The favorite inn!  What a call to food and wine and cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners!  It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one’s feet the kindly restful earth.  For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner’s true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn.  There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow and the bowl of a Holland clay propped in a horny fist, he might listen tranquilly to the sobbing of the tempest in the gaping chimney.  What if the night voiced its pains shrewdly, walls encompassed him; what if its frozen tears melted on the panes or smoked on the trampled threshold, glowing logs sent forth a permeating heat, expanding his sense of luxury and content.  What with the solace of the new-found weed, and the genial brothers of the sea surrounding, tempests offered no terrors to him.

Listen.  Perhaps here is some indomitable Ulysses, who, scorning a blind immortalizer, recites his own rude Odyssey.  What exploits!  What adventures on the broad seas and in the new-found wildernesses of the West!  Ah, but a man was a man then; there were no mythic gods to guide or to thwart him; and he rose or fell according to the might of his arm and the length of his sword.  Hate sought no flimsy pretexts, but came forth boldly; love entered the lists neither with caution nor with mental reservation; and favor, though inconsiderate as ever, was not niggard with her largess.  Truly the mariner had not to draw on his imagination; the age of which he was a picturesque particle was a brave and gallant one:  an Odyssey indeed, composed of Richelieus, sons and grandsons of the great Henri, Buckinghams, Stuarts, Cromwells, Mazarins, and Monks; Maries de Medicis, Annes of Austria, Mesdames de Longueville; of Royalists, Frondeurs, and Commonwealth; of Catholics, Huguenots, and Puritans.  Some were dead, it is true; but never a great ship passes without leaving a turbulent wake.  And there, in the West, rising serenely above all these tangles of civil wars and political intrigues, was the splendid star of New France.  Happy and envied was the mariner who could tell of its vast riches, of its endless forests, of its cruel brown savages, of its mighty rivers and freshwater seas.

New France!  How many a ruined gamester, hearing these words, lifted his head, the fires of hope lighting anew in his burnt-out eyes?  How many a fallen house looked longingly toward this promised land?  New France!  Was not the name itself Fortune’s earnest, her pledge of treasures lightly to be won?  The gamester went to his garret to dream of golden dice, the fallen noble of rehabilitated castles, the peasant of freedom and liberty.  Even the solemn monk, tossing on his pallet, pierced with his gaze the grey walls of his monastery, annihilated the space between him and the fruitful wilderness, and saw in fancy the building of great cities and cathedrals and a glittering miter on his own tonsured head.