Francis Parkman 195 



New World.&quot; The author s name was not famil 

 iar to me, but presently I remembered having seen 

 it upon a stouter volume labelled &quot; The Conspiracy 

 of Pontiac,&quot; of which many copies used to stand 

 in a row far back in the inner and dusky regions 

 of the shop. This older book I had once taken 

 down from its shelf, just to quiet a lazy doubt as 

 to whether Pontiac might be the name of a man 

 or a place. Had that conspiracy been an event in 

 Merovingian Gaul or in Borgia s Italy, I should 

 have felt a twinge of conscience at not knowing 

 about it ; but the deeds of feathered and painted 

 red men on the Great Lakes and the Alleghanies, 

 only a century old, seemed remote and trivial. In 

 deed, with the old-fashioned study of the humani 

 ties, which tended to keep the Mediterranean too 

 exclusively in the centre of one s field of vision, it 

 was not always easy to get one s historical perspec 

 tive correctly adjusted. Scenes and events that 

 come within the direct line of our spiritual an 

 cestry, which until yesterday was all in the Old 

 World, thus become unduly magnified, so as to 

 deaden our sense of the interest and importance of 

 the things that have happened since our forefathers 

 went forth from their homesteads to grapple with 

 the terrors of an outlying wilderness. We find no 

 difficulty in realizing the historic significance of 



