described, with rude defensive fortifications and ammunition of stones. They enclosed about fifty large oblong huts, made of sapling poles and roofed with bark, each containing several families and several fires-some of them being divided into several rooms surrounding the central one, which contained the social fire, each family having also its own fire. These fifty houses held about a thousand or fifteen hundred inhabitants, so that Hochelaga was at least a respectable village.

In the middle of it was an open square, about a stone's throw in width, and here Cartier and his companions held a conference with the inhabitants, who swarmed out of their huts-men, women and children-to survey and touch the mysterious strangers so unlike anything they had ever before seen or imagined. The women crowded about their visitors in admiration, even. touching their beards and moustaches, and holding up their children that they might be touched by these wonderful beings. The men, who were smooth-faced themselves, thought the beards and moustaches very ugly, but they could not resist the impression made by their imposing air, manner

and dress.

But the "braves" called the village to order, sent the women and children indoors, and squatted round the French in rows, as if they were going to look at a play. Then the squaws brought mats of plaited rushes and laid them on the ground for the strangers, after which the ruling chief, a helpless paralyzed old man, was carried out on a deer-skin and laid down at Cartier's feet. A red fillet worked in porcupine quills was the only thing that relieved his generally squalid appearance, and betokened his chieftainship. He could not make a dignified oration, like Donnacona; he could only point to his powerless and shrivelled limbs, silently imploring from the white strangers the touch in which Indian superstition supposed a mysterious healing power to lie. Cartier willingly fulfilled the request, though we are not told whether it did any good; and the grateful old man gave him his red fillet in token of his thanks. A throng of sick, lame, infirm and blind people then crowded about the French captain to share the healing touch.

Sorely puzzled what to do, Cartier had recourse to the sign of the Cross, pronouncing over his patients a portion of St. John's Gospel, with a prayer

not only for the healing of their bodies but of their miserable souls as well. Then he read to them from his French Testament, which was probably interpreted to them, the story of the death of Christ, to which they listened with grave attention. After that came what they understood much better— the distribution of gifts; knives and hatchets for the men, gay strings of beads for the women, and for the children little pewter figures for which they scrambled in glee. Then the trumpeters gave a blast from their trumpets that at once amazed and delighted their hosts, after which they bade them a cordial farewell, filing out of the village gates through a crowd of hospitable. squaws, who urgently pressed upon their departing visitors fish, beans, corn and other novel food, all of which their guests courteously declined.

Before departing, however, Cartier and his friends ascended the beautiful hill above the village. Delighted with the magnificent view of broad river and boundless forest and distant cloud!ike mountain, he called the hill Mont Royal-Montreal. This name it has preserved ever since and as this we know the great busy city that has arisen at its base. As Cartier gazed wistfully over the endless masses of autumn-dyed forests that stretched away unbroken to the Gulf of Mexico, the Indians who had guided him told him wonderful tales of the length and breadth of this great river of Hochelaga, of the vast inland seas that lay beyond it, and of another mighty river still farther south, that wound down through softer climes into the land of perpetual summer. About the gold and silver that he most desired to hear of, they could tell him only that copper was to be found up the river Saguenay below Quebec.

Cartier would gladly have pressed on up the enticing river that lay before him, past the foaming rapids whose snowy crests he could see flashing to westward, but he had no means of doing so, and the season was growing late. So, turning his back on the "Royal Mountain" on which he had planted a cross in token of claiming possession for "His Most Christian Majesty," he and his companions began to retrace their way to the ships and the men they had left on the St. Charles. On the way he found some Indians less friendly than those of Hochelaga. He and his party were surprised while

bivouacking on the shore, and but for the intrepid conduct of his English boatswain, might all have been massacred.

At Stadacona Cartier was again kindly received by Donnacona and the Indians, who had now laid up a store of provisions for the long winter. His men had built a palisaded fort round their ships and after his recent experience, Cartier thought it well to be wary in dealing with the savages, whose friendliness might not last, and so strengthened the little fort with some of the guns from his ships.

But now the face of the country was changed indeed. The winds howled through the leafless forest, great masses of ice began to drift down the St. Lawrence, and soon a solid bridge of ice was formed across the mile wide strait. As the snows and keen frosts shut the Frenchmen up in their narrow quarters, all they had formerly known of winter was mild, compared with what they now experienced. Their ships, though not burned, like those of the ancient Greeks, were frozen in and kept them prisoners till spring. Heavy snow-storms blocked up the shore, and the river became a dead white expanse of firm, snow-sheeted ice. Their ships, as well as the forest pines, glittered in a panoply of dazzling snow and sparkling ice, the hulls deep buried in snow drifts, the masts, spars and cordage encased in glittering ice and gleaming with fringes of hanging icicles, while the bulwarks were crusted with four feet of icy mail.

The shivering Frenchmen, accustomed to the sunny mildness of France, and unprovided with warm clothing, clung to the protection of their ships and tried to keep themselves warm beside their fires. The Indians occasionally visited them, coming as Cartier says in his journal, “like so many beasts, wading half-naked in the snow," showing powers of endurance which the pale-faces" must have thought wonderful. The savages, on the whole, seem to have treated them kindly and shared with them their winter stores.

6.

But a worse foe than cold now attacked the unfortunate explorers. The terrible scurvy broke out among them, and spread until out of the whole band of one hundred and ten only three or four healthy men were left to wait on the sick. The poor sufferers lay in hopeless misery-no doubt

thinking sadly of fair France and the homes and friends they might never see again. Twenty-six died before April, and the survivors, too weak to break through the ice-bound soil, buried the dead in the snow-drifts till spring should return. Their case grew more and more hopeless. Still Cartier did not lose his faith in God, who, as he said, "looked down in pity upon us and sent to us a knowledge of the means of cure," in an unexpected way.

He had been so much afraid lest the Indians should take advantage of their weak state to attack them that he had ordered his men to make all the noise they could with sticks and stones, so that they might be supposed well and hard at work. But one of these poor savages was made the means of saving them. One of their young guides, called Doregaya, who had himself been suffering from scurvy and had recovered, told Cartier of the remedy which had cured him-a decoction from an evergreen called Ameda, supposed to have been the spruce fir. The sick men eagerly tried it, and drank it in such quantities, that in six days they had boiled down a tree as large as a French oak; and very soon all the invalids were restored to health, courage and hope.

But at last the great snow drifts melted away under the warm spring sunshine, the ice slowly broke up, and the blue water, sparkling in the sunshine, gladdened the eyes of the imprisoned French. Cartier and his

men joyfully prepared for departure; but in leaving the country he committed a base and ungrateful act of treachery. During the winter he had heard strange stories from the Indians, of a region where gold and rubies might be found, of a white race like his own, of another able to exist without food, and of still another created with but one leg.

Cartier wanted to take home some trophies of his enterprise, and to have his strange stories confirmed. And as the chief, Donnacona, had traveled far and professed to have seen many wonders, Cartier conceived the wicked project of carrying off by force Donnacona and some of his braves. So, having decoyed them on board his ships he set sail with them, first attaching the French flag to a great cross which he had set up on the shore. This cruel and false act, done under the shadow of the sacred emblem, was a foul

stain on the honor of the brave explorer, and, like most such actions, brought its just recompense in future disaster.

It was five years before Cartier again saw the shores of the New World. France was distracted by wars abroad and religious persecutions at home, and the project of a third expedition met with little favor. The terrors of the severe winter, the death of so many of the exploring party, and the lack of success in finding gold and silver, caused much opposition to the expenditure of more money-and perhaps of life-in what seemed a fruitless. undertaking. But there were some who saw the advantage of opening a large fur trade with the savages, and who urged that Spain and Portugal should not be allowed to have all the spoils of the New World to themselves.

At last a great French noble, the Sieur de Roberval, asked the king to make him governor of all the newly discovered countries, with the right of raising a band of volunteers to found a colony; one of the objects of which was stated to be the conversion of the Indians, as "men without knowledge of God or use of reason." Yet Cartier, who was made commander of the expedition, was allowed to take many of his "colonists" out of the French prisons. As the same error was frequently repeated in the French attempts to colonize Canada, it is not surprising that the French trappers and half-breeds should often have been a wild and lawless race.

The Spanish emperor, who claimed the entire country between the Gulf of Mexico and the North Pole, under the name of Florida, made all the opposition he could to the execution of this project. But at last the little. squadron of five ships lay ready to start, under the old port of St. Malo, awaiting the arrival of some artillery from Roberval. Tired of his weary waiting, Cartier set sail, leaving Roberval to follow. Again the squadron was dispersed by storms, and again the ships were reunited at Newfoundland. As Roberval's vessels were not yet to be seen, Cartier once more entered the Gulf, passed the great, sombre, pine-clad hills, the dark gorge of the Saguenay, the snowy sheet of Montmorency, and the rich woods of the Island of Orleans, and again cast anchor under the grand rock of Quebec. The Stadacona Indians came out quickly in their canoes, anxious to see again the faces of their long-absent friends. Alas! all had died in