I have shown elsewhere the aspects of Canada, where a rigid scion of the old European tree was set to grow in the wilderness.  The military Governor, holding his miniature Court on the rock of Quebec; the feudal proprietors, whose domains lined the shores of the St. Lawrence; the peasant; the roving bushranger; the half-tamed savage, with crucifix and scalping-knife; priests; friars; nuns; and soldiers,—­mingled to form a society the most picturesque on the continent.  What distinguished it from the France that produced it was a total absence of revolt against the laws of its being,—­an absolute conservatism, an unquestioning acceptance of Church and King.  The Canadian, ignorant of everything but what the priest saw fit to teach him, had never heard of Voltaire; and if he had known him, would have thought him a devil.  He had, it is true, a spirit of insubordination born of the freedom of the forest; but if his instincts rebelled, his mind and soul were passively submissive.  The unchecked control of a hierarchy robbed him of the independence of intellect and character, without which, under the conditions of modern life, a people must resign itself to a position of inferiority.  Yet Canada had a vigor of her own.  It was not in spiritual deference only that she differed from the country of her birth.  Whatever she had caught of its corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy.  The mass of her people lived in a rude poverty,—­not abject, like the peasant of old France, nor ground down by the tax-gatherer; while those of the higher ranks—­all more or less engaged in pursuits of war or adventure, and inured to rough journeyings and forest exposures—­were rugged as their climate.  Even the French regular troops, sent out to defend the colony, caught its hardy spirit, and set an example of stubborn fighting which their comrades at home did not always emulate.

Canada lay ensconced behind rocks and forests.  All along her southern boundaries, between her and her English foes, lay a broad tract of wilderness, shaggy with primeval woods.  Innumerable streams gurgled beneath their shadows; innumerable lakes gleamed in the fiery sunsets; innumerable mountains bared their rocky foreheads to the wind.  These wastes were ranged by her savage allies, Micmacs, Etechemins, Abenakis, Caughnawagas; and no enemy could steal upon her unawares.  Through the midst of them stretched Lake Champlain, pointing straight to the heart of the British settlement,—­a watery thoroughfare of mutual attack, and the only approach by which, without a long detour by wilderness or sea, a hostile army could come within striking distance of the colony.  The French advanced post of Fort Frederic, called Crown Point by the English, barred the narrows of the lake, which thence spread northward to the portals of Canada guarded by Fort St. Jean.  Southwestward, some fourteen hundred miles as a bird flies, and twice as far by the practicable routes of travel, was Louisiana, the second of the two heads of New France; while between lay the realms of solitude where the Mississippi rolled its sullen tide, and the Ohio wound its belt of silver through the verdant woodlands.