sailing craft of that period. It was cribbed all the way out, the cribs being filled with stone found in the neighborhood. The farmers of Leith and vicinity had then never heard of such a thing as a booster, but they showed a most booster-hke spirit when the dock was built. Realizing that the dock would be of great value to the village, they organized a few bees and Mr. Ainslie thus had his stone drawn for nothing. The oak snubbing posts were works of art. They were nicely beveled on top, and rounded to a smaller diameter at the floor of the dock than at the head. Leith was at once made a fueling station for the wood-burning steamers, and many thousands of cords passed over the dock in the years that followed, to be fed to their furnaces.

An addition was built to the mill and here, shortly I afterwards, the first telegraph office was opened, in a small building at the east end of it. Mr. Ainslie commenced grain buying, using part of the mill for storage, but it was found too damp for that purpose and he soon desisted. The mill pond was enlarged and the dam strengthened, all these improvements on that building being effected at considerable expense. The distillery was running at full capacity at this time and the head distiller, a Mr. Rochester, previously mentioned, had made several improvements over the lax methods of his predecessor. There was no more free whiskey for all who cared to come and take a dipperful from the vats at their pleasure. A small storehouse for Mr. Rochester’s product was built down at the waterfront, just beside the dock. There is an old, but true story, that one of the villagers stole a whole barrel of booze from this building by going down every morning before daylight, gaining access to the inside by some means known only to himself, filling his pail, and scurrying furtively home with it. In time he was suspected, caught with the goods on him, and was made to pay for the whole barrel. At the prevailing price of whiskey he would not have to pay so much, after all. And if stolen fruit is always sweetest, think of how he must have enjoyed licking up that stolen liquor!

Mr. Ainslie had different gangs of men working on his various enterprises, and when he found they could not get free liquor themselves by going to the distillery it was his fashion to fill a quart bottle and start making the rounds, giving each man a small “snort.” Such an employer should not have had much difficulty in hiring men.

The distillery ceased operations some time in 1864. 'The reason for such cessation was said to be the heavy excise duty levied by the Upper Canada authorities about that time on hard liquors. It is positive that it was not due to any slackening in the demand for its product.

The new proprietor of the village and its fortunes used to have some funny experiences with his tenants and would-be tenants. Among these latter was an old character who answered to the homely name of Tommy Jones. Tommy was a bachelor, probably for the good and sufficient reason that no woman would consent to have him, and like most bachelors his affections were centred on very few objects in life. In fact, they narrowed themselves down to one. That was whiskey, for which he had a tender and loving regard indeed. He persuaded Mr. Ainslie into permission to start a garden on some vacant land adjacent to Keefer’s Creek, on the north side. Here he planted some Indian com and a variety of garden truck, which was all very well. But the homing instinct seems to have struck him, for he suddenly began operations in the construction of a house and had made the excavation for a cellar before Mr. Ainslie appeared on the scene to put a crimp in his activities. He was ordered off the land bag and baggage, but a huge hole in the ground remained for many years as a monument to his blasted hopes. The building of a row of summer cottages is at present projected, within two hundred yards of the spot. After that Tommy made his home as previously, wherever the night chanced to find him. A huge hogshead back of Glen’s tavern was one of his places of nightly repose. How he came to his end nobody knows, but his dead body was found in the bush back of the village, and where he is buried everyone seems to have forgotten.

The list of inhabitants of the village, with their several occupations, is given by W. W. Smith in his gazetteer, published in 1865, and is as follows:

Adam Ainslie, proprietor of Leith Mills; Richard Alexander, laborer; Peter Burr, blacksmith, Thomas Brown, carpenter; Arthur B. Cameron, carpenter; George Cameron, carpenter; Peter Cameron, carpenter; James Clark, carpenter; Michael Duffy, laborer; Robert Grierson; John Lenfesty, miller, Leith Mills; Charles Lemon, boot and shoemaker; Royal Moulton, inn-keeper, “Leith Hotel;” Henry Moore, teacher, boards at A. Ainslie’s; Anthony Marshall, laborer; Neil McNeil, laborer; Malcolm McNeil, laborer; William McKeen, farmer; Daniel North, laborer; Henry Rixon, boards at A. Ainslie’s; James Ross, postmaster; John Ross, assistant; James Ross, Jr.

The population of the village is given by the same authority as being one hundred and ten, on the above date. This may be so, but there are a few old people still living in the neighborhood who are ready to testify that the list of inhabitants as given by Mr. Smith is incomplete, and that he also under estimated its population. The last survivor of those in the list passed away recently at Moosomin, Sask, in the person of Malcolm McNeil ; he was at the same time the last survivor of the old and highly respected family of that name. He moved to Manitoba in 1882, and prospered as a farmer. About a year or two after Mr. Ainslie’s coming to Leith and while his improvements were under way Mr. McNeil was selected to take a census of the village, floating population and all ; he found nearly three hundred people there, and so reported. As an old timer once regretfully said to us—“Leith was a-boomin’ in them days.”

Mr. Smith also says that the draught of water at the end of the old dock, built in 1861, was eight and one half feet. This also may be true, but an old and excellent authority is positive it was ten feet. However, it was in the first half of the sixties the gradual subsiding of the lake level first became apparent.

The steady advance in the clearing of the forests on the shores of our inland seas was beginning to get in its deadly work. Mr. Ainslie determined on a further extension out into the bay, and this was carried out, although nobody can be found who can fix the exact year in which it commenced. It was probably in 1870—possibly a little later, as men fifty eight and sixty years of age can remember seeing the pile driver at work on the ice. The piles were driven in the winter, holes through the ice being cut for the purpose, and when finished the dock showed a depth of thirteen feet of water at the end. Had the old style construction been followed—cribbing- filled with stone—the dock would in all probability have stood much longer than it did. An ell was built at the end, running at a right angle to the main dock and in a north-easterly direction. On this cattle and wood sheds were erected, the wood being hauled in the winter by the surrounding farmers and stored there for the purpose previously mentioned. If recollections serves aright, the wood shed was about fifteen or eighteen feet high. It was from the roof of this building the young swimmers of the village—and some of them not so young—were wont to dive into the waters of the bay, when taking their swim after a hard day’s work. As the planking on the surface of the dock was fully six feet above that of the water, it can be readily seen that this was no baby’s dive. The bathing suits worn by the strong swimmers of Leith in that day were all of an exact likeness, both as to color and pattern. They were of a style that was fashionable in the Garden of Eden, before the serpent beguiled Eve. A man wearing the same suit at the same place would in our day be subject to arrest— but times change.

A list of steamboats and sailing craft calling at this dock and its predecessor, in the ten or twelve years following 1870, would include nearly all the same craft plying to Owen Sound at that time. For many years the mails came from Owen Sound by steamboat, the Frances Smith being the last one utilized in this service. It was coming-bi-weekly in 1865; nobody seems to remember when the daily mail by land was established. The mails were distributed from the office in the store of Ross Brothers until 1875, and on their removal to Annan Arthur B. Cameron became postmaster. At the time of his death, about thirty-seven years ago, the office continued to be held by members of his family and still remains there, to the eminent satisfaction of all who make Leith their post office. The general store in connection with it was opened in 1864, or sixty years ago, by the late Mr. Cameron, and is still conducted by his eldest son, Mr. Arthur Cameron. It is the solitary place of business in Leith that has survived in the gradual decay of the village, but its record is a unique one and it is to be doubted if it can be duplicated in Grey County. “A Cameron never can yield.”

The new dock was a source of endless expense from the very beginning. It was exposed to the north and north-easterly gales, the worst that sweep the bay. The heavy seas raised by a storm from these directions, rushing under its unprotected sides, tore up the plank flooring, necessitating constant repairs. Had a breakwater a few hundred yards long been built from the mouth of Keefer’s Creek out into the bay in a westerly direction, it would have obviated all this, but the expense would have been considerable, and the day of harbor grants and legislative subsidies for such purposes was not yet, for Leith at any rate. The place had no natural harbor advantages, and with the steady lowering of the water levels it is easily seen now that money so spent would have been thrown away.

There were many mishaps during these periods of heavy weather, one of which had rather an amusing sequel. The schooner Maple Leaf, loaded with wheat, was caught in one of them while moored to the dock, and threatened to pound it to pieces. The storm rose a little after sunset, and a steamboat captain in Owen Sound was wired to, with the request that he bring his boat down and endeavor to tow the schooner out to deep water, where she could get canvas on herself without danger of being driven ashore. He put in an appearance in answer to the call, but the night was such a wild one that in the pitch darkness prevailing he thought it safest not to go near the dock at all, so the Maple Leaf was left to ride out the storm. She did so, but the resultant damage to the dock was disheartening to look at, when the gale had subsided. Mr. Ainslie promptly entered an action for damages against her owners, employing counsel. He was awarded them in the paltry sum of one hundred dollars. He then went to pay his lawyer. That gentleman had evidently made up his mind to charge all the traffic would bear. He informed his client in an apologetic tone, as though ashamed of his own modesty, that “he guessed his bill would be about ninety-five dollars.”

“Take it all while you’re at it” said Mr. Ainslie, throwing him the hundred across the table.

On another occasion, in the spring of 1880, the schooner Restless, also loaded with wheat, was torn loose from the dock in a gale of wind, and driven over on the shore on the south side. She was lightered of almost her whole cargo, the farmers for miles around getting all the seed wheat they wanted for little or nothing, and a small tug tried to pull her off. The attempt was unsuccessful, but later the Mary Ann, a heavier tug from Collingwood, managed to float her.

Other sailing vessels calling at Leith, beside the two luckless ones already mentioned, and falling within our own recollection were : The Mountaineer, Lady MacDonald and Lily Hamilton, all owned by the late James Sutherland of Owen Sound ; the Phoebe Catherine, Prince Edward, Annie Foster, Belle MacPhee and Ariel. Of these the Lily Hamilton and Lady MacDonald, each having a capacity of about twenty thousand bushels of wheat, and being of the three-masted type, were the largest. It was generally estimated that their construction cost one thousand dollars for every thousand bushel of grain they would carry, in vessels of their design. The Lily Hamilton was lost on Lake Ontario.

The first steamboat of which there is any record as calling at Leith was the Kaloolah. She was calling there regularly many years before the building of the first dock. Other early steamboats were the Ploughboy, Canadian, Clifton, Silver Spray, City of London, Algoma and Cumberland. Coming down to comparatively recent years, the list includes the Frances Smith, City of Owen Sound, Magnet, Spartan, Africa, Persia (occasionally) City of Winnipeg, Josephine Kidd, Northern Belle, Northern Queen, Alderson. Manitoulm and Emerald. The list is made from memory only, and is probably incomplete. Many of these steamboats, particularly the early ones, had wood burning furnaces and sometimes merely called to “wood up.” The one-day steamboat excursions, once so popular in Owen Sound, but which have fallen into innocuous desuetude, called regularly at Leith in the sixties, seventies and the early eighties, after which the dock began to grow unsafe, for larger vessels at least. Some of these excursions were highly enjoyable events, and it is to be hoped the custom will yet be revived.

The wharf, as it was generally called, was thus not only a great commercial convenience but a source of pleasure to young and old, and many of the fondest recollections of old Leithonians still centre round it. It is now as unsightly a ruin as will be seen anywhere on Georgian Bay, and about as ugly as the receding waters have left the shores on both sides of it. The passing stranger, glancing at it casually, would be surprised were he to learn of the volume of trade that once found an outlet over its sides. Plow many such melancholy wrecks are scattered along the two shores between the head of the Great Lakes and the mouth of the St. Lawrence? There may be something impressively picturesque in the sight of the old baronial castles, standing in the magnificence of their ruined masonry along the banks of the Rhine, and doubtless something inspiring in the ivy-covered walls of their counterparts, dating back to the time of the Plantagenets and Tudors, still surviving in various parts of the British Isles. The poet and painter, at least, have told us so. But the sight of one of these wooden ruins such as we have described, so common on our North American continent, the original structures of which have risen, flourished and gradually fallen into the last stages of decay within the lifetime of a man not so very old, is one that fills us with feelings of the most melancholy depression. The former is at least sanctified by legend and tale, and stirs the images of generations long gone. But a wooden ruin furnishes no inspiration to either the painter or poet. It has no historical importance because it concentrates its interest on one family or one man only, and may be said to resemble a mangled corpse rather than the monument that covers it. While not a positive danger to anything, or anybody, the remains of the Leith dock should be torn up and demolished entirely, as an offence to the eye.

Even when times were good and trade at its briskest, it proved in the long run to be a losing venture to its builder. It would not pay interest on the original investment and the constant expense of keeping it in repair, and the same might be said of Mr. Ainslie’s other enterprises in the village. But it will always be said to his honor that he was the gamest sort of a loser. He had known the most generous prosperity, and he met adversity with a cool imperturbability one could not help but admire. All the world loves a good loser, and it is sure we cannot afford keener gratification to our enemies than by showing ourselves a hard one. The trend of the times was against him. Business was concentrating more and more in the large centres of population, and gradually draining off the trade enjoyed by the smaller towns and villages. Of course he had critics in abundance, as has every man of business who is not afraid to back his hopes of gain with his dollars. Men who had made the sorriest botches of their own affairs were not lacking who could tell him why such-and-such a venture had failed, and what he should have done to have succeeded. The world will never want for men who can manage the affairs of their neighbors far better than they can their own—if we are only fools enough to listen to them.

When he came from Galt Mr. Ainslie might have invested his considerable fortune in government securities, where small rewards were certain, and lived a life of inglorious inactivity ever afterwards. But such was not the bent of his nature. If want of success be a sin, at least he sinned in excellent company. Take the neighbouring city as an example, although it is certainly not unique as an object lesson. In the last fifty years how many business enterprises have been launched under the most favorable auspices and promises of permanent success in Owen Sound, only to fail by reason of circumstances which could not be foreseen, any more than they could be controlled? How many of her shrewdest business men have lost, and lost heavily, in these ventures? Were the lists ever published they would be lengthy ones.

A few words anent the closing years in his long and varied career will appropriately close this chapter. In 1888 he moved to Owen Sound with his son-in-law, Mr. Henry Rixon. His interest in life is best evidenced by the fact that after he had passed his eightieth year he wrote his autobiography, which those who have been fortunate enough to have read declare to be one of the most interesting manuscripts they ever perused, covering as it does his early life in Britain, and subsequent years in Gibralter, Galt and Leith. It is to be hoped this autobiography will yet be published and given to the world at large, where it would be received with wider approbation. He died in his ninetieth year at Owen Sound, and is buried in the cemetery he had, with characteristic generosity, presented to the Presbyterian congregation at Leith just a third of a century previously. By a curious coincidence his wife, who had been many years his junior, died twenty-two years later to a day than her lamented husband, having lived until within a week of being also in her ninetieth year. The last surviving member of their family, Captain John Ainslie, passed away in 1923.