seems, once in a while, powerless to kill a great memory. Romance blooms
sometimes untarnished across centuries of commonplace. In a new world
old France lives.

* * * * *

It is computed that about one-seventh of the French-Canadian population
of Canada enlisted in the great war. The stampede of heroism seems to
have left them cold. A Gospel of the Province first congealed the none
too fiery blood of the _habitants_, small farmers, very poor, thinking
in terms of narrowest economy, of one pig and ten children, of
painstaking thrift and a bare margin to subsistence. Such conditions
stifle world interests. The earthquake which threatened civilization
disturbed the _habitant_ merely because it hazarded his critical balance
on the edge of want. The cataclysm over the ocean was none of his
affair. And his affairs pressed. What about the pig if one went to war?
And could Alphonse, who is fourteen, manage the farm so that there would
be vegetables for winter? Tell me that.

When in September, 1914, I went to Canada for two weeks of camping I had
heard of this point of view. Dick Lindsley and I were met at the Club
Station on the casual railway which climbs the mountains through Quebec
Province, by four guides, men from twenty to thirty-five, powerfully
built chaps, deep-shouldered and slim-waisted, lithe as wild-cats. It
was a treat to see their muscles, like machines in the pink of order,
adjust to the heavy _pacquetons_, send a canoe whipping through the
water. There was one exception to the general physical perfection; one
of Dick's men, a youngster of perhaps twenty-two, limped. He covered
ground as well as the others, for all of that; he picked the heaviest
load and portaged it at an uneven trot, faster than his comrades; he was