On this ship with her blackamoors sailed Mistress Hortense, bearing letters to Sir John Kirke, director of the Hudson’s Bay Company and father of M. Radisson’s wife.

“Now praise be Heaven, that little ward will open the way for us in England, Chouart,” said M. de Radisson, as he moodily listened to news of the trouble abrewing in Quebec.

And all the way up the St. Lawrence, as the rolling tide lapped our keel, I was dreaming of a far, cold paleocrystic sea, mystic in the frost-clouds that lay over it like smoke.  Then a figure emerged from the white darkness.  I was snatched up, with the northern lights for chariot, two blazing comets our steeds, and the north star a charioteer.

PART III

CHAPTER XXIII

A CHANGE OF PARTNERS

Old folks are wont to repeat themselves, but that is because they would impress those garnered lessons which age no longer has strength to drive home at one blow.

Royalist and Puritan, each had his lesson to learn, as I said before.  Each marked the pendulum swing to a wrong extreme, and the pendulum was beating time for your younger generations to march by.  And so I say to you who are wiser by the follies of your fathers, look not back too scornfully; for he who is ever watching to mock at the tripping of other men’s feet is like to fall over a very small stumbling-block himself.

Already have I told you of holy men who would gouge a man’s eye out for the extraction of one small bean, and counted burnings life’s highest joy, and held the body accursed as a necessary evil for the tabernacling of the soul.  Now must I tell you of those who wantoned “in the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life,” who burned their lives out at a shrine of folly, and who held that the soul and all things spiritual had gone out of fashion except for the making of vows and pretty conceits in verse by a lover to his lady.

For Pierre Radisson’s fears of France playing false proved true.  Bare had our keels bumped through that forest of sailing craft, which ever swung to the tide below Quebec fort, when a company of young cadets marches down from the Castle St. Louis to escort us up to M. de la Barre, the new governor.

“Hm,” says M. Radisson, looking in his half-savage buckskins a wild enough figure among all those young jacks-in-a-box with their gold lace and steel breastplates.  “Hm—­let the governor come to us!  An you will not go to a man, a man must come to you!”

“I am indisposed,” says he to the cadets.  “Let the governor come to me.”

And come he did, with a company of troops fresh out from France and a roar of cannon from the ramparts that was more for the frightening than welcoming of us.

M. de Radisson bade us answer the salute by a firing of muskets in mid-air.  Then we all let go a cheer for the Governor of New France.