paring vigour, had tended to accelerate the flight of M. Riel and the
members of his government, who sought in rapid retreat the safety of the
American frontier. How had the mighty fallen! With insult and derision
the President and his colleagues fled from the scene of their triumph and
their crimes. An officer in the service of the Company they had plundered
hooted them as they went, but perhaps there was a still harder note of
retribution in the "still small voice" which must have sounded from the
bastion wherein the murdered Scott had been so brutally done to death. On
the bare flag-staff in the fort the Union Jack was once more hoisted, and
from the battery found in the square a royal salute of twenty-one guns
told to settler and savage that the man who had been "elevated by the
grace of Providence and the suffrage of his fellow-citizens to the
highest position the Government of his country" had been ignominiously
expelled from his high position. Still even in his fall we must not be
too hard upon him. Vain, ignorant, and conceited though he was, he seemed
to have been an implicit believer in his mission; nor can it be doubted
that he possessed a fair share of courage too--courage not of the Red
River type, which is a very peculiar one, but more in accordance with our
European ideas of that virtue.

That he meditated opposition cannot be doubted. The muskets cast away by
his guard were found loaded; ammunition had been served from the magazine
on the morning of the flight. But muskets and ammunition are not worth
much without hands and hearts to use them, and twenty hands with perhaps
an aggregate of two and a half hearts among them were all he had to
depend on at the last moment. The other members of his government appear
to have been utterly devoid of a single redeeming quality. The Hon. W.
B. O'Donoghue was one of those miserable beings who seem to inherit the
Vices of every calling and nationality to which they can claim a kindred.
Educated for some semi-clerical profession which he abandoned for the
more congenial trade of treason rendered apparently secure by distance,
he remained in garb the cleric, while he plundered his prisoners and
indulged in the fashionable pastime of gambling with purloined property
and racing with confiscated horses--a man whose revolting countenance at
once suggested the hulks and prison garb, and who, in any other land save
America, would probably long since have reached the convict l