Whilst James the Second was making a last stand for his Crown against the victorious Dutchman, La Salle, with a patent of Governor, was sailing from La Rochelle, for the dependency of Louisiana, which now completed the vast semicircle over which the King of France claimed authority, and which enclosing the British settlements in a belt from Newfoundland through the lakes, swept thence by the Ohio down to the Gulf of Mexico, far away to the _terra incognita_ under the setting sun. The superior trading resources of the Indians of the South, the favourable conditions for the expansion of trade possessed by the British on the Hudson over the French, who had to struggle with longer frost, and the wintry storms of the St. Lawrence, and the greater commercial enterprise of the English colonists, nullified that vast territorial superiority. The French governors thought, by displays of vigour and violence towards the natives, to alter the course of trade; but they could not compete with their neighbours, and quarrels and petty wars vexed the life of both colonial systems. In 1690, M. de Frontenac launched three little corps of invading savages, aided and led by French troops, against the British settlements in the New England Colonies. Schenectady in New York, Salmon Falls in New Hampshire, Casco in Maine, were surprised and burned, and the colonists were given to the sword and the scalping-knife. For a time the survivors of the massacre had something else to do besides persecuting each other to death for witchcraft or torturing their heretics. They set to work to avenge their slaughtered saints. Sir William Phipps, a native of Massachusetts, led his Puritan hosts to Port Royal in Nova Scotia, but was obliged to retreat ingloriously from an attempt against Montreal. His rival, de Frontenac, had no better fortune in a projected attack by land and sea against New York. The war which raged between the colonists was terminated by the Peace of Ryswick; but peace did not last long, and the declaration of war by Great Britain against France and Spain revived the bloody contests between the borderers. The British Government sent out Marlborough’s veterans, and those sailors who had swept the seas of every enemy, to aid the colonists. An immense expedition, which seemed capable of destroying any trace of French rule in Canada, sailed from Boston in 1710, against Quebec, but failed miserably at sea and in the St. Lawrence ere it reached the city. The Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, brought about a cessation of hostilities, but not of jealousies, or of Indian wars and massacres. By that time the predominance of the white man was well established, and the faces of the Indians were turned steadily towards the setting sun, and their footsteps followed his course towards the forests of the west. Fort after fort encroached on their decreasing domain, and Englishman and Frenchman, each after his kind, sought to reproduce