know Montreal winters will appreciate--"they are ordered to
make paths through the snow before their houses,"--to all of which
petty regulations did royalty subscribe sign manual.

[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY MAP (after La Hontan, 1689) (The line shows
the French idea of the territory under English control)]

The Treaty of Ryswick closed the war between France and England the
year before Frontenac died, but it was not known in Canada till 1698.
As far as Canada was concerned it was no peace, barely a truce. Each
side was to remain in possession of what it held at the time of the
treaty, which meant that France retained all Hudson Bay but one small
fort. Though the English of Boston had captured Port Royal, they had
left {192} no sign of possession but their flag flying over the
tenantless barracks. The French returned from the woods, tore the flag
down, and again took possession; so that, by the Treaty of Ryswick,
Acadia too went back under French rule.

Indeed, matters were worse than before the treaty, for there could be
no open war; but when English settlers spreading up from Maine met
French traders wandering down from Acadia, there was the inevitable
collision, and it was an easy trick for the rivals to stir up the
Indians to raid and massacre and indiscriminate butchery. For Indian
raids neither country would be responsible to the other. The story
belongs to the history of the New England frontier rather than to the
record of Canada. It is a part of Canada's past which few French
writers tell and all Canadians would fain blot out, but which the
government records prove beyond dispute. Indian warfare is not a thing
of grandeur at its best, but when it degenerates into the braining of
children, the bayoneting of women, the mutilation of old men, it is a
horror without parallel; and the amazing thing is that the white men,
who painted themselves as Indians and helped to wage this war, were so
sure they were doing God's work that they used to kneel and pray before
beginning the butchery. To understand it one has to go back to the
Middle Ages in imagination. New France was violently Catholic, New
England violently Protestant. Bigotry ever looks out through eyes of
jaundiced hatred, and in destroying what they thought was a false
faith, each side thought itself instrument of God. As for the French
governors behind the scenes, who pulled the strings that let loose the
helldogs of Indian war, they were but