re still fresh and the handwriting, while not
that of one much accustomed to use the pen, is clear and vigorous. The
zeal for copying letters was intermittent. There are gaps, covering many
years. Then, for a time, not only the letters sent, but those received,
are copied into the book. In the long winter evenings there was not much
to do. Malcolm Fraser, it is true, lived just across the river at the
neighbouring manor house. But Malcolm was more usually away than not.
Besides, as one grows older, there is no place like one's own fireside
of a winter evening. So our good seigneur read and dozed and wrote and
we are grateful that he has told us so much about past days.

Nairne's first visit to Malbaie was, as we have seen, in the autumn of
1761, when he took possession of his seigniory. Not until the following
year was the formal grant made by Murray. Long afterwards, in 1798,
writing to a friend, Hepburn, in Scotland, Nairne recalled his arrival
at his future home. "I came here first in 1761 with five soldiers [alas,
we do not know their names!] and procured some Canadian servants. One
small house contained us all for several years and [we] were separated
from every other people for about eighteen miles without any road." He
contrasts this with what he sees about him at the time of writing--a
parish with more than five hundred inhabitants, with one hundred men
capable of bearing arms, grist mills, fisheries, good houses and barns,
fertile fields, a priest, a chapel, and so on. The five soldiers of whom
Nairne speaks were no doubt men of the 78th Highlanders and ancestors of
a goodly portion of the population of Malbaie at the present time.
Perhaps some of them had fought at Culloden; certainly all fought at
Louisbourg and Quebec.

In the first days at Murray Bay Nairne was in debt. In 1761, probably to
purchase his captaincy, he had incurred a considerable obligation to his
friend General Murray; where Murray got L400 to lend him is a mystery,
for he was himself always pressed for funds. With everything to do at
Murray Bay, mills to be built, roads to be opened, a manor house to be
constructed, it was not easy to get together any money; for years the
debt hung like a mill-stone round Nairne's neck. But he had always a
certain, if small, revenue in his half pay and, in time, he acquired,
chiefly by inheritance, what was, for that period in Canada, a
considerable fortune. In 1766, when Nairne was in Scotland, General
Mu