Title:  The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825

Author:  Gordon Sellar

Release Date:  March 9, 2005 [EBook #15307]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK the narrative of Gordon ***

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[Illustration:  Frontispiece.]

The Narrative

of

+Gordon Sellar+

who

Emigrated to Canada in 1825

HUNTINGDON, QUE.

THE GLEANER BOOK ROOM

1915

Copyright, Canada, by Robert Sellar, 1915.

+Gordon Sellar+

CHAPTER I.

While my mother was a servant in Glasgow she married a soldier.  I have only a faint remembrance of my father, of a tall man in a red coat coming to see us in the afternoons and tossing me up and down to the ceiling.  I was in my fourth year when his regiment was hurried to Belgium to fight Bonaparte.  One day there rose a shouting in the streets, it was news of a great victory, the battle of Waterloo.  At night mother took me to Argyle street to see the illuminations, and I never forgot the blaze of lights and the great crowd, cheering.  At the Cross there were men with bottles, drinking the health of Wellington.  When my mother caught me up to get past the drunken men she was shivering.  Long afterwards, when I was able to put two and two together I understood it was her fear of what had happened father.  She went often to the barracks to ask if any word had come, but except that the regiment was in the thick of the fight they could tell nothing.  It might be three weeks after the battle that a sergeant came to our room.  Mother was out working He left a paper on the table and went away.  When mother came home late, she snatched the paper up, gave a cry that I hear yet, and taking me in her arms fell on the bed and sobbed as if her heart would break.  I must have asked her what had happened, for I recall her squeezing me tighter to her bosom and saying My fatherless boy.  Long after, I met a comrade of my father, who told me he acted bravely all day and was cut down by a dragoon when the French charged on the infantry squares at the close of the battle.  My mother got nothing from the government, except the pay that was coming to him, which she told me was 17s 6d.