arithmetic. His father then decided to extend his son’s horizon so as to permit of his seeing something of the life and learning the language of his English compatriots. About eight miles west of St. Lin, and on the bank of the river Achigan, is the village of New Glasgow. This settlement was established about 1820 by a number of Scotch Protestants who came to Canada with English regiments. Carolus Laurier had done surveying in this neighbourhood and was well acquainted with many of the families, and thus an arrangement to have his son resident among them for a period was easily brought about. Shortly after young Wilfrid Laurier was a figure in the intimate life of the Murrays, the Guthries, the Macleans, the Bennetts and other families of the settlement. For a time he boarded with an Irish Catholic family, named Kirk, and later he lived with the Murrays, giving, in return for lodging and food, his services as a clerk in the general store kept by the head of the household.

The school which young Laurier attended for two terms, 1852-53 and 1853-54, was brusquely closed during the first term because of the departure for other parts of the teacher, one Thompson. He was quickly replaced by a man of considerable rough talent, one, “Sandy” Maclean, who possessed a pronounced and good taste for literature, and who in many ways made an admirable teacher. His young French-Canadian pupil, learning English at play, at work, at home and at school, aroused in the good Scot a kindly concern, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier in later years never failed to attribute his knowledge of English literature to the man who first opened his eyes to the wealth of English letters.

These two years at New Glasgow proved of inestimable benefit to young Laurier. Not only did he secure a good foundation for further study of the English language, but he had inculcated in him a broadness of vision, an understanding of his English compatriots and a spirit of tolerance and good will, which ever afterwards proved a great asset. In September, 1854, at the age of thirteen years, Wilfrid Laurier was sent to college at L’Assomption. There he passed seven rigorous years of study. His health was delicate, and his physique did not permit of his taking part in the ordinary sports of his fellow-students. His favourite recreation was to visit the village court house when the judicial assizes were in progress and to listen there to the pleadings of the village lawyers. Sir Wilfrid often recalled of this period of his life that a contradictory meeting of two political opponents always afforded him the keenest enjoyment. In fact, in his anxiety to miss none of such delightful and auspicious events as court sessions and public meetings he often ran foul of the school authorities.

Wilfrid Laurier’s mother died when the boy was but six years old. His earlier years were spent under the constant supervision of the village curé. He knew no language but the French. St. Lin slept quite a distance from the centre of the earth—Montreal. It heard only echoes of the outer world. But like every other French-Canadian village, it had its church, its curé, and its dream. It prayed for a French-Canadian Messiah.

They say that something in the boy’s temperament raised a vague hope in the heart of the parish priest. The priest was one of the dreamers of St. Lin, one who helped keep alive the name of New France. It is said that one afternoon he invited the lad Laurier into the garden of the presbytery, and there tested as best he could the drift of his imagination, whether he loved the heroic, whether he would make a patriot or not. He let himself hope that the little imaginative son of the land-surveyor might be of use to his race by writing songs, perhaps, that they could chant on the day of their re-establishment, or perhaps—. He took the boy into his study, where the black crucifix hung upon the wall. From the bottom of an ancient chest of drawers, one that had come from Brittany, he drew forth an object carefully folded so as to conceal certain gaping holes and frayed edges. He lifted it and let the folds slip out, so that the colored cloth hung before the eyes of the boy.

“Do you know what that is, my son?” he demanded.

“It is the French flag, Father.”

“It is our flag,” corrected the priest.

On various occasions he took the boy to the study and told him stories connected with the flag. The visits became a sort of ceremony. Each day the boy learned a new fact about the piece of silk. It had been carried not far from Montcalm himself on the day that he rode out of Quebec to meet Wolfe and defeat upon the Plains of Abraham. It was marked by British bullets. There were stains on it, almost faded out, that had come from French veins. This, it is said, was the strange first training which Laurier received for the works which he afterwards accomplished.

It was amid such associations that the future Prime Minister of Canada first learned the English tongue—“with a bit of Scotch accent,” as he once himself described it—and religious breadth and tolerance, two endowments which helped to give to the man of French descent and Roman Catholic faith the grace and facility of expression and the breadth of vision irresistibly appealing alike to both the great races in Canada, British and French, Protestant and Catholic.

The powerful influence of the years spent under the shadow of the little Presbyterian church of New Glasgow was demonstrated throughout his whole career, while his life-long affection—almost amounting to reverence—for Murray, the sturdy Scot who “fathered” him at this time, resembled the deep sentiment entertained by David Lloyd George for the worthy Welsh cobbler-uncle who did so much to make his career possible. Wilfrid Laurier never alluded to Malcolm Murray without evidences of the deepest appreciation and admiration.

That he also enjoyed with all the enthusiasm of boyhood, his stay in this Scottish settlement he has recalled on more than one occasion. “I remember,” he once observed after he had become a national figure, “I remember how I fought with the Scotch boys and made school-boy love to the Scotch girls, with more success in the latter than in the former.”

From his earliest boyhood, Laurier gave evidence of an independent character. While at college in L’Assomption, a debating society was formed, and there are men living to-day at the base of the Laurentides who remember the debating qualities of the man who was to shine later on as a Rupert in debate, in the home of the elder daughter of the mother of parliaments—the Canadian Commons Chamber. An instance of this comes to mind. A resolution had been submitted to the effect that the old kings in the interest of Canada should have permitted the Huguenots to settle here. Opposition was, of course, manifest in the debate, but young Laurier espoused the affirmative side in the discussion which waxed very warm, and his speech, which followed, was of so aggressive a character that the prefect of studies was scandalized, and at one fell swoop stopped the debate, and threw such societies into the discard.

Up to his last days Sir Wilfrid used to laugh over this incident, and he often remarked that it was a great pity the debate was stopped, as the entire international situation in Europe might have been affected by the result of that discussion, participated in by the boys of