CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

Westward—­News from the Outside World—­I retrace my Steps—­An
Offer—­The West—­The Kissaskatchewan—­The Inland Ocean—­Preparations—­
Departure—­A Terrible Plague—­A lonely Grave-Digressive—­The Assineboine
River—­Rossette.

One night, it was the 19th of September, I was lying out in the long prairie grass near the south shore of Lake Manitoba, in the marshes of which I had been hunting wild fowl for some days.  It was apparently my last night in Red River, for the period of my stay there had drawn to its close.  I had much to think about-that night, for only a few hours before a French half-breed named La Ronde had brought news to the lonely shores of Lake Manitoba—­news such as men can hear but once in their lives:  the whole of the French army and the Emperor had surrendered themselves prisoners at Sedan, and the Republic had been proclaimed in Paris.

So dreaming and thinking over these stupendous facts, I-lay-under the quiet stars, while around me my fellow travellers slept.  The prospects of my own career seemed gloomy enough too.  I was about to go back to old associations and life-rusting routine, and here was a nation, whose every feeling my heart had so long echoed a response to, beaten down and trampled under the heel of the German whose legions must already be gathering around the walls of Paris.  Why not offer to France in the moment of her bitter adversity the sword and service of even one sympathizing friend—­not much of a gift, certainly, but one which would be at least congenial to my own longing for a life of service, and my hopeless prospects in a profession in which wealth was made the test of ability.  So as I lay there in the quiet of the starlit prairie, my mind, running in these eddying circles of thought, fixed itself upon this idea:  I would go to Paris.  I would seek through one well-known in other times the means of putting in execution my resolution.  I felt strangely excited; sleep seemed banished altogether.  I arose from the ground, and walked away into the stillness of the night.  Oh, for a sign, for some guiding light in this uncertain hour of my life!  I looked towards the north as this thought entered my brain.  The aurora was burning faint in the horizon; Arcturus lay like a diamond above the ring of the dusky prairie.  As I looked, a bright globe of light flashed from beneath the star and passed slowly along towards the west, leaving in its train a long track of rose-coloured light; in the uttermost bounds of the west it died slowly away.  Was my wish answered? and did my path lie to the west, not east after all? or was it merely that thing which men call chance, and dreamers destiny?

A few days from this time I found myself at the frontier post of Pembina, whither the troublesome doings of the escaped Provisional leaders had induced the new governor Mr. Archibald to send me.  On the last day of September I again reached, by the steamer “International,” the Well-remembered Point of Frogs.  I had left Red River for good.  When the boat reached the landing-place a gentleman came on board, a well-known member of the Canadian bench.