der the British flag. West and north lay the vaguely
outlined domains of the Hudson's Bay Company, where the red man and the
buffalo still reigned supreme and almost unchallenged.

The old colony of Acadia, save only the island outliers, Cape Breton
and Prince Edward Island, now ceded by the Peace of Paris, had been
in British hands since 1713. It was not, however, until 1749 that any
concerted effort had been made at a settlement of this region. The
menace from the mighty fortress which the French were rebuilding at that
time at Louisbourg, in Cape Breton, and the hostility of the restless
Acadians or old French settlers on the mainland, had compelled action
and the British Government departed from its usual policy of laissez
faire in matters of emigration. Twenty-five hundred English settlers
were brought out to found and hold the town and fort of Halifax. Nearly
as many Germans were planted in Lunenburg, where their descendants
flourish to this day. Then the hapless Acadians were driven into
exile and into the room they left, New Englanders of strictest Puritan
ancestry came, on their own initiative, and built up new communities
like those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Other waves
of voluntary immigration followed--Ulster Presbyterians, driven out by
the attempt of England to crush the Irish woolen manufacture, and,
still later, Highlanders, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian, who soon made
Gaelic the prevailing tongue of the easternmost counties. By 1767 the
colony of Nova Scotia, which then included all Acadia, north and east of
Maine, had a prosperous population of some seven thousand Americans,
two thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely a thousand English,
and well over a thousand surviving Acadian French. In short, this
northernmost of the Atlantic colonies appeared to be fast on the way
to become a part of New England. It was chiefly New Englanders who had
peopled it, and it was with New England that for many a year its whole
social and commercial intercourse was carried on. It was no accident
that Nova Scotia later produced the first Yankee humorist, "Sam Slick."

With the future sister province of Canada, or Quebec, which lay along
the St. Lawrence as far as the Great Lakes, Acadia or Nova Scotia had
much less in common than with New England. Hundreds of miles of unbroken
forest wilderness lay between the two colonies, and the sea lanes ran
between the St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy, or