g--they had proved it again and again on sanguinary
fields--but they could not prevail when they had to receive orders from
a corrupt and reckless court at Versailles, and, above all when they had
to look to that court for help that never came.

His reading of the books in the slaver's chest told him that folly and
crime invariably paid the penalty, if not in one way then in another,
and he remembered too some of the ancient Greek plays, over which he had
toiled under the stern guidance of Master Alexander McLean. Their burden
was the certainty of fate. You could never escape, no matter how you
writhed, from what you did, and those old writers must have told the
truth, else men would not be reading and studying them two thousand
years after they were dead. Only truth could last twenty centuries.
Bigot, Cadet, Pean, and the others, stealing from France and Canada and
spending the money in debauchery, could not be victorious, despite all
the valor of Montcalm and St. Luc and De Levis and their comrades.

He remembered, too, the great contrast between Quebec and New York that
had struck him when he arrived at the port at the mouth of the Hudson
with the hunter and the Onondaga. The French capital in Canada was all
of the state; it was its creature. If the state declined, it declined,
there was little strength at the roots, little that sprang from the
soil, but in New York, which men already forecast as the metropolis of
the New World, there was strength everywhere. It might be a sprawling
town. There might be no courtliness to equal the courtliness at the
heart of Quebec, but there was vigor, vigor everywhere. The people were
eager, restless, curious, always they worked and looked ahead.

He saw all these things very clearly. Silence, loneliness and distance
gave a magnificent perspective. Facts that were obscured when he was
near at hand, now stood out sharp and true. His thoughts in this period
were often those of a man double his age. His iron health too remained.
His was most emphatically the sound mind in the sound body, each helping
the other, each stimulating the other to greater growth.

It was a fact, however, that the Onondaga belief, peopling the air and
all sorts of inanimate objects with spirits, grew upon him; perhaps it
is better to say that it was a feeling rather than a belief. According
to Tayoga the good spirits fought with the bad, and on his island the
good had prevailed. They had told him that a shi