A Dry Wind Brought Along All The Clean Smell Of Their
Continent-Mixed Odours Of Sawn Lumber, Virgin Earth, And
Wood-smoke; and
they snuffed it, and their eyes softened as they, identified point after
point along their own beloved
River - places where they played and fished
and amused themselves in holiday time. It must be pleasant to have a
country of one's very own to show off. Understand, they did not in any
way boast, shout, squeak, or exclaim, these even-voiced returned men and
women. They were simply and unfeignedly glad to see home again, and they
said: 'Isn't it lovely? Don't you think it's beautiful? We love it.'
At Quebec there is a sort of place, much infested by locomotives, like a
coal-chute, whence rise the heights that Wolfe's men scaled on their way
to the Plains of Abraham. Perhaps of all the tide-marks in all our lands
the affair of Quebec touches the heart and the eye more nearly than any
other. Everything meets there; France, the jealous partner of England's
glory by land and sea for eight hundred years; England, bewildered as
usual, but for a wonder not openly opposing Pitt, who knew; those other
people, destined to break from England as soon as the French peril was
removed; Montcalm himself, doomed and resolute; Wolfe, the inevitable
trained workman appointed for the finish; and somewhere in the
background one James Cook, master of H.M.S. Mercury, making beautiful
and delicate charts of the St. Lawrence River.
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