It was then perhaps that he formed the great style for which he was so famous in after years. His vocabulary became remarkable for its range, flexibility and power, and he developed the art of selection. His rivals even were used to say of him that he always chose the best word. He learned there on the island that language was not given to man merely that he might make a noise, but that he might use it as a great marksman uses a rifle. Work and study together filled his days. They kept far from him also any feeling of despair. He had an abiding faith that a ship of the right kind would come in time and take him away. He must not worry about it. It was his task now to fit himself for the return, to prove to his friends when he saw them once more that all the splendid opportunities offered to him on the island had not been wasted. Almost unconsciously, he began to reason more deeply, to look further into the causes of things, and his mind turned particularly to the present war. The more he thought about it the greater became his conviction that England and the colonies were bound to win. Courage and numbers, resources and tenacity must prevail even over great initial mistakes. Duquesne and Ticonderoga would be brushed away as mere events that had no control over destiny. He remembered Bigot's ball in Quebec that Willet and Tayoga and he had attended. It came before him again almost as vivid as reality. He realized now in the light of greater age and experience how it typified decadence. A power that was rotten at the top, where the brain should be, could never defeat one that was full of youthful ardor and strength, sound through and through, awkward and ill directed though that strength might be. The young French leaders and their soldiers were valiant, skillful and enduring--they had proved it again and again on sanguinary fields--but they could not prevail when they had to receive orders from a corrupt and reckless court at Versailles, and, above all when they had to look to that court for help that never came. His reading of the books in the slaver's chest told him that folly and crime invariably paid the penalty, if not in one way then in another, and he remembered too some of the ancient Greek plays, over which he had toiled under the stern guidance of Master Alexander McLean. Their burden was the certainty of fate. You could never escape, no matter how you writhed, from what you did, and those old writers must have told the truth, else men would not be reading and studying them two thousand years after they were dead. Only truth could last twenty centuries. Bigot, Cadet, Pean, and the others, stealing from France and Canada and spending the money in debauchery, could not be victorious, despite all the valor of Montcalm and St. Luc and De Levis and their comrades.