the advantage of a little slack discipline and a little
slack drill. Those in the country had some practice in
the handling of firearms. But, taken all round, it would
be an exaggeration to call them even quarter-trained
soldiers.

The fourth factor was the Indians. They belonged to the
Micmac tribe of the great Algonquin family, and probably
numbered no more than about four thousand throughout the
whole French sphere of influence in what are now the
Maritime Provinces. A few hundred braves might have been
ready to take the war-path in the wilds of Cape Breton;
but sieges were not at all in their line, except when
they could hang round the besiegers' inland flanks, on
the chance of lifting scalps from careless stragglers or
ambushing an occasional small party gone astray. As in
Canada, so in Cape Breton, the Indians naturally sided
with the French, who disturbed them less and treated them
better than the British did. The British, who enjoyed
the inestimable advantage of superior sea-power, had more
goods to exchange. But in every other respect the French
were very much preferred. The handful of French sent out
an astonishingly great number of heroic and sympathetic
missionaries to the natives. The many British sent out
astonishingly few. The Puritan clergy did shamefully
little compared with the wonderful Jesuits. Moreover,
while the French in general made the Indian feel he was
at all events a fellow human being, the average British
colonist simply looked on him as so much vermin, to be
destroyed together with the obstructive wilds that