Rude phrase of the country, summing up in two words all
the heartbreaking labour that transforms the incult woods, barren of
sustenance, to smiling fields, ploughed and sown. Samuel
Chapdelaine's eyes flamed with enthusiasm and determination as he
spoke.

For this was the passion of his life; the passion of a man whose
soul was in the clearing, not the tilling of the earth. Five times
since boyhood had he taken up wild land, built a house, a stable and
a barn, wrested from the unbroken forest a comfortable farm; and
five times he had sold out to begin it all again farther north,
suddenly losing interest; energy and ambition vanishing once the
first rough work was done, when neighbours appeared and the
countryside began to be opened up and inhabited. Some there were who
entered into his feelings; others praised the courage but thought
little of the wisdom, and such were fond of saying that if good
sense had led him to stay in one place he and his would now be at
their ease.

"At their ease ..." O dread God of the Scriptures, worshipped by
these countryfolk of Quebec without a quibble or a doubt, who hast
condemned man to earn his bread in the sweat of his face, canst Thou
for a moment smooth the awful frown from Thy forehead when Thou art
told that certain of these Thy creatures have escaped the doom, and
live at their ease?

"At their ease..." Truly to know what it means one must have
toiled bitterly from dawn to dark with back and hands and feet, and
the children of the soil are those who have best attained the
knowledge. It means the burden lifted; the heavy burden of labour
and of care. It means leave to rest, the which, even if it be
unused, is a new mercy every moment. To the old it means so much of
the pride of life as no one would deny them, the late revelation of
unknown delights, an hour of idleness, a distant journey, a dainty
or a purchase indulged in without anxious thought, the hundred and
one things desirable that a competence assures.

So constituted is the heart of man that most of those who have paid
the ransom and won liberty-ease-have in the winning of it created
their own incapacity for enjoying the conquest, and toil on till
death; it is the others, the ill-endowed or the unlucky, who have
been unable to overcome fortune and escape their slavery, to whom
the state of ease has all those charms of the inaccessible.

It may be that the Chapdelaines so were thinking, and each in his
own fashion