"A Land of Hope and Sunshine"

Piano Old Brewery Bay Orillia

"In the preface [Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town] Leacock made the patently false claim that he had not done 'anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people.'  He could not have done otherwise.  He was mistakenly convinced that he had the power to create lifelike characters. At the same time he admitted that 'I have no notion as to how to make things happen.'  What he did have was an abundant ability to transfer the genuine article from life to the printed page in compressed form." 
~ Stephen Leacock A biography, David M. Legate, Doubleday Canada Limited, 1970.

In the preface of Sunshine Sketches Leacock claims that his imaginary little town of Mariposa is not a real town ~ that it is about seventy or eighty of them ~ that the inspiration of the book comes from "a land of hope and sunshine where little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside placid lakes."  However, it took people in Orillia, Ontario, a while to get over the perception that many of the characters were exaggerations of townsfolk they knew.