ere is a natural refusal to destroy confidence, wherever we find
it. That would be uprooting a plant which does not grow strongly
enough anywhere, and I, for one, love to cultivate it. 'So, so,' I
hear you say, my friend!

"Certainly at times I wished that my Lord Montcalm would treat me with
less consideration and not ask me questions about the British invading
forces, because I gathered information from those questions, and, in
truth, here was the basis of much I imparted to General Wolfe. He
asked, did Monsieur Montcalm, in some detail, about the Highlanders of
Fraser's Regiment, and said that, far away as he had seen them from the
ramparts, they appeared so picturesque in their tartans as to be hardly
associable with the even, undeviating, outward English character.

"I answered that there were greater similarities between the
Highlanders of Scotland and the French than between those same
Highlanders and the English, both having Celtic blood in them, and that
this resulted in a natural brotherhood which even the hazards of war
could not disturb, or only temporarily. Nay, I said once to his
excellency that we Jacobites still look more over the water to France
and to our Stuart King than we look, or ever may look, over the
Scottish border to England.

"You will mark how I sprawl between my native land and this New France,
as it was termed until the other month. A man's heart can be in many
places, a woman's only in one, and my affections, I confess, have
mostly been a divided allegiance. They have gone out and come home
again, and now, thanks to my prosperity here, they have a tendency to
abide where my epistle finds me. For there is grateful comfort in
Quebec, and a freshness glad to experience, and the society remains
merry, though the _fleur-de-lys_ has perished for ever. All the French
women here in Quebec did not see, in its changed governors, a burial
for the living, and some of them said, 'It is destiny; let us make the
best of things.'

"But I anticipate events, and that would be to miss their drama and my
own little share in them, a share with which, in the result, I am
satisfied, although I could sincerely have wished the ways and means to
be more aboveboard. However, you cannot remain the complete gentleman
and make history, and my justification lies in this signal fact: that I
inspired and counselled General Wolfe to his scaling of the cliffs at
the one place where that was possible, a matter