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Fry AT THE FORKS OF THE GRAND At three o'clock a steep descent brought us to a very beautiful double turn of the Grand, on which is situated the most picturesque town of Paris. We crossed the river by a fine wooden bridge, with a steep bluff opposite us, on the top of which stands the town, while the river wound away around it on either side of us. The stream was shallow but rapid, and broad and fringed with fairy- like tinted hues . . . Paris is decidedly the prettiest town we have yet seen in Canada. A winding road up the steep bank took us through the main street and so along the edge of the cliffs past a number of neat houses and pretty villas . . . A stream called Smith's Creek runs past the town, which is therefore almost surrounded by water. It was probably William Kingston who inspired Parisians to name their town "The Prettiest Town in Canada". If we could somehow go back to the Upper Village of 1845, we should find it strangely familiar - as when we study the youthful picture of an old man whom we know well. We should recognize, for instance, the Anglican Church and all other buildings that have cobblestone masonry; and the buildings of cut stone on Dumfries Street; and probably more than half the homes that lie at or near the centre of the Upper Village, although a number of these in I845 would be shops, stores, and inns. In 1893, Israel Rounds, a printer who first came to Paris in 1852, revisited the town after an absence of almost 40 years. He said of the Upper Town that "many of the old buildings remain much as they were and as engraven upon the memory, the most vivid to me being the old Star Office [now numbers 9 and i i Dumfries Street] where I first learned how to handle the lever that moves the world. In that part of town called 'upper' the most noticeable change is that of decay." But if we were to go back to the Lower Village of i845, we should be astonished by the strangeness of the place. Of course the general contours of the old village and that of the modern town, as determined by the course of the rivers and the surveys of Burwell, would be in most ways similar. But we should recognize very few of the scattered group of shops, mills and homes, all of which lay in I845 west of the Grand and nearly all south of Charlotte Street. We should be able to pick out only Hamilton Place, Capron's stone house (now Penmarvian), Capron's home- stead, two cobblestone houses on Broadway Street, two old shops on Mechanic Street, and an occasional house between William and Banfield Streets. Even in i893, there was not much resemblance between the Lower Village and the Lower Town. Israel Rounds wrote that "in the lower there is little at present that presents itself to the eye and memory as seen in 1852. So much here is now that it looks as if dressed in disguise, and but for the general feature, the con- firmation of mother earth and the grand old river that majestically 40