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The Work of Our Hands known as Canada House, run by proprietor Solomon Sayles, with its "Excellent accommodation for travellers," and sample some of its "choice wines, liquors and cigars, good stabling and attentive hostlers," before catching one of the daily stages outside its door "along the Brantford and Simcoe route." Soon after the young Prince's tour of British North America, loyal subjects residing in towns and villages just like Mount Pleasant, honoured his mother Queen Victoria on the occasion of her 45th birthday on May 24, 1865. Resplendent in their best finery tailored by Mr. Jno. Tennant or Mr. Shurman or the young dressmaker Jane Sayles, Mount Pleasant residents would have celebrated the milestone of their monarch with picnics by one of the nearby streams or with carriage drives into the country. Others intent on a more adventurous type of celebration went carousing at Haight's Pond as generations of Mount Pleasant young men had done for years on the anniversary of their queen's birth. But the very next year Fenian raiders from the United States shattered the idyllic calm over the Empire's northern colonies, threatening their very existence and once again mustering Mount Pleasant residents to attention in the face of outside aggression. The Fenian Brotherhood was an Irish nationalist freedom organisation, determined to free Ireland from British control by invading British North America to distract and perhaps even threaten the imperial government. Many Fenians received military training in the United States during and after the Civil War from 1861-1865 and used the United States as a base from which to launch their attacks, predominantly in the Maritimes and Niagara area. The nearby Niagara invasions particularly alarmed residents of Mount Pleasant. A report from May 31, 1866 informed local residents that "The Fenians have crossed at Buffalo and are now in possession of Ft. Erie. More of them are still arriving." That evening a local newspaper announced: "the bugle is now calling our worthy volunteers to arms and the men as usual are responding with alacrity, pleased to think that their country has need of their services." As in the War of 1812 and the Rebellion of 1837, Mount Pleasant sons heeded the call to