ered flame it
meant sickness; the sudden extinguishing of the fire was a sign of
death; as many times as it was extinguished so many were the deaths; a
large blaze meant an adult, a small one a child. Before the days of post
and telegraph these signals were used winter and summer; so great an
obstacle to communication was the mighty tide of the St. Lawrence.[16]

At all seasons but especially in winter the news that reached Malbaie
was of a very fragmentary character. With his kin in Scotland Nairne
exchanged only an annual letter but since each side took time and pains
to prepare it, the letter told more, probably, than would a year's bulk
of our hurried epistles. Newspapers were few and dear and only at
intervals did any come. Books too were scarce. Occasionally Nairne notes
those that he thought of buying--St. Simon's "Memoirs;" an account of
the Court of Louis XIV; "A Comparative View of the State and Facultys of
Man with those of the Animal World;" "Elegant Extracts or Useful and
Entertaining passages in prose," a companion volume to a similar one in
poetry, and so on. He writes gratefully, in 1799, to a friend in Quebec,
who had sent newspapers and sermons, both of which remotely different
classes of literature had furnished "great entertainment." From Europe
he is receiving the volumes of the new edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, still on the shelves at Murray Bay, and is thankful that
they were not captured by the French. "The older I grow the fonder I am
of reading and that book is a great resource." Our degenerate age gets
little "entertainment" out of sermons and usually keeps an encyclopaedia
strictly for "reference"; obviously Nairne read it.

The old soldier watched and commented upon developments which were the
fruit of seed he himself had helped to sow. He had fought to win Canada
for Britain; he had fought to crush the American Revolution. By 1800 he
sees how great Canada may become and is convinced that yielding
independence to the United States has not proved very injurious to Great
Britain. Though, in a short time, the United States was to secure the
great West by purchasing Louisiana from France, when Nairne died it had
not done so and in 1800 he could say that the United States "are small
in comparison of the whole of North America. They are bounded upon all
sides and will be filled up with people in no very great number of
years. Our share of North America is yet unknown in its extent.
Ent