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I suppose it may be taken for granted that if a man elects to write memoirs he should begin before he is so old that he has forgotten how to tell the truth: while his impressions of the persons he has encountered and the things he has experienced are still vivid. Therefore it is not as a "slippered pantaloon", ripe for epitaphs, that I present these chronicles.

The problem which confronts a writer who essays such a task, before he is well into his first chapter, is how far he shall go in intimacy; how copious in presenting credentials. As an ardent reader of memoirs, I have taken most pleasure in those volumes which are, within reasonable limits, intimate; and which partake of the nature of vivacious conversation. I may then plead for this book that, like the young lady in a once popular ditty who averred "I'm not so homely as I look", it is not so planless as it seems.

It is perhaps advisable that I should reveal the motive of the early chapters, which deal with the more remote past; and which to some may seem unduly personal. In them I have tried to make the past, as seen through the eyes of relatives and connections long since in their graves, live again: to evoke a suggestion of the cross-currents, great and small, which influenced Canada's social and economic development. In other words I have sought, in my own infirm way, to do what Arnold Bennett did for a corner of industrial England in the early chapters of "Clayhanger"; and what in a much more elaborate way the German novelist, Thomas Mann, did for one of the Hanseatic cities in "Buddenbrooks"; the difference being that the men and women of whom I write had real identities. My early chapters will perhaps serve as a reminder that not all who helped to bring into being the Canada of to-day were, in the narrower conception of the term, "pioneers", dependent alone on axe and rifle. Not all native sons of a hundred years ago were "cradled in a sap-trough". The rank and file of the uncelebrated makers of Canada, as of every young country, were men of many callings, many aptitudes, and varied ambitions, as my early chapters show.

I make no apology for the circumstance that the pivot around which these chronicles centre is, in the main, the inland city of Toronto. Electricity, radio, and various modern channels of communication have robbed the epithet "provincial" of its former significance. Outside the realm of commerce and industry, the interests of cities, great and small, reveal a surprising uniformity. Toronto, however, has a claim to distinction, in that it is the most cohesively British city to be found outside Great Britain itself. Men of British name and lineage still dominate its affairs to an extent unequalled in any other town of large dimensions in North America. But the feature of its history of which its people have most reason to be proud (whether they are aware of it or not), is that their city has from its inception been in some measure an intellectual centre. Almost the first thing decided by the little group of British colonists and New England loyalists who were its founders was that it should have an university. Amid a network of streams, in an oasis on the edge of an almost unscarred forest, this destiny was planned, and in the face of an unforeseen commercial development the faith has been kept by their descendants.

This volume, I trust, will not be my last of its kind. Except in rare instances, and then mainly for the purposes of allusion and parallel, the incidents related do not occur later than 1905. In the chapters on actors, a period has been set at 1900.

In writing this book I discovered a fact I did not realize at the outset; namely, that the accumulations of a fairly tenacious memory run far beyond the limits of a single volume; and I lay down my pen with many tales untold.

H. C.

August 1st, 1925.