The dark months wore slowly on. A band of half-famished men gathered
about the huge fires of their barn-like hall, moody, sullen, and
quarrelsome. Discord was here in the black robe of the Jesuit and the
brown capote of the rival trader. The position of the wretched little
colony may well provoke reflection. Here lay the shaggy continent, from
Florida to the Pole, outstretched in savage slumber along the sea, the
stern domain of Nature,--or, to adopt the ready solution of the
Jesuits, a realm of the powers of night, blasted beneath the sceptre of
hell. On the banks of James River was a nest of woe-begone Englishmen, a
handful of Dutch fur-traders at the mouth of the Hudson, and a few
shivering Frenchmen among the snow-drifts of Acadia; while deep within
the wild monotony of desolation, on the icy verge of the great northern
river, the hand of Champlain upheld the fleur-de-lis on the rock of
Quebec. These were the advance guard, the forlorn hope of civilization,
messengers of promise to a desert continent. Yet, unconscious of their
high function, not content with inevitable woes, they were rent by petty
jealousies and miserable feuds; while each of these detached fragments
of rival nationalities, scarcely able to maintain its own wretched
existence on a few square miles, begrudged to the others the smallest
share in a domain which all the nations of Europe could hardly have
sufficed to fill.
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