AUTHOR'S PREFACENo undue liberties with history have been attempted in this
romance. Few characters in the story are purely imaginary.
Doubtless the fastidious reader will distinguish these intruders at
a glance, and very properly ignore them. For they, and what they
never were, and what they never did, merely sugar-coat a dose
disguised, and gild the solid pill of fact with tinselled
fiction.
But from the flames of Poundridge town ablaze, to the rolling
smoke of Catharines-town, Romance but limps along a trail hewed out
for her more dainty feet by History, and measured inch by inch
across the b****y archives of the nation.
The milestones that once marked that dark and dreadful trail
were dead men, red and white. Today a spider-web of highways
spreads over that Dark Empire of
