rray, who had himself just arrived from Canada, wrote urgently to ask
for payment. Murray owed to a Mr. Ross L8,000 and could not borrow one
shilling in England on his estates in Canada; so he said "delay will be
a very terrible disappointment to me." But this disappointment he had to
bear. In 1770 the debt was still unpaid and may have remained so for
some years longer. Happily the friendship between the former comrades
was not impaired by their financial relations. Murray promised to put
Nairne in the way of being "very comfortable and easy" in Canada, if he
would follow his advice, but nothing came of his offer. For some years
after 1761 Nairne thought of returning to Scotland, whither ties of kin
drew him strongly. But his father's death in 1766 or 1767 helped to
weaken these ties. In any case Scotland offered no career and he must do
something to pay the debt to Murray and to provide for himself.

Nairne's chief task as seigneur was to put settlers on his huge tract.
The seigneur, indeed, discharged functions similar to those of a modern
colonization company, but with differences that in some respects favour
the older system. Now-a-days the occupier buys the land and the
colonization company gets the best possible price for what it has to
sell; it can hold for a rise in value and, if it likes, can refuse to
sell at all. Nairne had no such powers. Under the law, if a reputable
person applied for land, he must let him have it. Settlers required no
capital to buy their land, and, as long as they paid their merely
nominal rent, they could not be disturbed in their holdings. The rent
amounted to about one cent an acre, and some twenty cents or a live
capon for each of the two or three arpents of frontage which a farm
would have. The rent charge was uniform and depended not upon the
quality of the land or upon the individual seigneur but upon what was
usual in the district; moreover, under the French law, no matter how
valuable the land became, the rent could not be increased and, though so
trifling, it was rarely required until the settler's farm had begun to
be productive. Sometimes in a single year Nairne would put as many as
twenty brawny young fellows on his land to hew out homes for themselves.
Each of them got a tract of about one hundred acres and, as the annual
rental received for a dozen farms would be hardly more than twenty
dollars, the seigneur reaped no great profit from his tenants. It was
only when a tenan