The Project Gutenberg eBook, Carols of Canada, Etc., Etc., by Mrs. Elizabeth S. (MacQueen) MacLeod

Carols of Canada

etc., etc.

BY

MRS. MACLEOD

Charlottetown, P. E. I.
Printed by John Coombs, Queen Street
1893

Entered according to Act of Parliament, in the year 1893,
By Elizabeth S. MacLeod,
In the Office of the Minister of Agriculture.

To

The Honourable

Sir Donald A. Smith,

K. C. M. G., LL. D.

These Carols of Canada, etc., etc.,

are

Most Respectfully Inscribed.

PREFACE.

In sending forth these gleanings from the later compositions of my few leisure hours, I take the opportunity of thanking most sincerely those many friends who have so generously subscribed for the work. Not only has their kind appreciation caused me to realize that I am no longer a stranger in a strange land, but also, that I possess the whole-souled sympathy of not a few, in this the country of my adoption.

Many are the tender memories which unite me to the olden land: a land for ever hallowed as the quiet resting-place of the lovèd dead, and the once happy home of a love-encircled childhood. Still, I cannot but deplore the many evils existing therein; more especially that evil of a system which places the greater number at the mercy of the fewer—the debasing system of extensive landlordism; a system which may have suited in those former periods when kingdoms and positions were mainly dependent upon force of arms, but for which there can be no plausible apology in this progressive, and pretentiously humanizing age; and if any words of mine shall induce the tyrant-crushed and woe-oppressed of other climes to raise their eyes towards the setting sun, and to seek a home in this Canada,—this God-appointed haven, these words shall not have been penned in vain.

I cherish the utmost faith in the future of Canada—faith which leads me to look beyond my little day and view her, with ample resources still developing, with invitations of welcome still extended, a full-grown nation of intelligent, enterprising and generous-souled people, more glorious by far than the world-renowned empires of the past; a nation unfettered from bigotry of sect, envy of position, and clannishness of clime; a nation whose belief is in the eternal fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood of humanity; a nation whose every act of every day life is the pure and lofty exponent of a Christly Christianity, and in whose healthy moral atmosphere vice with its attendant train of evils cannot exist; a nation upon which, over all its boundless pasture lands and by its many sounding shores, the sun of Freedom shines, and the honest, earnest worshipper bendeth never a humble knee save to fair Freedom's God.

E. S. MACLEOD.     

Charlottetown, Nov. 1893.

CONTENTS.