—­Words of a foreign speech from every lip, on every street, in every shop ...  Little girls taking hands to dance a round and singing a song one could not understand ...  Here ...

Maria turned toward her father who still slept with his chin sunk on his breast, looking like a man stricken down by grief whose meditation is of death; and the look brought her swift memory of the hymns and country songs he was wont to teach his children in the evenings.

    A la claire fontaine
    M’en allant promener ...

In those cities of the States, even if one taught the children how to sing them would they not straightway forget!

The clouds a little while ago drifting singly across a moonlit sky were now spread over the heavens in a vast filmy curtain, and the dim light passing through it was caught by the earth’s pale coverlet of melting snow; between the two wan expanses the ranks of the forest darkly stretched their long battle-front.

Maria shuddered; the emotion which had glowed in her heart was dying; once again she said to herself:  “And yet it is a harsh land, this land of ours ...  Why should I linger here?”

Then it was that a third voice, mightier than the others, lifted itself up in the silence:  the voice of Quebec—­now the song of a woman, now the exhortation of a priest.  It came to her with the sound of a church bell, with the majesty of an organ’s tones, like a plaintive love-song, like the long high call of woodsmen in the forest.  For verily there was in it all that makes the soul of the Province:  the loved solemnities of the ancestral faith; the lilt of that old speech guarded with jealous care; the grandeur and the barbaric strength of this new land where an ancient race has again found its youth.

Thus spake the voice.—­“Three hundred years ago we came, and we have remained ...  They who led us hither might return among us without knowing shame or sorrow, for if it be true that we have little learned, most surely nothing is forgot.

“We bore oversea our prayers and our songs; they are ever the same.  We carried in our bosoms the hearts of the men of our fatherland, brave and merry, easily moved to pity as to laughter, of all human hearts the most human; nor have they changed.  We traced the boundaries of a new continent, from Gaspe to Montreal, from St. Jean d’Iberville to Ungava, saying as we did it.—­Within these limits all we brought with us, our faith, our tongue, our virtues, our very weaknesses are henceforth hallowed things which no hand may touch, which shall endure to the end.

“Strangers have surrounded us whom it is our pleasure to call foreigners; they have taken into their hands most of the rule, they have gathered to themselves much of the wealth; but in this land of Quebec nothing has changed.  Nor shall anything change, for we are the pledge of it.  Concerning ourselves and our destiny but one duty have we clearly understood:  that we should hold fast—­should endure.  And we have held fast, so that, it may be, many centuries hence the world will look upon us and say:—­These people are of a race that knows not how to perish ...  We are a testimony.