A little later Quebec was saved by the arrival of a British fleet and the French fell back on Montreal.  Murray followed them but the Highlanders remained in garrison at Quebec, apparently because, with half the officers and men invalided, they could make but a poor muster for active campaigning.  It thus happened that Nairne and Fraser did not share the glory of being present at the fall of Montreal.  There, on a September day in 1760, the Governor of Canada, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, handed over to General Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief in America of the armies of Great Britain, the vast territory which he had ruled.  It was not certain, albeit the great Pitt was resolved what to do, that, when the war ended, the country would not be handed back to France.  The French officers professed, indeed, to believe that a peace was imminent by which France should save what she held in America.  Meanwhile, however, they and their regiments were to be sent to France.  The few residents at Malbaie whom Captain Gorham had spared, looking out across the river in October, 1760, saw it dotted with the white sails of many ships outward bound.  Though they floated the British flag, their decks were crowded with the soldiers of France now carried home by the triumphant conqueror.

But more than the soldiers went back to France.  Rather than live under the sway of the British, many civilians also left Canada, among them some of the seigneurs of Canadian manors.  Land was cheap in Canada and it is not to be wondered at that young British officers, seeking their fortune, should have thought of settling in the country.  A hundred years earlier French officers of the Carignan Regiment had abandoned their military careers to become Canadian seigneurs.  In the end John Nairne and Malcolm Fraser took up this project most warmly and in their plan to get land they had the support of their commanding officer, General Murray.  Murrays, Nairnes and Frasers had all fought on the Jacobite side in 1745; and we know how the Scots hold together.

[Illustration:  GENERAL JAMES MURRAY]

James Murray, son of a Scottish peer, Lord Elibank, was himself still a young man of only a little more than thirty,—­a high-spirited, brave, generous and impulsive officer.  His family played some considerable part in the life of the time and they were always suspected of Jacobite leanings.  Murray’s brother, Lord Elibank, was a leader among the Scottish wits of his day.  Dr. Johnson’s famous quip against the Scots when he defined oatmeal as a food in England for horses and in Scotland for men was met by Elibank’s neat retort:  “And where will you find such horses and such men?” Another brother, Alexander, was a forerunner of John Wilkes the radical; the cry of “Murray and Liberty” was heard in London long before that of “Wilkes and Liberty.”  A third brother, George became an admiral.  General James Murray sometimes described himself as a soldier of fortune.  He was certainly not rich.  Yet now when many of the Canadian seigneurs sold their manors, in some way Murray was able to purchase half a dozen of these vast estates.  He bought that of Lauzon opposite Quebec on which now stands the town of Levis and half a dozen villages.  He bought St. Jean and Sans-Bruit (now Belmont), near Quebec, Riviere du Loup and Madawaska, on the lower St. Lawrence, and Foucault on Lake Champlain.