Those toy soldiers were my earliest memory, for they became mine when I was young. I never met the traveller who brought the piece that had started it, for he had drowned in the Merimpticook Stream at my grandparents’ farm and sawmilling business, even before the Madawaska affair. He had a gold watch with him too, as well as his lead soldier. On account of that watch having some value, my grandparents went through his things in the hope of sending them to family, but they found no sign of his origins – not even a letter.

They boxed up all his goods and kept them in case someone turned up looking for him, but I assume that never happened, for we kept it all. Napoleon must have come out of the box some time, for he ended up as a toy of my father’s. I still have the watch also. The traveller claimed to have acquired it on his continental adventures, though it was plainly English. It says as much on its face.

His story was that he had come from England – or some part of Great Britain, anyway – looking for a friend who had travelled ahead of him to join a family with a land grant in New Brunswick, somewhere outside Grand Falls. He had arrived by ship at Saint John and passed Grand Falls without luck weeks before arriving in Madawaska.

He was a musician – that was the other thing my grandfather knew about him. He had brought sheet music with him, whether from Saint John or Britain I cannot say. It was a new piece that became famous, very famous. A symphony by Beethoven, but it was new then.

I’m told that, before he died, our visitor was putting together a group of local players in an attempt to perform the work. Not the whole work, but a smaller version of it. The timber millers were building a barn, or starting to, felling and cutting the timber for it, and he was assisting with the milling of it. It was to be twice the size of anything around, an expansion of the business.