ests a brooding peace, bespeaking tranquil
lives, repose trimmed with the hush of night, and effort healthful and
cool as the freshening airs of morn.

L'ENVOI.

Longfellow--moving all hearts to pity--has painted in "Evangeline" the
enforced dispersion of the French in "Acadia." Who shall tell the
homesick pain, the vain regrets, the looking back of those who peopled
our "Acadia"? No voice bids them away; they melt before the fervor of
the time; hasten lest they be 'whelmed by the great wave of life now
rolling towards them. Vain retreat, the waters are out and may not be
stayed. It is fate! it is right, but the travail is sore, the face of
the mother is wet with tears.

This outline sketch proposed is at an end; we have striven to be
faithful to the true lines. There is no obligation to perpetuate
unworthy "minutae." Joy is immortal! sorrow dies! the petty features are
absorbed in the broad ones; those capable only of conveying truth.

The Red River Settlement in the days adverted to is an idyl simple and
pure: a nomadic pastoral, inwrought with Indian traits and color; our
one acted poem in the great national prosaic life. When the vast country
in the far future is teeming with wealth and luxury, this light rescued
and defined will shine adown the fullness of the time with hues all its
own. The story that it tells will be as a sweet refreshment: a dream
made possible, called by those who shared in its great calm, "Britain's
One Utopia--Selkirkia."

CHAPTER XXIV.

PICTURES OF SILVER.

Lord Selkirk's Colonists never had, as have seen, a bed of roses.
Adversity had dodged their steps from the time that they put the first
foot forward toward the new world--and Stornoway, Fort Churchill, York
Factory, Norway House, Pembina and Fort Douglas start, as we speak of
them, a train of bitter memories. Flood and famine, attack and
bloodshed, toil and anxiety were the constant atmosphere, in which for a
generation they existed. Higher civilization is impossible when the
struggle for shelter and bread is too strenuous. Though the
ministrations of religion were supplied within a few years of the
beginning of the Colony, yet the Colonists were not satisfied in this
respect till forty years had passed. It was a generation before the
Roman Catholic Church had a Bishop, who held the See of St. Boniface
instead of the title "in the parts of the heathen." It was not before
the year 1849 that a Church of England Bishop ar