tendant and
he quarreled with the Jesuits and he quarreled with the fur traders;
but his bitterest enemies did not deny that he could put the fear of
the Lord and respect for the French into the Iroquois' heart.
Arbitrary he was as a czar, but just always! To be sure he mended his
fortunes by personal fur trade, but in doing so he cheated no man; and
he worked no injustice, and he wrought in all things for the lasting
good of the country. Homage he demanded as to a king, once going so
far as to drive the Sovereign Councilors from his presence with the
flat of a sword; but he firmly believed and he had publicly proved that
he was worthy of homage, and that the men who are forever shouting
"liberty--liberty and the people's rights," are frequently wolves in
sheep's clothing, eating out the vitals of a nation's prosperity.

Here, then, was the haughty, hot-headed, aggressive Frontenac, sent
back in his old age to restore the prestige of New France, {168} where
both La Barre the grafter, and Denonville the courteous Christian
gentleman, had failed.

To this period of Iroquois raids belongs one of the most heroic
episodes in Canadian life. The only settlers who had not fled to the
protection of the palisaded forts were the grand old seigniors, the new
nobility of New France, whose mansions were like forts in themselves,
palisaded, with stone bastions and water supply and yards for stock and
mills inside the walls. Here the seigniors, wildwood knights of a
wilderness age, held little courts that were imitations of the
Governor's pomp at Quebec. Sometimes during war the seignior's wife
and daughters were reduced to plowing in the fields and laboring with
the women servants at the harvest; but ordinarily the life at the
seigniory was a life of petty grandeur, with such style as the
backwoods afforded. In the hall or great room of the manor house was
usually an enormous table used both as court of justice by the seignior
and festive board. On one side was a huge fireplace with its homemade
benches, on the other a clumsily carved chiffonier loaded with solid
silver. In the early days the seignior's bedstead might be in the same
room,--an enormous affair with panoplies of curtains and counterpanes
of fur rugs and feather mattresses, so high that it almost necessitated
a ladder. But in the matter of dress the rude life made up in style
what it lacked in the equipments of a grand mansion.

The bishop's description of t