brought news to the lonely shores
of Lake Manitoba--news such as men can hear but once in their lives:
the whole of the French army and the Emperor had surrendered themselves
prisoners at Sedan, and the Republic had been proclaimed in Paris.

So dreaming and thinking over these stupendous facts, I-lay-under the
quiet stars, while around me my fellow travellers slept. The prospects of
my own career seemed gloomy enough too. I was about to go back to old
associations and life-rusting routine, and here was a nation, whose every
feeling my heart had so long echoed a response to, beaten down and
trampled under the heel of the German whose legions must already be
gathering around the walls of Paris. Why not offer to France in the
moment of her bitter adversity the sword and service of even one
sympathizing friend--not much of a gift, certainly, but one which would
be at least congenial to my own longing for a life of service, and my
hopeless prospects in a profession in which wealth was made the test of
ability. So as I lay there in the quiet of the starlit prairie, my mind,
running in these eddying circles of thought, fixed itself upon this idea:
I would go to Paris. I would seek through one well-known in other times
the means of putting in execution my resolution. I felt strangely
excited; sleep seemed banished altogether. I arose from the ground, and
walked away into the stillness of the night. Oh, for a sign, for some
guiding light in this uncertain hour of my life! I looked towards the
north as this thought entered my brain. The aurora was burning faint in
the horizon; Arcturus lay like a diamond above the ring of the dusky
prairie. As I looked, a bright globe of light flashed from beneath the
star and passed slowly along towards the west, leaving in its train a
long track of rose-coloured light; in the uttermost bounds of the west
it died slowly away. Was my wish answered? and did my path lie to the
west, not east after all? or was it merely that thing which men call
chance, and dreamers destiny?

A few days from this time I found myself at the frontier post of Pembina,
whither the troublesome doings of the escaped Provisional leaders had
induced the new governor Mr. Archibald to send me. On the last day of
September I again reached, by the steamer "International," the
Well-remembered Point of Frogs. I had left Red River for good. When the
boat reached the landing-place a gentleman came on board, a well-known
member o