First French Foot- Prints Beyond the Lakes. 91 



The roving class was all the larger, because settled colonists 

 were vassals, both in soul and body. In Canada, individuals 

 existed for the government, not the goveroment for individuals. 



Cooped up in the dull exile of petty forts, their prayer was 

 that of the country mouse when entrapped in a city mansion — 



" O give me but a hollow tree, 

 A crust of bread and liberty." 



La Hontan — a young officer fresh from France — thus wrote 

 home from Montreal : " A part of the winter I was hunting with 

 the Algonquins, the rest of it I spent here very disagreeably. 

 One can neither go on a pleasure party, nor play cards, nor visit 

 the ladies, without the cure preaching about it;, and masqueraders 

 he excommunicates." 



Other writers add that no dances were allowed in which both 

 sexes took part. 



Allowing dances to one sex only was about as satisfactory to 

 gay and festive youth as a father confessor's permitting a fair 

 penitent to rouge only one side of her face ; or letting out an 

 American lady to walk the Parisian boulevards only on condi- 

 tion that she never goes alone, never wears colors, and never looks 

 into a shop window. Anti-dancing laws — it is needless to add, — 

 were doubly vexatious to a Frenchman, since his feet when he's 

 sleeping seem dreaming a dance. 



Fathers who neglected to marry sons till they were twenty, or 

 daughters till they were sixteen, were fined! Bachelors were 

 barred out from the Indian trade, and even branded with marks 

 of infamy. 



In Quebec chronicles for 1671 we read that Paul Dupuy, having 

 said that when the English cut off the head of Charles I. they did 

 a good thing, the council declared him guilty of words tending to 

 sedition, and condemned him to be led in his shirt, with a rope 

 about his neck and a torch in his hand, from prison to the castle, 

 there to ask pardon of the king ; to be branded on the cheek, set 

 in stocks, laid in irons, etc. 



At the same period Louis Gaboury. charged with ealii g meat 

 in Lent, was sentenced to be tied tnree hours to a stake, and then 



