rick
walls of Chateau Bigot, the Hermitage, half buried, in the days when I
visited it, with rose vines and orchard trees gone wild. That is all
you will find of the court clique whose folly brought Canada's doom;
but as you drive back from Beauport there towers the city from the
rocky heights above the St. Lawrence,--chapel spire and cross and domed
cathedral roofs aglint in the sunlight like a city of gold. The
church, baptized by the blood of its martyrs, is there in pristine
power; and the fruitful meadows bear witness to the prosperity of the
habitant on whom the burden fell in the days of the ancient regime.
Who shall say that habitant and church do not deserve the place of
power they hold in the government of the Dominion?

{276}

CHAPTER XIII

FROM 1763 TO 1812

English law and Quebec--French rights guarded--Pontiac's war--Siege of
Detroit--Fight at Bloody Run--Michilimackinac falls--How Bouquet wins
victory--Return of captives--The peddlers--Methods of
Nor'westers--Traders invade the Up Country--Disaffection in
Canada--Canada invaded--Quebec invested--Montgomery's fight--"Rats in a
trap"--Relief at last--Tricks of ringsters--Coming of Loyalists--Life
in the backwoods

Quebec has fallen. As jackals gather to feast on the carcass of the
dead lion, so rallies a rabble of adventurers on the trail of the
victorious army. Sutlers, traders, teamsters, riffraff,--soldiers of
fortune,--stampede to Montreal and Quebec as to a new gold field. When
Major Robert Rogers, the English forest ranger, proceeds up the lakes
to take over the western fur posts,--Presqu' Isle, Detroit,
Michilimackinac,--he is followed by hosts of adventurers looking for
swift way to fortune by either the fur trade or by picking the bones of
the dead lion. Major Rogers, beating up Lake Ontario and Lake Erie
with two hundred bushwhackers, pausing in camp near modern Sandusky,
meets the renowned Ottawa warrior, Pontiac, who had fought with the
French against Braddock and now wants to know in voice of thunder what
all this talk about the French being conquered means; how _dare_ the
French, because _they_ have proved paltroons, deed away the Indian
lands of Canada? How dare Rogers, the white chief of the English
rangers, come here with his pale-faced warriors to Pontiac's land? How
Rogers answered the veteran red-skinned warrior is not told. All that
is known is--the French gave up their western furs with bad grace, and
the Engli