Excerpt from A Beautiful Rebel: A Romance of Upper Canada in Eighteen Hundred and Twelve

It has long been one of my ambitions to write this tale or somewhat like it, re-creating in romantic form the early vicissitudes of fortune in the life of my native province. I have long felt, as the result of a close study of old Upper Canadian History, that no portion of our continent contains more fascinating and tragic material for the novelist, than does the triangular peninsula bounded by the Great Lakes, the Ottawa River and the Upper St. Lawrence.

Here, our early settlers, many of whom for principle forsook homes to the south, found a bracing and temperate climate and a land, a veritable garden of the gods. Here Simcoe, that wise and practical idealist, scholar, soldier and statesman, founded a province which happily has become the nucleus of a vaster British Canada, and nourished it in the stability of British law and the arts of peace. Here, later, that other great saviour of Canada, Brock, during the summer and autumn of 1812, in the face of fearful odds, A held this valuable outpost of empire for Britain and the Canadian people, and, in the struggle, laid down his life as a brave soldier of the Empire.

When our history is truly written, as it must be some day, it will be found that the Canada of to-day owes more than she can ever repay to the memory of this great soldier and man.

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