eserts, and
along the western coasts of America, the Spaniard toiled, nor halted
till the soft Spanish speech mingled with the swift, ejaculatory
utterance of the far French frontier. For this search of theirs we
bless them, and shall always be glad they left their nomenclature to
mind us of what this now wrecked people had achieved.

And our geography is sown thick with reminiscences of the French
occupancy of America. Now he is a total foreigner in this realm he
helped so largely to discover. Not Acadia was more bereft of the
French after their sad banishment than our America is of French rule.
New Orleans has its creole.

In Quebec, of all American cities, you seem most in the old French
_regime_. The names above the business blocks would make you believe
that what you had read of the battle of Quebec was a myth, and that
Wolfe truly died and Montcalm lived to celebrate a victory; but when
you climb to the fortress, it is the Englishman's speech you hear, and
the English colors you see floating on the heights. The French empire
is melted away like snows of winter in the month of June. But those
now remote days, profligate of valor, when French trapper and
discoverer, fearless as Eric the Bold, fought their way along lake and
river, over plain and mountain, with fierce Indian and fiercer
winter,--those remote days are on us once more, when we forget our
history and read our geography. There may be no new France in
contemporaneous American history, but in contemporaneous geography
there is. The French discoverer fires the imagination. I confess to
wishing I might have tramped by his side through the dense forests;
have sailed in his canoe on lake and stream; have plodded with him, by
oar or sail, over the Great Lakes; have joined with him in portage;
have been boon companion with La Salle on his journey to the sea on the
wide and majestic Mississippi; have consorted with Pere Marquette. Few
American histories will do more to raise the temperature of one's blood
than Parkman's story of the French occupancy of North America.

And one reason why Gilbert Parker's "An Adventurer of the North" and
"Pierre and his People," books vivid with a boundless freedom and
heroism, hold attention and gather force in one's spirit is, that they
unconsciously, yet truly, carry us back to those bold days when such
episodes were not the exception, but the rule. Pioneering appeals, in
some degree, to us all; and in Frenchmen we