After a while came in Félix Baudoin in his full livery, reserved for special occasions, and announced to his lady that tea was served. The gentlemen were invited to partake of what was then a novelty in New France. The Bourgeois, in the course of the new traffic with China that had lately sprung up in consequence of the discovery of ginseng in New France, had imported some chests of tea, which the Lady de Tilly, with instinctive perception of its utility, adopted at once as the beverage of polite society. As yet, however, it was only to be seen upon the tables of the refined and the affluent. A fine service of porcelain of Chinese make adorned her table, pleasing the fancy with its grotesque pictures,--then so new, now so familiar to us all. The Chinese garden and summer-house, the fruit-laden trees, and river with overhanging willows; the rustic bridge with the three long-robed figures passing over it; the boat floating upon the water and the doves flying in the perspectiveless sky--who does not remember them all? Lady de Tilly, like a true gentlewoman, prized her china, and thought kindly of the mild, industrious race who had furnished her tea-table with such an elegant equipage. It was no disparagement to the Lady de Tilly that she had not read English poets who sang the praise of tea: English poets were in those days an unknown quantity in French education, and especially in New France until after the conquest. But Wolfe opened the great world of English poetry to Canada as he recited Gray's Elegy with its prophetic line,-- “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” as he floated down the St. Lawrence in that still autumnal night to land his forces and scale by stealth the fatal Heights of Abraham, whose possession led to the conquest of the city and his own heroic death, then it was the two glorious streams of modern thought and literature united in New France, where they have run side by side to this day,--in time to be united in one grand flood stream of Canadian literature. The Bourgeois Philibert had exported largely to China the newly discovered ginseng, for which at first the people of the flowery kingdom paid, in their sycee silver, ounce for ounce. And his Cantonese correspondent esteemed himself doubly fortunate when he was enabled to export his choicest teas to New France in exchange for the precious root.