account. Each selected his partner, and in a fortnight these
three lots of venison had been taken away with all the seasoning that
could be taken with them.

"The next day the Governor-general caused to be distributed to them
enough provisions to give them courage to embark upon this stormy sea.
They went to housekeeping almost as did Noah in the Ark, with an ox, a
cow, a pair of swine, a pair of fowls, two barrels of salted meat, and a
piece of money. The officers were more fastidious than the soldiers and
allied themselves with the daughters of other officers or of the richer
settlers who had been established in the country for nearly a century."

The coming of these girls in such numbers, followed or accompanied as
they were by many young Frenchmen of gay, if not dissolute habits,
produced a natural change in the aspect of the social conditions.
Simplicity became a thing of the past, and the merriment, as in New
England, at last became scandalous to those of graver trend of thought.
Some restrictive laws were passed, among others one which provided that
all girls and women should be in their houses by nine of the night; but
as some who incurred the penalty were dragged from their beds and
whipped by officers of the town, the punishment seems hardly less
conducive to lesion of good morals than the crime itself. As in New
England, laws regulating personal adornment were passed, and the wearer
of a top-knot was refused admission to the communion; and all these
stern enactments had about as much repressive effect as their fellows in
the lower colonies,--practically none.

From this time forward there began to grow in New France the follies and
frivolities of her mother country, and there arose that which is termed
"society," at least in the growing towns. Quebec and Montreal
flourished, and the young, and also the old at times, frolicked and
danced and made merry. On the frontiers there was still some of the fine
simplicity of olden days; but those frontiers were being pushed further
and further away from proximity to the towns. At last there came the
time when the infamous Bigot ruled in Quebec, caring for nothing but to
fill his purse and take his pleasures; and then Canadian society touched
its lowest. There was thought of little beyond rout and revel; Bigot
ruled as if king of New France, and emulated his sovereign in Old France
by having his Pompadour in the person of Angelique de Pean, who was as
grasping and re