be thought unsullied.’  Murray, who had accepted the fees, at first took umbrage.  But Carleton soon put matters straight with him.  The fact was that fees, and even certain perquisites, were no dishonour to receive, as they nearly always formed a recognized part, and often the whole, of a perfectly legal salary.  But fees and perquisites could be abused; and they did lead to misunderstandings, even when they were not abused; while fixed salaries were free from both objections.  So Carleton, surrounded by shamelessly rapacious magistrates and the whole vile camp-following gang, as well as by French Canadians who had suffered from the robberies of Bigot and his like, decided to sacrifice everything but his indispensable fixed salary in order that even the most malicious critics could not bring any accusation, however false, against the man who represented Britain and her king.

An interesting personal interlude, which was not without considerable effect on Canadian history, took place in the middle of Carleton’s four years’ stay in England.  He was forty-eight and still a bachelor.  Tradition whispers that these long years of single life were the result of a disappointing love affair with Jane Carleton, a pretty cousin, when both he and she were young.  However that may be, he now proposed to Lady Anne Howard, whose father, the Earl of Effingham, was one of his greatest friends.  But he was doomed to a second, though doubtless very minor, disappointment.  Lady Anne, who probably looked on ‘grave Carleton’ as a sort of amiable, middle-aged uncle, had fallen in love with his nephew, whom she presently married, and with whom she afterwards went out to Canada, where her husband served under the rejected uncle himself.  What added spice to this peculiar situation was the fact that Carleton actually married the younger sister of the too-youthful Lady Anne.  When Lady Anne rejoined her sister and their bosom friend, Miss Seymour, after the disconcerting interview with Carleton, she explained her tears by saying they were due to her having been ’obliged to refuse the best man on earth.’  ‘The more fool you!’ answered the younger sister, Lady Maria, then just eighteen, ‘I only wish he had given me the chance!’ There, for the time, the matter ended.  Carleton went back to his official duties in furtherance of the Quebec Act.  His nephew and the elder sister made mutual love.  Lady Maria held her tongue.  But Miss Seymour had not forgotten; and one day she mustered up courage to tell Carleton the story of ‘the more fool you!’ This decided him to act at once.  He proposed; was accepted; and lived happily married for the rest of his long life.  Lady Maria was small, fair-haired, and blue-eyed, which heightened her girlish appearance when, like Madame de Champlain, she came out to Canada with a husband more than old enough to be her father.  But she had been brought up at Versailles.  She knew all the aristocratic graces of the old regime.  And her slight, upright figure—­erect as any soldier’s to her dying day—­almost matched her husband’s stalwart form in dignity of carriage.