Lively Frenchmen now multiplied along the yeasty Gulf. In 1718 Bienville, then the French governor of Louisiana, courageously braving the alligators and swamp snakes, whose crescent attitude might have terrified a son of St. Patrick, began the city of New Orleans, of which, four years afterwards, Charlevoix, the historian and traveller, who visited it, gives this description: “The place has a population of about two hundred. I find it to consist of one hundred cabins disposed with little regularity; a large wooden warehouse; two or three dwellings that would be no ornament to a French village, and the half of a sorry storehouse, which they were pleased to lend to the Lord, but of which he had scarcely taken possession when it was proposed to turn him out to lodge in a tent.” These kind of loans, some maliciously aver, have continued fashionable in the Crescent City from that time to the present. However that may be, certain it is that the French settlements in America—a succinct narrative of which we had purposely deferred to give in connection with their last desperate struggle for power—had at the close of King George’s war, in 1748, reached their greatest extension. Imperial, too, was their stretch. Beginning at St. John’s, New Brunswick, and dotting the wide area that fills seventeen hundred miles between that point and the Mississippi River, at the present spunky little city of St. Paul, and stretching down that river fourteen hundred miles to its outlet, and so spreading westward into Texas, and eastward through Mississippi and Alabama, until they confronted the old Spanish plantation in Florida, these settlements zoned on three sides with a spiked belt the thirteen English Colonies on the Atlantic. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the accumulations of hatred through the preceding four had gathered to a festering head the hostile memories of the French race of English assumption, victories, and national contempt; and so through all this wide circuit of settlement, under cassock and surplice, under the coat of the soldier and the bear-skin of the trader, beat zealous French hearts, ready to assert the claims of a king deemed by them rightfully in possession, and to earn the absolution of a spiritual sovereign at Rome, ready, since the schism of Henry VIII., to be given to any one who would despoil or destroy the heretic English.