of these men, who had received good educations in the Red
River academy, and a certain degree of polish which education always
gives, a very _different_ polish, indeed, from that which the
conventionalities and refinements of the Old World bestow, but not the
less agreeable on that account--nay, we might even venture to say, all
the more agreeable on that account. There were Red Indians and
clergymen--there were one or two ladies of a doubtful age, who had come
out from the old country to live there, having found it no easy matter,
poor things, to live at home; there were matrons whose absolute silence
on every subject save "yes" or "no" showed that they had not been
subjected to the refining influences of the academy, but whose hearty
smiles and laughs of genuine good-nature proved that the storing of the
brain has, after all, _very_ little to do with the best and deepest
feelings of the heart. There were the tones of Scotch reels
sounding-tones that brought Scotland vividly before the very eyes; and
there were Canadian hunters and half-breed voyageurs, whose moccasins
were more accustomed to the turf of the woods than the boards of a
drawing-room, and whose speech and accents made Scotland vanish away
altogether from the memory. There were old people and young folk; there
were fat and lean, short and long. There were songs too--ballads of
England, pathetic songs of Scotland, alternating with the French ditties
of Canada, and the sweet, inexpressibly plaintive canoe-songs of the
voyageur. There were strong contrasts in dress also: some wore the
home-spun trousers of the settlement, a few the ornamented leggings of
the hunter. Capotes were there--loose, flowing, and picturesque; and
broadcloth tail-coats were there, of the last century, tight-fitting,
angular--in a word, detestable; verifying the truth of the proverb that
extremes meet, by showing that the _cut_ which all the wisdom of tailors
and scientific fops, after centuries of study, had laboriously wrought
out and foisted upon the poor civilised world as perfectly sublime,
appeared in the eyes of backwoodsmen and Indians utterly ridiculous. No
wonder that Harry, under the circumstances, became quietly insane, and
went about committing _nothing_ but mistakes the whole evening. No
wonder that he emulated his father-in-law in abusing the gray cat, when
he found it surreptitiously devouring part of the supper in an adjoining
room; and no wonder that, when he ru