Longfellow—­moving all hearts to pity—­has painted in “Evangeline” the enforced dispersion of the French in “Acadia.”  Who shall tell the homesick pain, the vain regrets, the looking back of those who peopled our “Acadia”?  No voice bids them away; they melt before the fervor of the time; hasten lest they be ’whelmed by the great wave of life now rolling towards them.  Vain retreat, the waters are out and may not be stayed.  It is fate! it is right, but the travail is sore, the face of the mother is wet with tears.

This outline sketch proposed is at an end; we have striven to be faithful to the true lines.  There is no obligation to perpetuate unworthy “minutae.”  Joy is immortal! sorrow dies! the petty features are absorbed in the broad ones; those capable only of conveying truth.

The Red River Settlement in the days adverted to is an idyl simple and pure:  a nomadic pastoral, inwrought with Indian traits and color; our one acted poem in the great national prosaic life.  When the vast country in the far future is teeming with wealth and luxury, this light rescued and defined will shine adown the fullness of the time with hues all its own.  The story that it tells will be as a sweet refreshment:  a dream made possible, called by those who shared in its great calm, “Britain’s One Utopia—­Selkirkia.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

Pictures of silver.

Lord Selkirk’s Colonists never had, as have seen, a bed of roses.  Adversity had dodged their steps from the time that they put the first foot forward toward the new world—­and Stornoway, Fort Churchill, York Factory, Norway House, Pembina and Fort Douglas start, as we speak of them, a train of bitter memories.  Flood and famine, attack and bloodshed, toil and anxiety were the constant atmosphere, in which for a generation they existed.  Higher civilization is impossible when the struggle for shelter and bread is too strenuous.  Though the ministrations of religion were supplied within a few years of the beginning of the Colony, yet the Colonists were not satisfied in this respect till forty years had passed.  It was a generation before the Roman Catholic Church had a Bishop, who held the See of St. Boniface instead of the title “in the parts of the heathen.”  It was not before the year 1849 that a Church of England Bishop arrived, and it was two years after that date when the first Presbyterian minister came to be the spiritual head of the Selkirk Colonists.  Before this the education and elevation of the people was represented by a few schools chiefly maintained by private or church effort.  The writer intends to bring out, from selected quotations from different sources, the few bright spots in the gloom—­the pictures of silver—­on a rather dark background.

ABBE DUGAS’ STORY.