"My first breath was drawn on the shores of the mighty St. Lawrence," wrote B. W. Arthur Sleigh in the preface to Pine Forests and Hacmatack Clearings; or, Travel, Life, and Adventure in the British North American Provinces (1853), his book of "travel, life and adventure," "and I may perhaps therefore claim the right of feeling and expressing a deep interest in Canadian affairs." Born in 1821 in Lower Canada (Quebec), Sleigh was the son of the physician William Willcocks Sleigh and his wife, Sarah Campbell Sleigh. He received his early education in England, but in 1834 returned to Lower Canada and there studied for the next four years. At the age of twenty-one Sleigh enrolled in the Second West India Regiment and bought his lieutenancy in Jamaica in 1844. The following year he transferred, again by purchase, to the 77th Foot Regiment, with which he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in...