MILITARY AND CIVIL. 97

showed that the number of schools throughout the Island had increased to 135, that the number of scholars to 5,366, and the Free Education Act passed this year, formed the basis of the present educational system. This year also witnessed the successful laying of the first telegraph cable between Cape Tormentine and Cape Traverse, on which occasion many of the inhabitants of the latter settlement assembled on the shore and assisted in dragging the cable end to the land, such being the spirit of welcome with which it was received.

During the early part of the summer of 1853, a steamer called the Fairy Queen, frail, old and shaky, was employed by the Government to carry the mails and passengers to and from the neighboring Provinces, in the performance of which she continued until the 7th October. On that morning the steamer left Charlottetown as usual, with the mails and eight passengers, bound for Pictou. But as a gale of wind the night before had made the water rough, it was soon found that the old ship was going to have a hard time to reach Pictou. Off Point Prim she shipped a heavy sea, that broke open the gangways, doing considerable damage otherwise. But repairs were soon made and she continued her course, and had reached opposite Pictou Island when the tiller-rope gave way; splicing this she was got underway again, but as she was now leaking badly, fears were entertained by the ofiicers that she would founder, and they, the inhuman monsters, and a part of the crew took charge of the only boat and left the ship regardless of the fate of those on board. Shortly after the captain and crew left the ship she went to the bottom, taking with her four women and two men; the remainder of the unfortunate people clung to some wreckage of the ship and drifted to the Nova Scotia shore, where they landed after many hours exposure to cold and the dangers of an angry sea. The cowardly conduct of the captain and others in abandoning the passengers to their

fate excited a great deal of public indignation against them at the time.

In this year the Hon. Colonel Ambrose Lane, Town Mayor, Adjutant General and Inspecting Officer of Militia, passed quietly away at his residence in Charlottetown, aged 62 Years. Colonel Lane was a native of Ireland, and had formerly been in the army; on his retirement he took up his

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