A people whose land was dotted with schools and churches, to whose maintenance their contributions were so slight as to be unworthy of mention.  The three separate religious denominations, holding widely different tenets—­elsewhere the cause of bitter sectarian feeling,—­was with them so unthought of as to give where all topics were eagerly sought—­no room for even fireside discussion.  Side by side, “upon the voyage,”—­as they termed their lake or inland trips—­the Catholic and the Protestant knelt and offered up their devotions—­following the ways of their fathers,—­no more to be made a subject of dispute than a difference in color or height.

The cursings and obscenities that taint the air and brutalize life elsewhere, were in this quaint old settlement unknown.  Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a “patois” of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ever welcome to the ear.

AN ARCADIA.

Where locks for doors were unknown, or, known, unused, where a man’s word, even in the transfer of land, was held as his bond—­honesty became a necessity.  Lawyers were none.  Law was held to be a danger.  Still the importance attached by simple minds to an appearance in public, the amusing belief cherished by some, that, if permitted to plead his own case, exert his unsuspected powers, there could be but one result, brought some honest souls to the Red River forum, with matter of much moment, “the like never heard before.”  None can read the quaint, minutely-detailed record of these “causes celebres” that shook the little households as with a great wind, without a smile, or resist the conviction that no scheme of an English Utopia can safely be pronounced perfect without some such modest tribunal to afford vent for that ever-germinating desire for battle inherent in the race.

[Illustration:  Alexander Ross Sheriff and Author.  Came to Red River Settlement in 1825 from British Columbia.  Died in 1856.]

Their manners were natural, cordial, and full of a lightsome heartness that robed accost with sunshine,—­a quietude withal—­that rare quality —­that irked them not at all—­one gathered from their Indian kin-folk.  Their knowledge of each other was simply universal—­their kin ties almost as general.  These ties were brightened and friendships reknit in the holiday season of the year, the leisure of the long winters, when the far-scattered hewn log houses—­small to the eye—­were ever found large enough to hold the welcome arrivals,—­greeted with a kiss that said, “I am of your blood.”  These widespread affiliations broke down aught like “caste.”  Wealth or official position were practically unheeded by a people in no fear of want and unaccustomed to luxuries, who sought their kinswoman and her brood for themselves, not for what they had in store.  The children and grandchildren of men, however assured in fortune or position, wove anew equalizing ties, seeking out their mates as they came to hand; hence a genial, not a downward level, putting to shame fine-spun theories of democracy in other lands—­spun, not worn.