Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/32

in ancient as in modern days. Old and thumbworn as the books are, and written with ink that often had been frozen and with quill pens that often needed mending, they are extremely interesting as relics of the past, and well deserving of a better fate than that which manifestly awaited them when by the merest accident they were rescued from a dismal heap of rubbish.

It is not always the events greatest in historic consequences which are enshrined the deepest in the hearts of a people, but rather those that most exhibit the primal human virtues of valor patience and self-sacrifice. Into such events every man can project himself, and not only understand but feel them. In our own early history there were many occurrences of more importance than the gallant defence by Madame de La Tour of her husband's fort against his arch-enemy Charnisay, but there are none better known or oftener related. The historians of St. John have done the story full justice, and Mr. Hannay in particular has left little for any other to say about it. But if anyone, thoughtful of his country's past, wishes to stand on the spot where these things happened, and to call up in fancy the scenes of that April morning of long ago, whither shall he turn? For no man can this day point with certainty to the site of Fort LaTour.

Ample records exist to prove that the fort stood at the mouth of the St. John, but they allow room for difference of opinion as to whether it stood on the east or west side. It is placed on the east side on the map in Volume I of the superb new Jesuit Relations (under the name Fort St. Jean), and on the map in Greswell's History of Canada. Mr. Hannay thinks it was on the