“A centime for your thoughts, Hugh!” cried Vincent, rising and stretching his limbs.

“I was thinking,” said the Historian, “of that Frenchman, Montcalm, who one summer day came down on the English at Oswego unawares with his gunboats and Indians and gendarmes.  Of the twenty-five thousand people in yonder city I don’t suppose there are a dozen who know what his plans were.  They were grand ones.  In no country on the face of the globe has nature traced outlines of internal navigation on so grand a scale as upon our American continent.  Entering the mouth of the St. Lawrence we are carried by that river through the Great Lakes to the head of Lake Superior, a distance of more than two thousand miles.  On the south we find the Mississippi pouring its waters into the Gulf of Mexico, within a few degrees of the tropics after a course of three thousand miles.  ‘The Great Water,’ as its name signifies, and its numerous branches drain the surface of about one million one hundred thousand square miles, or an area twenty times greater than England and Wales.  The tributaries of the Mississippi equal the largest rivers of Europe.  The course of the Missouri is probably not less than twenty-five hundred miles.  The Ohio winds above a thousand miles through fertile countries.  The tributaries of these tributaries are great rivers.  The Wabash, a feeder of the Ohio, has a course of above five hundred miles, four hundred of which are navigable.  If the contemplated canal is ever completed which will unite Lake Michigan with the head of navigation on the Illinois River, it will be possible to proceed by lines of inland navigation from Quebec to New Orleans.  There is space within the regions enjoying these advantages of water communication, and already peopled by the Anglo-Saxon race, for four hundred millions of the human race, or more than double the population of Europe at the present time.  Imagination cannot conceive the new influences which will be exercised on the affairs of the world when the great valley of the Mississippi, and the continent from Lake Superior to New Orleans, is thronged with population.  In the valley of the Mississippi alone there is abundant room for a population of a hundred million.

“In Montcalm’s day all this territory belonged to France.  It was that soldier’s dream, and he was no less a statesman than a soldier, to make here a great nation.  Toward that end a great chain of forts was to be built along the line from Ontario to New Orleans.  Sandusky, Mackinaw, Detroit, Oswego, Du Quesne, were but a few links in the contemplated chain that was to bind the continent forever to French interests.  It was for this he battled through all those bloody, brilliant campaigns of the old French war.  But the English were too strong for him.  Montcalm perished, and the power of France was at an end in the New World.  But it almost overwhelms me at the thought of what a mighty empire was lost when the English huzza rose above the French clarion on the Plains of Abraham.”