Sir Horatio Gilbert George Parker, 1st Baronet PC (November 23, 1862 – September 6, 1932), known as Gilbert Parker, Canadian novelist and British politician, was born at Camden East, Addington, Ontario, the son of Captain J. Parker, R.A.
He was educated at Ottawa and at University of Trinity College. Parker started as a teacher at the Ontario School for the deaf and dumb (in Belleville, Ontario). From there he went on to lecture at Trinity College. In 1886 he went to Australia, and for a while became associate editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He also traveled extensively in the Pacific, Europe, Asia, Egypt, the South Sea Islands and subsequently in northern Canada. In the early nineties he began to gain a growing reputation in London as a writer of romantic fiction.

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You could not call the place a village, nor yet could it be called a town. Viewed from the bluff, on the English side of the river, it was a long stretch of small farmhouses—some painted red, with green shutters, some painted white, with red shutters—set upon long strips of land, green, yellow, and brown, as it chanced to be pasture land, fields of grain, or "plough-land."