TO THE PORCH OF THE WORLD The English colonies never had a race of woodsmen like the coureurs du bois of New France.

These were a strange mixture: French peasants, half-breeds, Canadian-born Frenchmen, gentlemen of birth with lives and fortunes gone askew, and many of the native Canadian noblesse, who, like the nobles of France, forbidden to become merchants, became adventurers with the coureurs du bois, who were ever with them in spirit more than with the merchant.

The peasant prefers the gentleman to the bourgeois as his companion.

Many a coureur du bois divided his tale of furs with a distressed noble or seigneur, who dare not work in the fields.
The veteran Charles le Moyne, with his sons, each of whom played a daring and important part in the history of New France,--Iberville greatest,--was one of the few merchants in whom was combined the trader and the noble.

But he was a trader by profession before he became a seigneur.