Who has sung this song of triumph? 
    The good Pierre Falcon had composed it,
    That the praise of these Bois-brules
    Might be evermore recorded.

CHAPTER XI.

The silver chief arrives.

The scene changes to the home of the founder of the Colony.  The Earl of Selkirk is living at his interesting seat—­St. Mary’s Isle, and letter after letter arrives which has taken many weeks on the road, coming down through trackless prairie, across the middle and Eastern States of America and reaching him via New York.  These letters continue to increase in being more and more terrible until his island home seems to be in a state of siege.

St. Mary’s Isle lies at the mouth of the Dee on Solway Frith, opposite the town of Kirkcudbright.  Here in 1778 Paul Jones, the so-called pirate in the employ of the Revolutionary Government in America, had landed, invested the dwelling with his men, and carried away all the plate and jewels of the House of Selkirk.  The Old Manor House of St. Mary’s Isle, with its very thick stone wall on one side, evidently had been a keep or castle.  It was at one time given to the church and became a monastery, then it was enlarged and improved to become the dwelling of the family of the Douglasses, which it is to this day.

But now the far cry from Red River reverberated across the Atlantic.  The startling succession of events of 1815 reached the Earl one after another.  It was late in the year when he made up his mind, but taking his Countess, his two daughters and his only son, Dunbar, a mere boy, and crossing the ocean he heard, on his arrival in New York, of the complete destruction by flight and expulsion of the people of his Colony.  About the end of October he reached Montreal, but winter was too near to allow him to travel up the lakes and through the wilds to Red River.

The winter in Montreal was long, but the atmosphere of opposition to Lord Selkirk in that city, the home of the Nor’-Westers, was more trying to him than the frost and snow.  His every movement was watched.  Even the avenues of Government power seemed by influential Nor’-Westers to be closed against him.  An appeal to Sir Gordon Drummond, the Governor-General, could obtain no more than a promise of a Sergeant and six men to protect him personally should he go to the far West, and the appointment of himself as a Justice of the Peace in Upper Canada and the Indian Territory was grudgingly given.

The active mind of his Lordship occupied the time of winter well.  He planned nothing less than introducing to the banks of Red River a body of men as settlers, who could, like the returned exiles to Jerusalem, work with sword in one hand and a tool of industry in the other.  The man of resource finds his material ready made.  Two mercenary regiments from Switzerland which had been fighting England’s