At all seasons but especially in winter the news that reached Malbaie was of a very fragmentary character. With his kin in Scotland Nairne exchanged only an annual letter but since each side took time and pains to prepare it, the letter told more, probably, than would a year's bulk of our hurried epistles. Newspapers were few and dear and only at intervals did any come. Books too were scarce. Occasionally Nairne notes those that he thought of buying--St. Simon's "Memoirs;" an account of the Court of Louis XIV; "A Comparative View of the State and Facultys of Man with those of the Animal World;" "Elegant Extracts or Useful and Entertaining passages in prose," a companion volume to a similar one in poetry, and so on. He writes gratefully, in 1799, to a friend in Quebec, who had sent newspapers and sermons, both of which remotely different classes of literature had furnished "great entertainment." From Europe he is receiving the volumes of the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, still on the shelves at Murray Bay, and is thankful that they were not captured by the French. "The older I grow the fonder I am of reading and that book is a great resource." Our degenerate age gets little "entertainment" out of sermons and usually keeps an encyclopaedia strictly for "reference"; obviously Nairne read it. The old soldier watched and commented upon developments which were the fruit of seed he himself had helped to sow. He had fought to win Canada for Britain; he had fought to crush the American Revolution. By 1800 he sees how great Canada may become and is convinced that yielding independence to the United States has not proved very injurious to Great Britain. Though, in a short time, the United States was to secure the great West by purchasing Louisiana from France, when Nairne died it had not done so and in 1800 he could say that the United States "are small in comparison of the whole of North America. They are bounded upon all sides and will be filled up with people in no very great number of years. Our share of North America is yet unknown in its extent. Enterprising people in quest of furs travel for years towards the north and towards the west through vast countries of good soil uninhabited as yet ... [except] for hunting, and watered with innumerable lakes and rivers, stored with fish, besides every other convenience for the use of man, and certainly destined to be filled with people in some future time. We have only [now] heard of one named Mackenzie[17] who is reported to have been as far as the Southern Ocean (from Canada) across this continent to the West." Long before Canada stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Nairne was thus dreaming of what we now see.