GILPIN ON THE STONE AGE OF NOVA SCOTIA. 225 



vast age headed a victorious invasion. Though his sense of his 

 own greatness was such as to demand a salvo of cannon when he 

 entered their fort, yet this far-seeing old man saw at once the inev 

 itable end of his race. He accepted their religion, begged to be 

 taught their arts ; he had been a great warrior, and a bloody man 

 in his day, and many years brought many enemies ; and he said '*I 

 sleep sound, I do not fear my enemies near my friends' fort." 

 When the end came to him, with it, as to most men of unabated 

 mind, came the thronging past. This old pagan, but new christian, 

 longed to rest with his old braves ; he feared his soul v/ould 

 not receive the consolation from the annual visit of the tribe to the 

 graves of their sires, but he yielded reluctantly to the worthy fathers 

 of Jesus, who knew how little his example would be unless crowned 

 with christian requiem. And so the young christian Henry (so 

 called in baptism after his brother monarch Henry of Navarre) , got 

 his bit of churchyard mould with those salvos roaring over him, 

 which he loved in life, and with such as they honored a General of 

 France. 



Far, far more befitting, had the old pagan Membertou, glorious 

 old type of the stone age, been wailed in the soft gutteral notes of 

 his women mourners; — had the long procession of canoes, borne 

 him by the light of iires on a hundred hills, to that desolate isle, as 

 LesCarbot says, some twenty leagues away in the direction of 

 Oape Sable, — had his old braves put him to rest in his uncoffined 

 grave, swathed him in beaver skins, shrouded him in birch bark 

 and heaped over him stone axe, agate spear, or jasper arrow-head. 

 This spot lies yet at the foot of the great Kossignol. " Fern clad 

 mounds," (to quote our late member Capt. Hardy,) still mark 

 where the stone men sleep. 



In wandering tribes such men mark only their own age. Men 

 must be brought together first, then come laws, letters or recorded 

 law, and the past acts upon the present. Accumulated capital to 

 keep them together, or agriculture, then is the first great step 

 towards civilization — a step which once obtained never goes back. 

 This made the thoughtful remark of Humboldt, '• cereals were the 

 bottom of everything." And not having attained this we cannot 

 say whether our stone men would have elevated themselves. Let 



