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emolument in some other settlement he will not object to transfer his services from that which he now fills.”

In the year of our Lord, 1813, the ju- dicial situation in each of the two Island col- onies was strikingly similar. Each had a chief justice from whom each eagerly longed to part. Each thought that any change must be for the better. To the limitless wisdom of the British Colonial Oflice the solution was easy. “Let them exchange,” it said, and exchanged they were.

Not as the conquered flying from defeat, but in all the dignity and state which a King’s ship could afford, did these two bat- tle scarred veterans seek a newer field where- on each was doomed to suffer defeat more inglorious than in their unfortunate past.

Judge Prowse carries down the history of Colclough to the close of his judicial career in Newfoundland and from his his— tory what follows here is derived.

Colclough evidently did not look upon his transfer to the bench of Newfoundland as a promotion. On September 29, 1813, he wrote a friend at Lisbon: ’

“St. John’s, Newfoundland. “My Dear Reynolds:

“Fate has removed me for my sins to this cursed spot as chief justice and I have by chance just heard that you are postmaster general at Lisbon. I write this in the count— ing house of a fish merchant, whose ship is bound for Lisbon. I have been here but a few days.”

He remained in St. John’s for three tur— bulent years, when the government retired him upon a pension.

Age and experience on the bench served only to develop his vanity and punctilious- ness. Over the door of his house in St. John’s was a royal coat of arms and he no-

PAST AND PRESENT OI"

tified everyone to take off his hat when passing the house. Yet he had a sense of humor and a shrewd wit that should have saved him from such absurdities.

When one of the Daltons was a trifle vociferous in court he appealed to him, “If you can’t be civil, Mr. Dalton, be as civil as you can.” He tells of a riot. The constables came in to say that if he did not go out the town would be in ruins. This message, he says, was “delivered by a beast of a maid servant while he was sitting in Mrs. Col— clough’s sick room with all her children down with the measles.” At the same time the servant said: “Madam, don’t let him out, he will probably be killed and what will be- come of us ?”

~Out he went valiantly. A great crowd followed him cheering him on and making it appear that they were his partisans, but when the “Barrens,” the rioting ground, was reached, “10; behold; there was nobody there.” The chief justice of Newfoundland had been hoaxed.

Meantime that “crusty, ill-tempered old bachelor” Tremlett had been making such a name for himself in Prince Edward Island that people mourned the loss of Colclough. One searches this Island’s records in vain to find one good word of Tremlett. Yet he reigned over the court for eleven years—- 1813 to 1824. He lost no time at all in getting into trouble with the Legislature. It was very difficult to avoid it and he does not appear to have tried.

In 1818 the pent-up wrath of the legis- lative assembly broke forth in a lenghty res- olution setting forth that “the extension of the sittings of His Majesty’s supreme court of judicature during the time Chief Justice Tremlett has presided has been a severe grievance to His Majesty’s subjects in this