Directors, who were all in official life, with the exception of "John Burnett, Esq., of Campobello, Merchant." The property, says the pamphlet, "is valued at $100,000, and offers available means of employing five times the capital." The returns in four or five years would probably be twenty-five per cent, on the capital. The situation of the Island "is extremely commodious for commerce with Great Britain, the West Indies, and the United States." An early prospectus of the Company's extols the situation, because, by order of His Majesty in Council, Campobello was constituted a free Warehousing Port. Jacob Allan, Deputy Surveyor and Commissioner of Crown Lands, "certifies that there is now standing a sufficient quantity of spruce and pine of the finest growth for saw logs to keep four double saw-mills going for the space of forty years; that is, perpetually.... The fisheries on the coasts of the Island were let this year by the Company for near £400, and fish were taken on the coasts to the amount of £3,000." It is also "stated that there is a large quantity of ore about Liberty Point." The Company was incorporated "for the purposes of erecting, using, and employing all descriptions of mills, mill-dams, fulling and carding machinery, and will have a decided advantage over any other spot in British America." "The population would thus grow rapidly, and the Company, having the property of the whole coast, must become the medium of all exchanges with all the population, which now amounts to six hundred only."

Alas, the Admiral's dreams have never been realized. The saw-mills which were built long ago fell into decay. The ores, if there are any, are still unexplored; agriculture does not flourish; the fisheries have decreased, herring are scarce; and the various changes in the imposition of duties have perplexed and thwarted the business activity of the Islanders.

Admiral's Second Marriage. Year after year the Admiral saw his hopes deferred. Lady Owen had died. His daughter, Mrs. Robinson Owen, and her children, still lived in the Island home, helping, teaching, guiding all around them with kindliness and wisdom. But the Admiral spent most of the last five years of his life at St. John, for he married a Mrs. Nicholson of that city, whose maiden name was Vennell.

His Burial. His strange, pioneer, semi-royal, administrative career ended in 1857. The boat that bore him back from St. John for the last time to his hermitage ran aground; for the great falling tides bade him wait, even in the pomp of death, until it was their hour to bear him aloft on his oft-trod pier. Men, women, and children, seized lantern, candle, or torch, and carried their hermit lord over the rough stones and the narrow ways to the cemetery, where they buried him at eventide, amid the waving trees and with the sound of falling tears.

His memory nestles in the hearts of the children who play around the weirs, and who have learned from their grandsires the tales of his jokes, his oddities, and his kindnesses. His children and his grandchildren stayed in the primitive ancestral home till 1881, when the Island was sold to an American syndicate. As long as any of the Owen family lived there they were beneficent rulers of the people, and maintained a courtly standard of manners and morals, the grace of which lingers among the Islanders.

The Cannons again. Tradition and fact still invest the Owen name with tenderness and homage, as was shown on July 10, 1890, when the great-grandson of the Admiral revisited Campobello. Never has the old cannon belched forth its volume of sound more loudly than it did for Archibald Cochrane, who, as a boy, had often sat astride of it. A "middy" on board Her Majesty's flagship Bellerophon, he came back to his ancestral estates, accompanied by Bishop Medley. The boys' sunny blue eyes and gentle smile recalled his mother's beauty to the old Islanders. The Dominion Hag and the English flag waved from every ship in port and from the neighboring houses, to welcome him back. As the steamer came in sight, the aged cannon, mounted on four huge logs of wood, gave forth its welcome. Each time the cotton had to be rammed down, and the cannon had to be propped up. Each time the match and the lighted paper were protected by a board held across the breech at arm's length; but the brass piece did its duty, and the people called "well done" to it, as if it had been a resuscitated grandsire. The steamer answered whistle for cannon blast, and the children's laugh was echoed back across the water.

It was dead low tide—and the tide falls twenty feet—when the venerable bishop came up the long flight of steps, slippery and damp with seaweed. Guarded on each side and before and behind, with umbrella in his hand for his walking-stick, the metropolitan of eighty-four years accepted the unneeded protection which Church of England reverence dictated.

The Great-Grandson. But as the boy ran quickly up the same steps, there was not a man who did not rush forward to greet him. The band played, while the women crept out from among the piles of lumber and waited for recognition. It came as the boy was led from one to another, bowing low in his shy, frank manner, cap in hand, to the women and girls, who had known him as a child, and shaking hands heartily with all the men, young and old. Away off stood two old ladies, who blessed the morn which had brought back their young master. Up to them he went with pretty timidity, and then, boy-like, hurried off to look at the cannon. He put his finger on it with a loving touch and a lingering smile, which to the older ones who saw it told of hidden emotion, which, perhaps, he himself scarcely recognized.

Silence fell as the Metropolitan rose from the chair where he had been resting and thanked the people for their greeting to the boy, because of his grandparents. The midshipman's eyes shone as they fell on the faces, lighted up as they had not been for years, to see that the fair, five-year old boy who had left them had grown into the straight-limbed, graceful, manly, modest youth, whose greeting was as unaffectedly frank as their own. After a while midshipman and bishop stole silently away up to the graves of the old Admiral and his wife, of the captain grandfather, and the cousin, all of whom had been naval heroes.

The Old Home. On to the Owen house went the boy and found his old haunts,—first, the nursery, then his mother's room, and next his grandmother's; out among the pines to the places where he had played, on to the sun-dial and the quarter-deck. All were revisited, with none of the sadness which comes in middle life, but with the sure joy of a child who has found again his own. He clicked the uncocked pistols of the Admiral, and took up the battered, three-cornered hat.

In the afternoon a game of baseball was played in his honor; and never did his great-grandfather watch more eagerly for victory over the pirates than did this descendant watch that the game might be won by the Campobello boys. At evening, in the little English Church, where the bishop blessed the people and told of Lady Owen's deeds of mercy, the boy bent his head over the narrow bookrest, and after the service was over he again shook hands with those who had so easily and quickly become his friends.

The next day the people gathered again at the wharf. The midshipman was a new old friend by this time. Once more the brass-piece sounded farewell as he crossed the bay. It had been the playmate of his boyhood, his imaginary navy, his cavalry horse, his personal friend. By its side he had never wanted to rest on chairs or sofas. Once more he turned to look at it as he went down the