That was the gayest winter Quebec had seen since Montcalm’s first season, twenty years before.  Carleton had been knighted for his services and was naturally supposed to be the chosen leader for the next campaign.  The ten thousand troops gave confidence to the loyalists and promised success for the coming campaign.  The clergy were getting their disillusioned parishioners back to the fold beneath the Union Jack; while Jean Ba’tis’e himself was fain to admit that his own ways of life and the money he got for his goods were very much safer with les Angla’s than with the revolutionists, whom he called les Bastonna’s because most trade between Quebec and the Thirteen Colonies was carried on by vessels hailing from the port of Boston.  The seigneurs were delighted.  They still hoped for commissions as regulars, which too few of them ever received; and they were charmed with the little viceregal court over which Lady Maria Carleton, despite her youthful two-and-twenty summers, presided with a dignity inherited from the premier ducal family of England and brought to the acme of conventional perfection by her intimate experience of Versailles.  On New Year’s Eve Carleton gave a public fete, a state dinner, and a ball to celebrate the anniversary of the British victory over Montgomery and Arnold.  The bishop held a special thanksgiving and made all notorious renegades do open penance.  Nothing seemed wanting to bring the New Year in under the happiest auspices since British rule began.

But, quite unknown to Carleton, mischief was brewing in the Colonial Office of that unhappy government which did so many stupid things and got the credit for so many more.  In 1775 the well-meaning Earl of Dartmouth was superseded by Lord George Germain, who continued the mismanagement of colonial affairs for seven disastrous years.  Few characters have abused civil and military positions more than the man who first, as a British general, disgraced the noble name of Sackville on the battlefield of Minden in 1759, and then, as a cabinet minister, disgraced throughout America the plebeian one of Germain, which he took in 1770 with a suitable legacy attached to it.  His crime at Minden was set down by the thoughtless public to sheer cowardice.  But Sackville was no coward.  He had borne himself with conspicuous gallantry at Fontenoy.  He was admired, before Minden, by two very brave soldiers, Wolfe and the Duke of Cumberland.  And he afterwards fought a famous duel with as much sang-froid as any one would care to see.  His real crime at Minden was admirably exposed by the court-martial which found him ’guilty of having disobeyed the orders of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, whom he was by his commission bound to obey as commander-in-chief, according to the rules of war.’  This court also found him ’unfit to serve his Majesty in any military capacity whatever’; and George II directed that the following ‘remarks’ should be added when the sentence was read out on