The mother was extremely small in stature, brunette, and with dark brown hair which, when it turned white, remained as long and abundant as ever; her eyes were sharp and piercing, generally quiet in expression but under excitement flashed ominously. The cheek bones were high, and the small features unmistakably Celtic, the thin-lipped mouth telling of an unconquerable will which she bequeathed to her only child. The face under the broad high forehead was seldom allowed to relax into perfect placidity, the surface always showing more or less of the inward volcano; any repose there was due to religious feeling. In the son we have but a replica of the mother. She spoke Gaelic, but seldom used it; she did not reckon fairies among abolished myths, and she believed firmly in the Mackenzie death-warning which was always given by an invisible messenger. The strongest affection existed between mother and son, who lived together for the last seventeen years of the former’s life.
It was but little to the credit of one of his powerful enemies that, in an effort to equal the _Advocate_, jeering remarks upon Mackenzie’s aged mother were made in the public press. But so it was; and he was advised to mend his ways as an editor, if he expected to continue to support his mother and family. The inference, as his biographer gives it, is that it was not praiseworthy to support an aged mother. It drew from the son the boast that if he could keep his old mother, his wife and his family, and avoid debt, he cared not for wealth.
Speaking in his paper of the spirit of the “faction” towards the press, Mackenzie indulged in a prophecy of an event at which the same aged mother was a pained witness. In connection with the trials of a Canadian editor of a different political stripe, he says: “By the implied consent of King, Lords and Commons, he is doomed to speedy shipwreck, unless a merciful Providence should open his eyes in time, and his good genius prompt him to hurl press and types to the bottom of Lake Ontario.” Mackenzie lived quite close to the lake, and his evil wishers must have taken the hint. Every one knows the story of how _noblesse oblige_ was construed into the necessity for an invasion of the printing office, at an hour when no man would be there; how the raiders, in age from thirty-four years downwards, were the flower of that “Canadian nobility” against which the editor never wearied hurling his radical sayings; and how Mrs. Mackenzie, then in her seventy-eighth year, stood trembling in a corner of the office--for the building was home as well--while she witnessed, with fear and indignation, the destruction of her son’s property and the means of her own livelihood. As if the tale could be improved upon, some romancers, telling of the rise of Canada from barbarism to civilization, have adorned it with gross maltreatment of the aged lady by these gentlemen who, with her only to stay them, were naturally _sans peur_. They should also be without this one reproach, for they were too intent upon pi-ing type and throwing the contents of the office into the bay to trouble about her.