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16 offered a rough but sure course tempting ambitious men onward to the great lake system from which it flowed, and the Ottawa River offered yet another course to the same splendid goal. So, while the stolid English were planting sure feet along the seaboard, New France was spreading by leaps and bounds across the longitudes. But, wide-spread as these discoveries were, they were discoveries only—the feet of those who should occupy and defend the land discovered were heavy where the light paddle of the voyageur had glistened brightly beneath the noon-day sun. It was one thing to seek out such an empire and quite another thing to occupy and fortify it. The French reached the Mississippi at the beginning of the last quarter of the seventeenth century; ten years after the middle of the eighteenth they lost all the territory between the Atlantic and Mississippi—though during the last ten years of their possession they had attempted heroically to take the nine stitches where a generation before the proverbial one stitch would have been of twenty-fold more advantage. The transportation of arms and stores up-