rebuilding the manor house.  The work was begun in 1845 and completed by the autumn of 1847; the new structure with little change is the present Manor.  It is of stone covered with wood, a capacious dwelling with some fine rooms, and admirably suited to its purpose.  To John Nairne an heir was born in 1842 and named John Leslie Nairne and the prospect seemed excellent for the final establishment of a Nairne dynasty in the seigniory.  But, alas, this was not to be.  The child died in his third year and the last of the Nairnes ruled at Murray Bay knowing that with himself the family should become extinct.

We must turn now to study the type of community of which he was the chief.  A singular type it is, French in speech, Roman Catholic in faith, half feudal in organization, in a land British in allegiance, if not in origin.  Long the determined rival of the Briton in America the French Canadian, though worsted in the struggle, remains still unconquered in his determination to live his own separate life and pursue his own separate ideals.  When the British took Canada they fondly imagined that in a few years a little pressure would bring the French Canadians into the Protestant fold.[26] Immediately after the conquest preparations for this gradual absorption were made.  The Roman Catholics were to be undisturbed but, as soon as a majority in any parish was Protestant, a clergyman of that faith would be appointed and the parish church would be given over to the Protestant worship.  The minority would, it was hoped, acquiesce, and, in time, adopt the creed of the majority.  The most illuminating comment upon these expectations is the fact that, during the half century after the conquest, Protestantism made probably not more than half a dozen converts among the Canadians, while of Protestants coming to the country during that time hundreds went over to the Church of Rome.  In other ways too the type in French Canada has proved curiously persistent.  A Lowland Scot of twenty-five married an Irish woman of twenty-three and went to live in a French Canadian parish.  Hitherto they had spoken only English but after twenty-five years they could not even understand it when heard.  They explained that at first they spoke English to each other but when the children went to school they used only French.  So the parents yielded “C’etait les enfants, M’sieu!”

A modern critic of France[27] has announced, as a sounding paradox, that the French, even of present-day anti-clerical France, are a profoundly religious people.  Certainly this appears in France’s efforts in Canada.  When the Roman Catholic faith was first planted there the ground was watered with the blood of martyrs, done to death by brutal savages.  At the very time when in France Pascal’s satire and scorn were making the spiritual sincerity of the Jesuits more than doubtful, in Canada these same Jesuits were dying for their faith almost with a light heart.  They and others, like-minded, won New France for the