The Red men paid the utmost attention to the words as they dropped from Margaret Godfrey’s lips. The grave was then filled in and the mourners dispersed to their homes along the river, leaving Paul Guidon to rest beside his mother.
For more than a century the “Young Lion of the Woods” has slept on the banks of the St. John. His loyal spirit took its flight to another sphere about the time thousands of united loyal spirits were forming a city near his tomb. The few thousand people that had settled in the colony in the days of Paul Guidon, were the ancestry of the nearly one million true, loyal subjects who inhabit the Maritime Provinces at the beginning of this year 1889. The colony, of which the noble Iroquois was a citizen, was confined within narrow bounds. Now the sons of the Loyalists are on the shores of the Pacific. Our country extends there. It is a noble faculty of our nature which enables us to connect our thoughts with the past as well as with the future, and by contemplating the example and studying the character of Paul Guidon, we must come to the conclusion that were that Indian living now his heart would glow with patriotic pride at the strides the country has taken, and that our destiny is Canadian, not American.
It is a pleasure to be able to exhibit to the present generation something of the splendid character of the Iroquois, whose ashes, commingled with those of the Union Jack, repose near the loyal City of St. John.