" They must now "make good the grandeur of their
hopes." And a brave beginning is soon to be made. This highly colored
scene becomes frontispiece of another glorious chapter, in the midst of
whose hardship one will turn many a time to look with a sneer or smile, or
with pity, at the figures in court garments, burnished armor, and
"cleansed vestments," standing where the east and the west and the far
north and the south meet.
From the shores of a seigniory on the St. Lawrence, eight or nine miles
from Montreal, just above those hoarse-voiced, mocking rapids which had
lured and disappointed Cartier and Champlain and Maisonneuve, and which
were to get their lasting name of derision from the disappointment of the
man who now (1668) stands there, Robert Rene Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle,
looks across the waters of Lake St. Louis (into which the St. Lawrence for
a little way widens) to the "dim forests of Chateauguay and Beauharnois."
His thoughts look still farther, for they are out in that valley of his
imagination through which a river "must needs flow," as he thinks, "into
the 'Vermilion Sea'"--the Gulf of California.
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