important part it had formed of his daily life, how insensibly it had colored all his plans for the future, and what a grievous affliction its abrupt cessation. now proved. Conscious of no offense committed, of no shortcoming in manner or intent, nor of any neglect of duty towards his young hostess, he was at first puzzled, and then greatly disturbed, by this singular change of deportment. After a long and fruitless pondering upon the matter, he resolved to seek an explanation of Hester herself. This, however, he found no easy matter, so persistently did she avoid him, and so lacking was he in the boldness needed to make opportunities. But patience such as Barent's rarely goes unrewarded. One Sunday afternoon, while idly pacing the ramparts of the fort, he saw the familiar figure just turning into the old burying-ground which formerly stretched between the western side of Broadway and the North River. Here at last was his chance. He paused a moment to summon resolution, and then made the best of his way to the spot. Passing through the gate, he looked about for several minutes before discovering the object of his search. After no long time, however, he saw her halfway down to the river, wandering among the graves and studying the epitaphs. He stopped; his courage flew away now when he most needed it. He loitered, watching her movements, accommodating his pace to hers. Muttering to himself in a distraught way, he read aloud scraps of the inscriptions on the simple head-stones, as he sauntered on: gered-'oude zynde 75 jaaren' — yet will I not go without speech with her. Hier leydt het stoffelyck deel von Wouter Van Dyke.'" Hester, too, it seemed, was busy with mortuary lore, for, turning back by chance to read again an epitaph she had passed, she came full upon her abashed follower. With a dismayed look, he stammered, "I saw you from the fort-I—I came here to get speech with you!" "With me?" she began, with a flushed and guilty look, but directly rallied, and ended in a freezing tone, "What can you have of such moment to say to me ? "I-we- of late you have not treated me with the old good-will." "So?" He did not wince at the exasperating monosyllable, but went on simply, — "I beg to be told in what I have given you offense." Staggered a little by this directness, Hester labored over her answer. "I-you cannot - my good-will is not a matter that comes at bidding," she answered at last, evasively. "I see well -I know all. I am a big bungler. I have done something: I have made a mistake, I have hurt your feelings. "T is always so: I drive them away I would draw to me. What shall I do? I think only of pleasing you, and here see how it turns out. Tell me now what it is, that I may do it no more." The petitioner was plainly stirred up. This was a long speech for him, and it was blurted out in a spasmodic, halfsurly tone, as though in resentment at Providence for having made him after so faulty a pattern. Hester looked at him attentively, as she said in a tone somewhat softer, "You have done nothing; there is nothing to tell." "But why, then, do you speak after that fashion? Why do you look at me in such a way? 'T would scare an enemy, that look! Why do you not give me TEN years before Jacques Cartier set sail from St. Malo, the French Crown had appropriated to itself the Ameriean coast from Florida to Cape Breton, under the name of La Nouvelle France. A decade afterward Cartier opened up to French occupation the northernmost parts of then known America, and the colonists that settled the shores of the St. Lawrence were Frenchmen, who had no other notion of their work than that of making a new France out of these wilds. This object would be accomplished when they had created in the New World a France which was a reproduetion of the France of the Old World. They never dreamed of changing their nationality, or even of suffering their new environment to qualify it in the least; nor did they ever do so; their enemy did it for them. They were Frenchmen-in-Canada, Canadian-French, down to 1759; then their hereditary foe took a hand in the matter, and when, as a result, the new oath of allegiance had severed the ties of blood they became French-Canadians. What transformed the CanadianFrench into French-Canadians, then, was not their own ploughs, but the sword of their enemy. If ever a blessing fell upon a people in the shape of a calamity, it was when the French were forced from the Plains of Abraham by the British. Men are slow to recognize blessings, and it is no wonder that despair settled upon these people when the fall of Louisburg was followed by that of Quebec. God had turned his face from them. Nevertheless, out of the carcass came forth honey; not in a day, it is true, but in a period of such short duration that, in the life of a people, is as a day. people, is as a day. Heretofore the French-in-Canada had not been a people, they had not been even a colony: they had "occupied" the land; they had been but garrisons, mere warders of the north gate of French America. It is true that the change of flag altered this characteristic no more than to make them warders of the north gate of British America, but a stupendous change was awaiting them. They were to be their own men, and, with the guns of their ancient enemy protecting them against the world, they were yet, indifferent to the sneer of Voltaire, to possess as their very own those "leagues of frozen ground," and to be living examples of the truth that peace hath its victories as well as war. Time brought along its opportunities, and that the conquered were not slow to take advantage of them is shown by the fact that in fifteen short years they had turned the tables upon their conquerors. It happened in this way. The annual increase of 480 souls had at last, by 1759, given over 60,000 French to the valley of the St. Lawrence. Here was the beginning of a people. As soon as the British obtained complete control of the country, which was accomplished in the year following by the capture of Montreal, they subjected it to military rule. It cannot be said that this bore very hard upon the French, for they were secure in life and property; they were protected from foreign enemies; the restrictions put upon them were not excessive; and, what is more to the purpose, they had always been so habituated to military rule under the old régime that they had little excuse for finding fault with it under the new. They had merely exchanged one form of military government for another; and that the later one was not unduly repressive is disclosed by the fact that the right of petition was exercised as freely by them as by any other dependents of the British Crown. Nevertheless, they chafed at the mere appearances of subjection, and especially at the abrogation of their old laws, and the substitution of the common law of England, for which they could have no hereditary attachment, and which they did not understand. Discontent in this respect began to express itself immediately after the royal proclamation of 1763, in the form of protest and petition, which were maintained with such constancy and vigor as led to the conclusion that already the unfortunates were enjoying greater freedom of speech than they ever had done in the good old days of commandants and intendants. How long the British government would have turned a deaf ear can be conjectured only. Military rule lasted but four years, and the governors certainly did all they could to effect a transformation of the Gallic into an Anglican structure of society with as little derangement of the established order of things as possible. For all that, the French felt the subjection keenly, and chafed under it, until, of a sudden, every cause of irritation, except the feeling of alienage, vanished as if by enchantment, and liberation was thrust upon them by the very hands which until now had been so grudging. With the downfall of French power upon the St. Lawrence disappeared external pressure upon the British colonies, and the fear of the wolf no longer made the child press closer to its mother. "They are caught at last!" cried Choiseul. There was reason for his glee, for the rapid development of thirteen colonies showed signs of attaining such proportions as would permit these colonies no longer to brook the restrictions of distant parliaments. 1774 was the year of the Boston Port Bill, of the Massachusetts Regulating Act, of the first Continental Congress, and Lord North was in office. The same motives that formerly had actuated the French now compelled the British to make sure of the St. Lawrence as a highway to the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and state-craft was already busy in that direction. If Canada went out with the other colonies, and all made good their footing, the whole of British America was lost. On the other hand, if she stood fast, then, come what might, Great Britain would still hold the northern gate of the continent. The French seized the opportunity, and pressed their demands. This action was significant, blessing that could befall them; for the and admitted of but one interpretation. last breath of Montcalm dissipated all There was nothing to do but to yield: the dreams of conquest that had stood and thus a mocking world was afforded so long between them and real prosthe spectacle of British officials making perity, dreams that had set up doroom for French; of a Protestant par- minion instead of development, that liament setting up the Church of Rome; had grasped at the emptiness of strife of an English legislature ousting the instead of the fullness of peace, that common law of England, and putting had pushed aside patient toil for the the Coutume de Paris in its place; excitement of adventure, and had sacand of Britons taking from Britons the rificed in high places the real to the woods and waters they had helped to unreal. Had any one told a Canadianconquer, and giving them to the very Frenchman in 1758 that he would be Gauls from whom they had been wrest- better off without a military constitution ed. The victor was vanquished, abso- than with one, he would have thought lutely, completely vanquished, and had the speaker mad. Had any one told a been made to eat his leek. It was French-Canadian in 1778 that it would enough to make Wolfe turn in his be better to have the old régime back grave. Thanks to the "external pres- than to go on without it, he would have sure" which, the tables being turned, was handed the tempter over to custody as now exerted from the south upon the one unsafe to be at large, whether madnorth, the compact—for such it was man or traitor. In this brief period a has held good to the present day. The The great and enduring change had been French-Canadians withstood the blan- wrought. The military constitution of dishments of the Americans, and have society had pervaded the whole struckept the gate for the English ever ture before the conquest. Every man since; and as they certainly could not felt himself to be a force in "the occubetter themselves by trusting to the haz- pation." All eyes, thoughts, and imards of rebellion, they prudently stood pulses centred in the Château St. Louis, firm for their old enemies and new and what emanated from headquarters friends. Each party got what it had gave tone to everybody and everything. bargained for one, the valley of the It was no more than natural, then, that St. Lawrence and dominion; the other, the life, the very existence, of this little religion, laws, customs, territory, honor. organism, so remote from its race-centre, The Frenchman took the lion's share. seemed to its components to depend upon the artificial character that had become a second nature, and that, bereft of this, there was nothing left but to lie down and die. But the fact is that, so far from being essential to its existence, this military constitution was the greatest hindrance to its development; it was the one thing which all along had been checking its growth, and putting it in a false light to itself and to the outer world. Thus in the short space of fifteen years the French found themselves better off than ever they could have hoped to be had they remained subjects of France. At a stroke of the pen they became Canadians. Ever since the conquest, the only military character remaining to them had been a passive one, and was derived from the mere fact of their being a body in situ, of their being where fortune had placed them, and all the force demanded of them was the resistance of immobility. This was simple negation so far as military character was concerned, but it was the greatest to them. Their awakening was a rude but salutary one. The dreams of conquest dissipated, they had nothing to distract attention from their fields, and these, the very soil itself, form the first and last foundations of constitutional development. The conditions of social existence soon began to better in every way: growth that heretofore had been stunted took on an air of evolution; dependence on others gave way to dependence on self; and the blood that so long had been sluggish now coursed freely through its natural channels. The weight had been lifted, and the long nightmare was over. Military glory, with all its delusive and mocking phantoms, once gone, the soldier retired, and the citizen took his place. Society no longer huddled beneath the eaves of a guard-house, but entering into its natural abiding-place, the home, grouped itself about the hearth; and lo, before the world had time to realize it, there stood a people! Henceforth the FrenchCanadians had a distinct, political, almost a national existence. No longer the hangers-on of a mother who valued them only for the use she could put them to, they dictated to a step-mother who was only too glad to keep peace in the family by letting them have their own way. They had their own property, their own tenures, their own language, and their own religion. They virtually made their own laws and imposed their own taxes; they paid no imperial revenue, and they had no external enemies against whom Great Britain was not bound to protect them. Nay, they were preferred above the true heirs themselves, who sent over a vain petition for the repeal, or at least amendment, of the Quebec Act. This sounds like a chapter from the Arabian Nights, where the water-carrier at sunrise is grand vizier at sunset. It is, nevertheless, a chapter from the history of England. Such are the bare facts. The transformation did not terminate with mere physical facts, but reached to moral and political effects that have attracted the observation of politicians and philosophers, and have demonstrated for the hundredth time that a people's development is best effected when left to the people themselves. Prior to the fall of Quebec, the contrast presented by the barren character of the French occupation with the rich development of institutions in the British colonies was extremely unfavorable. It cannot be said that the change of sovereignty changed this, but it can be said that it transformed the Canadian French into French - Canadians; that, in doing so, it infused new life. into this people, and gave them a new character, in fact, made a people of them, and started them so successfully on their feet that the Quebec Act marks an epoch of institutional development in their annals such as they never had before, and of which, so long as they were French subjects, they had never given the first hint or sign. In a word, the French-Canadians speedily took upon themselves the characteristics of a self-reliant people. Not that they surpassed other peoples under like conditions, or even equaled them; but they rose rapidly to the level assigned them by nature, as a cork rises to the surface when pressure has been removed. The old-time lethargy diminished, and activity took the place of inaction. The first and great change wrought was a result of the deprivation of their military character. Attack and defense were now in other hands. As a consequence, social directed itself toenergy ward domestic objects. The clash of arms was stilled in the presence of the law; expeditions, that had for their object the acquisition of unneeded territory and spoils, gave way to projects for agriculture and trade. The fifteen years that had elapsed since the capitulation of Quebec had given the land a healthy, recuperative rest; another generation, |