10 THE BRASS CANNON OF CAMPOBELLO.
they stayed, every now and then greeting some English ship of renown, until the Owen family, some ten years ago, went back to England, when the two old brass pieces were sold at auction. One was carried away to Portland Harbor. ‘The other was bought by George Batson, Esq., of Campobello.
The admiral died in 1857, at St. John, New Brunswick, where he had married a second time, and was brought back to the island for burial. His children and his grandchildren stayed in the primitive, an- cestral 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. Tradi- tion and fact still invest the Owen name with tenderness and homage, as was shown in July, 1890, when the great- grandson of the admiral revisited Campo- bello. 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 flag- ship Bellerophon, he came back to his ancestral estates accompanied by the Metropolitan of Canada, Bishop Medley of Fredericton. The boy’s sunny blue eyes and gentle smile recalled his mother’s beauty to the old islanders. The Domin- ion flag and the English flag waved from every ship in port and from the neigh- boring 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 breach 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 dic- tated. 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 hand 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 rec- ognized.
Silence fell as the metropolitan rose from the chair where he had been rest- ing and thanked the people for their greeting to the boy, because of his grand- parents. 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. On to the Owen house went the boy and found his old haunts; first, the nursery, then his mother’s room, and next his grand- mother’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.
