conviction that England and the colonies were bound to win. Courage and
numbers, resources and tenacity must prevail even over great initial
mistakes. Duquesne and Ticonderoga would be brushed away as mere events
that had no control over destiny.

He remembered Bigot's ball in Quebec that Willet and Tayoga and he had
attended. It came before him again almost as vivid as reality. He
realized now in the light of greater age and experience how it typified
decadence. A power that was rotten at the top, where the brain should
be, could never defeat one that was full of youthful ardor and strength,
sound through and through, awkward and ill directed though that strength
might be. The young French leaders and their soldiers were valiant,
skillful and enduring--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, Péan, 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