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La Salle discovered the Ohio and the Illinois, built Fort Crevecoeur, and started a colony on the coast of Texas; he received a patent of nobility, and lost his fortune and his life. The pathos of such a death lies in the consideration that his plans died with him. It was the year before the accession of William of Orange; and the first war with France began two years later.
Here was a home hearth prepared in the wilderness, and no welcome to it but silence. La Salle called out in every Indian language he knew. Dead branches grated, and the stream rustled betwixt its edges of ice. A heap of dry grass was gathered for a bed under a tree by the fire, and its elastic top showed the hollow where a man had lain.
La Salle undertook it with thousands of miles of uncharted wilderness before him, through tribes assumed to be hostile till they proved themselves otherwise, with doubtful and quarreling companions, and shod with moccasins of green hide. Even of the Frenchmen whom he might meet after reaching Illinois, the majority, being under Jesuit influence, would be hostile.
Gilman with negligent condescension. "A minute later, and we should have been gone.... Has Mr. Price got this right?" he asked Audrey, putting the music respectfully in front of her. It included the reduced score of the Beethoven violin concerto, and other items to be performed that night at the Salle Xavier. "Oh! Thank you, Mr. Price!" said Audrey.
When Fénelon decried magistrates who show no respect to the clergy and who use their deputed power for their own advantage, La Salle stood up and called the attention of the leading citizens to these words.
The Italian commandant with the copper hand could number on its metal fingers the only men to be trusted in his garrison of fifteen. One Récollet, Father Louis Hennepin, had been sent with two companions by La Salle to explore the upper Mississippi. Father Ribourde and Father Membré remained.
"Nevertheless," he adds, "if the Sieur de la Salle dies, I shall pursue a course different from that which he has marked out; for his plans are not good."
With a wild, tumultuous rush, they circled in head-on over the decoys; and it was so quickly done, that they had swept on fifty yards before La Salle could realize that the leader of the flock was heading for Davies, and had no intention of surging around to his lures again. "It will never do to let them get the first brent," muttered La Salle.
Dumas makes Louis remark facetiously to Madame Gaston, that his teacher in geography had not told him that Blois was so far from Paris that the fashions could not reach the provincial town for several years. Only one figure in the group, which had gathered in the vast salle to do honor to the monarch, appeared to him worthy of royal regard.
Meanwhile, adds Joutel, "we had the mortification and chagrin of seeing this scoundrel walking about the camp in a scarlet coat laced with gold which had belonged to the late Monsieur de la Salle, and which lie had seized upon, as also upon all the rest of his property."
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