his ship to send half our cargo across to France
before the Farmers of the Revenue could get their hands upon it. It
was this gave rise to the slander that M. de Radisson ran off with half
La Chesnaye's furs--which the records de la marine will disprove, if
you search them.

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