me out with his family in an emigrant
vessel, talking of purchasing a seignory! But this was a magnificent
manner of the captain's. Sixpence in his pocket assumed the dimensions
of a sovereign in his imagination.

'Some of them are thirty thousand acres in extent,' Mr. Holt remarked
drily.

'Ah, yes, quite a little principality: one should enjoy all the old
feudal feelings, walking about among one's subject _censitaires_,
taking a paternal interest in their concerns, as well as bound to them
by pecuniary ties. I should build a castellated baronial residence,
pepper-box turrets, etcetera, and resist modern new lights to the
uttermost.'

'As soon a living man chained to a dead man, as _I_ would hamper myself
with that old-world feudality!' exclaimed the Western pioneer. 'Why,
sir, can you have seen the wretched worn-out land they scratch with a
wretched plough, fall after fall, without dreaming of rotation of crops,
or drainage, or any other improvement? Do you remember the endless strips
of long narrow fields edging the road, opening out of one another,
in miserable divisions of one or two acres, perhaps, just affording
starvation to the holders? What is the reason that where vast quantities
of wheat were formerly exported, the soil now grows hardly enough for
the people to eat? Sir, the country is cut up and subdivided to the
last limits that will support even the sleepy life of a _habitan_; all
improvement of every kind is barred; the French population stand still
in the midst of our go-ahead age: and you would prolong the system that
causes this!'

It was one of the few subjects upon which Mr. Holt got excited; but he
had seen the evils of feudalism in the strong light of Western progress.
Captain Armytage, for peace' sake, qualified his lately expressed
admiration, but was met again by a torrent of words--to the unalloyed
delight of Andy, who was utterly unable to comprehend the argument,
but only hoped 'the schamer was gettin' more than he bargained for.'

'Pauperism will be the result, sir; the race is incorrigible in its
stupid determination to do as its forefathers did, and nothing else.
Lower Canada wants a clearing out, like what you are getting in Ireland,
before a healthy regeneration can set in. The religion is faulty; the
habits and traditions of the race are faulty; Jean Baptiste is the
drone in our colonial hive. He won't gather honey: he will just live,
indolently drawling through an existence dive