Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/313

Rh than that of the Frenchman. But antipathy, disgust, absolute contempt for — and if there be any stronger word for expressing the feeling — repelled the Englishman from the Indian; while the Frenchman, in an easy, tolerant, rollicking, or even in an affectedly sympathizing way, “took to” his red companion. The whole contrast is presented by setting before the imagination two pictures, strictly drawn to the fact. One gives us the Jesuit priest (and he was not in this distinguished by his religious character from his countrymen) occupying the same filthy lodge, sleeping on the same flea-infested skins, and ladling out his abominable dinner from the same caldron with a whole family of humanity and dogs. The other picture shows us the careful wife of the Apostle Eliot doing up for him a wallet of clean, however frugal food, as he mounted his horse for his eighteen miles' ride to Natick, where when hungry he ate it in his own private sitting and sleeping apartment in a loft of the Indian meeting-house.

But the French really assimilated with the Indians, neither raising nor recognizing any barrier of race, habit, or antipathy between them. They even seem to a large extent to have been actually attracted to and won over by the features of the wild life, and the wild free ways of those who led it. The easy adoption of this kind of life by vast numbers of Frenchmen, including daily habits, dress, food and the revolting ways of preparing it, love of roving and adventure in hunting and trapping, ability and endurance in rough and daring enterprise and exposure, — all goes to prove that this assimilation with savagery was of natural prompting and proclivity. There were charms and joys for thousands of the light-hearted, pliable, and reckless rovers from old France — its peasants, its soldiers, its convicts and criminals, and none the less for its nobles and courtiers — in the range and lawlessness and wild indulgences of their forest companions. Of course the savages heartily responded to and genially accepted all this accordancy and