Cosgrove, after the lapse of eighty years. He remembers well, also, the breaking up of the old home, the auction of the family belongings, and the general sense of hope and abandon with which they cut loose from the shores of the old world. None of the family, probably, had any considerable appreciation of the vast race movement to which they as units of society were answering, but felt keenly the bracing effect of increased energy and enthusiasm which that movement imparted.
In Canada they hastened to secure their possessions, locating the one hundred-acre lot of their own, in the hard timber woods out on the boulder-sprinkled soil of lower Canada, in the Dalhousie township, within five miles of Lanark, and obtaining a free government outfit at the government store at Lanark. Here young Hugh spent the most of his boyhood, helping to clear the farm, becoming an expert axeman, burning the hard wood, from the ashes of which was leached the potash that paid for the clearing; and also getting his education at the free school. He recalls these as very happy years, and the pride and joy that all the family took in owning their own home did very much to form his character on a more liberal and progressive plan than could have been had in old world conditions. At the age of twenty-one he was married to Mary, a daughter of Richard Rositer, "a glorious good man," of Perth. Learning at length that land of a better quality, less stony, was vacant "out west, a move was made to Chatham, in Canada West, as then known. Having a "birth-right claim," as it was called, to one hundred acres, and finding that he could make a purchase adjoining of one hundred acres of "clerical land/ the young farmer laid out his two hundred-acre farm, and made buildings to improve it. But learning that land was still better tjie farther west one went, he proceeded as far as the Detroit River.
