result of the aggregate efforts of a
busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to
gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the
achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It
was a vain attempt. Long and valiantly her chiefs upheld their cause,
leading to battle a vassal population, warlike as themselves. Borne
down by numbers from without, wasted by corruption from within, New
France fell at last; and out of her fall grew revolutions whose
influence to this hour is felt through every nation of the civilized
world.

The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its
departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange,
romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the
fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest,
mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship
on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed
continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval
sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling
with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for
civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests,
priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism.
Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the
cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage
hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst
shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a
far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to
shame the boldest sons of toil.

VI

THE RETURN OF THE COUREURS-DE-BOIS[54]

It was a curious scene when a party of _coureurs de bois_ returned
from their rovings. Montreal was their harboring place, and they
conducted themselves much like the crew of a man-of-war paid off after
a long voyage. As long as their beaver-skins lasted, they set no
bounds to their riot. Every house in the place, we are told, was
turned into a drinking-shop. The newcomers were bedizened with a
strange mixture of French and Indian finery; while some of them, with
instincts more thoroughly savage, stalked about the streets as naked
as a Pottawottamie or a Sioux. The clamor of tongues was prodigious,
and gambling and drinking filled the day and the night. When at last
they were sober again, th