be used and great quantities of salmon might be salted down in good seasons.  Happily, conditions are mending.  The previous farmer had let things go to rack and ruin but now one sees neither thistles nor black wheat; all the fences are in place.  Joseph Dufour has a special talent for making things profitable.  If he can be induced to continue his services, it will be a benefit to his employer.  But he is not contented.  Last year he could not make it pay and wished to leave.  Nearly all his wages are used in the support of his family.  He has three grown-up daughters who help in carrying on the establishment, and a boy for the stables.  The best paid of these gets only 50 livres (about $10) a year; she should get at least 80 livres, M. Coquart thinks.  Dufour has on the farm eight sheep of his own but even of these the King takes the wool, and actually the farmer has had to pay for what wool his family used.  Surely he should be allowed to keep at least half the wool of his own sheep!  If it was the policy of the Crown to grant lands along the river of Malbaie there are many people who would like those fertile areas, but there is danger that they would trade with the Indians which should be strictly forbidden.  So runs M. Coquart’s report.  It was rendered to one of the greatest rascals in New France, the Intendant Bigot, but he was a rascal who did his official tasks with some considerable degree of thoroughness and insight.  He knew what were the conditions at Malbaie even if he did not mend them.

After 1750 the curtain falls again upon Malbaie and we see nothing until, a few years later, the desolation of war has come, war that was to bring to Canada, and, with it, to Malbaie, new masters of British blood.  After long mutterings the war broke out openly in 1756.  In those days the farmer at Malbaie who looked out, as we look out, upon the mighty river would see great ships passing up and down.  Some of them differed from the merchant ships to which his eye was accustomed.  They stood high in the water.  Ships came near the north shore in those days and he could see grim black openings in their sides which meant cannon.  Already Britain had almost driven France from the sea and these French ships, which ascended the St. Lawrence, were few.  Then, in 1759, happened what had been long-expected and talked about.  Signal fires blazed at night on both sides of the St. Lawrence to give the alarm, when not French, but British ships, sailed up the river, a huge fleet.  They stopped at Tadousac and then slowly and cautiously filed past Malbaie.  On a summer day the crowd of white sails scattered on the surface of the river made an animated scene.  In wonder our farmer and his helpers watched the ships silently advance to their goal.  There were 39 men-of-war, 10 auxiliaries, 70 transports and a multitude of smaller craft carrying some 27,000 men; it was the mightiest array Britain had ever sent across the ocean.  New France was doomed.