262 MY AMERICAN FRIENDS -

my book) be hanged for a sheep instead of a
lamb. * * *

In the course of another visit to the Maritime
Provinces I stayed for some weeks in the Anna-
polis Valley of Nova Scotia, at a house built
by Oliver de Lancey, grandson of the famous
loyalist colonel of that name. Oliver de Lancey
was then living; his brother, Uniacke de Lancey,
now verging on ninety, is alive at the present
time of writing. Many were the stories I heard
about this family1 while in the neighbourhood.
It was of Huguenot descent. Colonel de Lancey
(he of the Revolution) owned estates in the
Bronx district of New York. He is said to have
been a man of iron. He raised a regiment of
loyal Americans at his own cost, and wept " for
the first time in his life " when he saw his house
in the Bronx going up in flames. This spectacle
he witnessed from among the branches of a tree
growing in what is now the Bronx Park, where,
like Charles the Second, he had hidden himself
to escape his pursuers.2 He was a slave-owner,
and settling on a Crown grant in the Annapolis
Valley he managed to get his slaves conveyed
to his new abode; their descendants are in the
Valley to this day. The old warrior's end was
tragic. The story goes that in a fit of rage he
cruelly beat one of his slave boys, and being

1 One of the family married Sir Hudson Lowe, Napoleon's
keeper; another, Fennimore Cooper; another, the Earl of
Cassilis. \

* Remnants of the tree still exist carefully preserved.