They say that something in the boy’s temperament raised a vague hope in the heart of the parish priest. The priest was one of the dreamers of St. Lin, one who helped keep alive the name of New France. It is said that one afternoon he invited the lad Laurier into the garden of the presbytery, and there tested as best he could the drift of his imagination, whether he loved the heroic, whether he would make a patriot or not. He let himself hope that the little imaginative son of the land-surveyor might be of use to his race by writing songs, perhaps, that they could chant on the day of their re-establishment, or perhaps—. He took the boy into his study, where the black crucifix hung upon the wall. From the bottom of an ancient chest of drawers, one that had come from Brittany, he drew forth an object carefully folded so as to conceal certain gaping holes and frayed edges. He lifted it and let the folds slip out, so that the colored cloth hung before the eyes of the boy.
“Do you know what that is, my son?” he demanded.
“It is the French flag, Father.”
“It is our flag,” corrected the priest.
On various occasions he took the boy to the study and told him stories connected with the flag. The visits became a sort of ceremony. Each day the boy learned a new fact about the piece of silk. It had been carried not far from Montcalm himself on the day that he rode out of Quebec to meet Wolfe and defeat upon the Plains of Abraham. It was marked by British bullets. There were stains on it, almost faded out, that had come from French veins. This, it is said, was the strange first training which Laurier received for the works which he afterwards accomplished.
It was amid such associations that the future Prime Minister of Canada first learned the English tongue—“with a bit of Scotch accent,” as he once himself described it—and religious breadth and tolerance, two endowments which helped to give to the man of French descent and Roman Catholic faith the grace and facility of expression and the breadth of vision irresistibly appealing alike to both the great races in Canada, British and French, Protestant and Catholic.
The powerful influence of the years spent under the shadow of the little Presbyterian church of New Glasgow was demonstrated throughout his whole career, while his life-long affection—almost amounting to reverence—for Murray, the sturdy Scot who “fathered” him at this time, resembled the deep sentiment entertained by David Lloyd George for the worthy Welsh cobbler-uncle who did so much to make his career possible. Wilfrid Laurier never alluded to Malcolm Murray without evidences of the deepest appreciation and admiration.
That he also enjoyed with all the enthusiasm of boyhood, his stay in this Scottish settlement he has recalled on more than one occasion. “I remember,” he once observed after he had become a national figure, “I remember how I fought with the Scotch boys and made school-boy love to the Scotch girls, with more success in the latter than in the former.”
From his earliest boyhood, Laurier gave evidence of an independent character. While at college in L’Assomption, a debating society was formed, and there are men living to-day at the base of the Laurentides who remember the debating qualities of the man who was to shine later on as a Rupert in debate, in the home of the elder daughter of the mother of parliaments—the Canadian Commons Chamber. An instance of this comes to mind. A resolution had been submitted to the effect that the old kings in the interest of Canada should have permitted the Huguenots to settle here. Opposition was, of course, manifest in the debate, but young Laurier espoused the affirmative side in the discussion which waxed very warm, and his speech, which followed, was of so aggressive a character that the prefect of studies was scandalized, and at one fell swoop stopped the debate, and threw such societies into the discard.