Menotah

In the following story of the Canadian North-West Rebellion, Louis Riel—leader of a hopeless enterprise—has not been introduced as an active character. He was himself so colourless, so commonplace, that a true picture must have been uninteresting, while a fictitious drawing would have been unsatisfactory and out of place with the plan of this story. He was much like his brother, who lives to-day on an unpretentious farm in the Red River Valley, dull-witted, heavy-featured and obtuse—in fact, a French half-breed of the ordinary stamp. So the plot of this work tends more towards the study of passion, and dwells upon what was undoubtedly one of the principal reasons for the revolt.