I took leave of the old chief. He had been present at the capture of Quebec. In the shameful years of the reign of Louis XV., the episode of the Canadian War comes to our consolation as though it were a page from our ancient history discovered in the Tower of London.
Montcalm[480], left to defend Canada unaided against forces often relieved and four times his own in number, fights successfully for two whole years; he defeats Lord Loudon[481] and General Abercromby[482]. At last fortune forsakes him; he falls wounded beneath the walls of Quebec, and two days later breathes his last: his Grenadiers bury him in a hole dug by a shell, a grave worthy of the honour of our arms! His noble enemy Wolfe[483] dies facing him; he pays with his own life for Montcalm's life and for the glory of expiring upon a few French flags.
*
Once more my guide and I mounted our horses. Our road became more difficult and was marked only by some felled trees. The trunks of these trees served as bridges over the streams or as hurdles in the bogs. The American population was at that time moving towards the Genesee grants. These grants were sold at prices more or less high according to the goodness of the soil, the quality of the trees, the current and abundance of the water.
It has been observed that colonists are often preceded in the woods by bees: these are the van-guard of the tillers of the soil, and the symbols of the industry and civilization whose coming they proclaim. Foreign to America, these peaceful conquerors came in the wake of Columbus' sails, and have robbed a new world of flowers of those treasures only of whose use the natives were ignorant; nor have they employed those treasures other than to enrich the soil whence they derived them.
The clearings along both sides of the road which I travelled displayed a curious mixture of the state of nature and the state of civilization. In one comer of a wood which had never known any sound save the yells of the savage and the belling of the stag, one came across a ploughed field; one saw from the same point of view the wigwam of an Indian and the dwelling of a planter. Some of these dwellings, when completed, reminded one of the neatness of the Dutch farm-houses; others were only half finished, and had nothing but the sky for a roof.
Indians and settlers.
I was welcomed in these dwellings, the results of a morning's work; often I would find a family displaying European elegancies, mahogany furniture, a piano, carpets, mirrors, at a few steps from the hut of an Iroquois. In the evening, when the farm-servants returned from working in the woods or fields with the axe or the hoe, the windows were opened. My host's daughters, with their beautiful fair hair dressed in ringlets, would sing, to the accompaniment of the piano, the duet from Paisiello's[484] Pandolfetto or some cantabile by Cimarosa[485], all in full view of the wilderness, and sometimes to the murmuring sound of a waterfall.
Small market-towns rose in the better districts. The spire of a new steeple shot up from the midst of an old forest. The English are accompanied by English customs wherever they go: after crossing districts containing no trace of habitation, I came upon the sign of an inn swinging from the bough of a tree. Hunters, planters, and Indians mingled at these caravansaries: the first time I rested there, I swore that it should be the last.