es blood full in her, and I have always
thought it warmer in its flow of both love and pride than the Gordon
blood, although of that you should be a better judge than I am.

"One needs a wife of parts if one is, as I hope, to found a new clan in
a new country, for, mind you, many of the Fraser Highlanders, when they
end their period of enrolment, will prefer to settle in this lush,
virgin country where the days go by like a dream. They will sit down
on the untilled lands, and out of them find a competence of food and
raiment, and they will marry French women who are buxom and healthy and
will be good wives and mothers.

"Granted all this, and it follows that there will be materials for a
new house of Inverey in some valley by the River Saint Lawrence, where
the Red Man at present reigns in indolence. He who can sit on a knoll
for an hour and let old Mother Earth spin her tune to the fathering
sun, is ever a friend of mine. But the Red Man carries the pastime
beyond me, unless when he is on the warpath, and then he is a devil.
It would give me no compunction to reign with a hundred or more Fraser
Highlanders, in a strath from which the Red Man has to be persuaded
away, or driven by force. Perhaps I could even hold out a helping
invitation to smaller 'broken men' still in the Aberdeenshire Highlands
or elsewhere in dear Scotland, and that would please my self-importance.

"I renounce nothing, give up no legitimate claim that I have put
forward for hand or land in our native country, but I see that I am
come to leaving them unclaimed. Madame Angelique, to whom, mayhap, I
have confided those consolations and aspirations, and who has a comely
sense as well as comely looks, says very properly that changed
circumstances carry other changes, and that even a Highland gentleman
may recognize as much without loss of self-respect.

"Madame has, in the crash which sank Bigot's fortunes, come to plain
faring, but I have made no difference in my friendship to her, and she,
I feel, has increased hers towards me. She tells me she has no clamant
ties left in Old France, any more than in New France, where the lustre
of her powerful French friends has set, and my heart goes out to her in
sympathy, and, I know not what more, except that she is a very fine
woman and would adorn the home of. . . . Why give a name?

"You must make what you can of this scattered epistle and read it into
my future because you may not hear from me agai