Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/400

his bow and conducts his partner to a seat. His old friends congratulate him on his grace and agility, which they say might equal that of a much younger man, at which the old fellow is pleased, and straightens up his back, and tries not to feel the twinge of lumbago which the extra exertion has brought on.

Midnight comes and the party begins to break up. Those who have to go home wrap themselves up in shawls and furs, the sleighs come to the door, and with much handshaking, blessings and good wishes, the holiday comes to an end.

Those of the household who remain behind, gather around the fire, and indulge in reminisinces of by gone times. The old folk recall the days of their youth by the fireside at the old homstead on the Hudson. When they look around and see the sturdy young men and handsome girls who have grown up around them, they give thanks in their hearts for all the blessings vouchsafed them, and for the happy termination of what, for many years, was a life of anxiety and struggles and disappointments, and for the pleasant home they have made in the wilderness far removed from the land of their birth.

I must enter my humble but emphatic dissent from the dictum of M. Richard, (Acadia, p. 29) adopted and elaborated by Mr. Hannay in The New Brunswick Magazine, vol. 1, pp. 129 et seq., that the father of the two Melansons named in the census of Port Royal, taken in 1671, was one of Sir William Alexander's Scotch Colony who had remained in the country and joined and intermarried with the French. I submit the following considerations:

1. He was, as Mr. Hannay himself shews, the