unworthy of you. I make you this reparation as being due
to your character, and I am sincerely mortified about the
misunderstanding which has caused you so much trouble.

"And I have the honour to be, sir, "Yours, etc.

"To M. LeCour de Lincy, officer of the Bodyguard of the company of
Noailles."

The old Councillor, one of the most respected men in the colony, grew
red with shame.

"It is impossible for me, as a man of honour, to sign such a paper," he
said to himself. After walking up and down in his parlours, therefore,
he wrote a reply.

The story of the Chevalier's life will help us to understand him in the
matter.

He had, in his youth, under the French _regime_, won distinction as a
Canadian officer by many important services, and was entitled by written
promises of the Government of France, to money rewards alone of nearly
a hundred thousand livres. On the fall of the colony, however, when the
Canadian officers proceeded to the home country, they found a cold
shoulder turned upon them in the departments of Versailles, so ready to
waste immense sums for those in power and to ignore the barest dues of
merit. Among the rest, de Lery, his bosom burning with the distress of
his family in Paris, paced the corridors of the Colonial Office for
nearly two years. Monsieur Accaron, the cold and procrastinative
ex-Jesuit deputy of the First Minister, would reply--

"I agree with you, sir, that these services are very distinguished;
still, Canada being no longer ours, it is to be admitted they have all
been useless."

"Monsieur," the soldier would return, "I have never understood that the
misfortunes of the brave lessen their rights."

"Well, well, if you will but wait----"

"I shall be enchanted to wait, and I beg of you to inform me of the
means of doing so. I have in Paris my wife and four children, and the
twenty louis to which his Majesty has reduced my allowance would not
support us in the most favoured province of France."

After making such fruitless attempts, he said boldly to them one day--

"I will return to Canada and try my fortune under a different Crown."

"Do not so easily abandon hope," remarked Accaron coolly.

De Lery, for reply, went to the British Ambassador, told him he had
heard high reports of the British nation and offered to become a subject
of the English King. In due time a man of so much sense and spirit was
received by George III. with satisfaction, as t