The above is the substance of the Governor’s letter to Mrs. Godfrey.  The date and first three or four lines of it were torn off and gone, and the remainder was, with great difficulty, deciphered, the letter being in several pieces and quite ragged.  This letter must have been written in the year 1785 or ’86, as in a letter from a friend to Mrs. Godfrey, dated September, 1785, Little Mag and her husband are said to have been met in the street the day previous to writing.  It is not at all likely that little Mag was long married before she appeared in presence of Governor Carleton.

Had Margaret Newall moved in a more elevated social sphere, and been surrounded by wealthy parents and rich relatives, possibly Governor Carleton would have been obliged to give Mrs. Godfrey a vivid description of Mag’s trousseau, and her beautiful presents of gold, silver, diamonds, etc.  But her parents and friends were poor.  Her old father possessed only a moving tent, occuping here and there, as he found a spot to pitch it, a few square feet of King George the Third’s wilderness.  Old Reonadi was not a commercial man.  He had never made an assignment.  He was born one hundred years too soon to be surrounded by commercial morality, perfect holiness and paternal affection.  It took a later generation of Chippewayans to display that care for their posterity which only disguises an habitual avarice, or hides the workings of a low and grovelling nature.

During neither of the stays that the Godfreys made at Halifax had society reached that brilliant epoch it afterwards attained when that Royal Duke, who set such an example of duty to all men, was making it his temporary home.  That for a colony was, from all accounts, indeed a brilliant, gay, and polished society which was assembled at old Chebucto when the Duke of Kent was at the head of the army in British North America.  Pleasure, however, was not the only occupation of that then brilliant capital, at whose head was one so much devoted to duty, that in its fulfilment he acquired the reputation of a martinet.  This was the day of the early morning parade, particularly irksome in a cold climate to those who were obliged to turn out before daybreak in the bitter weather of mid-winter.  At this day, also, there were frequent troopings of colours, marchings out, sham fights, and all the other martial circumstances of a fully garrisoned town.

The maintenance of this strict discipline among the garrison whom he commanded, was not more characteristic of the Duke than his affable condescension and the considerate kindness that he displayed toward the inhabitants of Nova Scotia, and of Quebec also, when he occupied its castle.  So that his name and memory are still held dear by the loyal descendants of the men to whom Prince Edward was a familiar figure, both at Halifax and Quebec, as he rode through the streets of either town.