of the Indian warriors, provided they did not meet the enemy on the way. But at Crown Point, afterwards noted in the warfare of the white man, this expedition of red men discovered at night fall, through the dusk, a flotilla of the Iroquois canoes. Dark as it was the enemies recognized each other with savage war-cries. The Iroquois landed close by and labored all night, as Champlain could see, at the work of entrenching themselves behind a barricade, made of trees felled on the spot. Champlain's allies lashed their canoes together with poles and danced and shouted till morning broke.

The three Frenchmen lay concealed, each in his canoe, till the critical moment approached. When the attacking canoes reached the shore and their owners landed, Champlain could see some two hundred tall, strong Indian warriors advancing from the forests to meet them, some of them wearing a primative kind of armor made of interwoven twigs, or shields of wood and hide, while the chiefs could be distinguished by the tall plumes on their heads. As they approached the attacking Indians called for their gallant defender, who came forward before the astonished Indians in the garb of a French soldier, and fired his arquebuse. As its report resounded two of the Iroquois warriors fell. The savages replied with a yell and showers of arrows, but shots in rapid succession soon broke their advance into a retreat, and they fled in terror and confusion.

The victory was complete but the tortures inflicted on their prisoners by the Indians sickened the heart of Champlain, who remonstrated indignantly, but in vain. Then, satisfied with this successful skirmish, and probably fearing speedy vengeance, the party turned their canoes toward home. At the mouth of the Richelieu the expedition broke up, the Hurons and Algonquins steering for the Ottawa, while Champlain accompanied the Montagnais to Tadousac, where the squaws danced in glee to celebrate their victory, and swam out to their canoes to receive the heads of their slain enemies.

Champlain soon sailed for France with Pontgravé and carried to King Henry a belt embroidered in dyed porcupine quills, and two bright plumaged Canadian birds as trophies of his adventures, while he entertained him with his lively account of them. De Monts was trying to secure the

renewal of his monopoly, but, failing in this, he pluckily determined to go on without it.

Early in the following spring Champlain and Pontgravé sailed again for New France. As usual, they found greedy fur-traders busy at Tadousac and on the Saguenay, exhausting the supplies so much needed for the support of the colony.

Champlain had various schemes for exploring expeditions ready to carry into action. One of these was to go with the Hurons to see the great lakes and near them the copper mines, which they had promised to show him. They met accordingly at a rendezvous on the Richelieu. But while they were preparing for a dance and a feast, a canoe came, swiftly paddled toward them, bearing the news that a battle was going on in the forest between Algonquins and Iroquois. Champlain's Montagnais friends rushed to their canoes, taking Champlain with them and on landing bounded off through the woods like hounds after their prey. Champlain and his friends pressed on through the forest jungle as best they might, stumbling over fallen trees and entangling vines, wading through swamps, persecuted by legions of mosquitoes, until at last they came within hail of their forgetful guides.

Champlain was wounded in the battle that followed; but he fought on undaunted, assisted by some young Frenchmen from a fur-trader's ship in the neighborhood, and again won the day for his Indian allies. Again the fiendish tortures began and all Champlain could do was to save one prisoner from the ferocity of the victors.

The allies rejoiced that a heavy blow had been dealt to their enemies, and a great band of Hurons who arrived next day were terribly vexed that they had come too late for the fray. The tumultuous savages celebrated their success with songs and dances, and then set out for home in their canoes, decorated with ghastly scalps, without a thought of following up the blow they had struck. Neither did Champlain insist on their guiding him on to the great lakes he had set out to reach. For startling tidings from France seemed, for the time, to drive these projects from his mind.

Henry the Fourth had fallen beneath the dagger of Ravaillac. This was sad news for the hopes of Quebec, sad news for those of Port Royal.

Champlain must hasten home to look after the interests of his colony. Regretfully he left once more his post at Quebec, with his fields and gardens and vineyards redeemed from the wilderness; and exchanged his forays with the wild warriors of the forest for unsuccessful pleadings at court, which were much less to his taste. He could not protect the interests of the colony on which he had spent so much labor, from the descent of swarms of fur-traders who bought up the skins which were all they cared about, and so exhausted the colony's only means of existense. When he returned, in the following spring, thirteen of them followed in his wake, ready to reap the profit of his labors.

Champlain, however, had learned that patience and perseverance can do much toward success, and, undiscouraged, he chose a si e for a new trading post at the foot of the beautiful Mont Royal, where he thought he could establish a trade with the great tribes of the interior as they came down from the Ottawa. Not far from the place where had once stood the Indian town of Hochelaga, on a spot now covered by the massive stone warehouses of Montreal, he cleared a site for his trading-post, and built a wall of bricks of his own manufacture to preserve it from damage by the "ice shove" in the spring. He called it Place Royale. The hospital of the Grey Nuns occupies a part of the Place.

At this appointed rendezvous a band of Hurons were the first to arrive, paddling their canoes down the dashing surges of the Lachine rapids, then called the rapids of St. Louis. They invited Champlain to visit their country, buy their beavers, build a fort, teach them the true faith-do anything he liked, only they begged him to keep the greedy fur-traders away. They disliked and distrusted them, thinking that they meant to plunder and to kill them. Champlain did all he could to reassure them, and went to visit them at their camp on Lake St. Louis, from whence they conveyed him down. the rapids in their canoes; the third white man to descend the Lachine Rapids.

Once more visiting France to consult with M. de Monts, Champlain succeeded in finding a new and powerful patron for New France in Henry of Bourbon, who became its protector. Champlain, however, continued to be

the moving spring of its life. In order to secure his two-fold aim of converting the Indians, and finding a short passage to China, he needed the profits of the fur-trade, but he did not wish to keep these entirely to himself. He was willing to share them with the traders, and he now offered them a chance of joining the new company. The offer was accepted by the merchants of St. Malo and Rouen, but refused by those of Rochelle, who preferred to take the chances of unlawful trading.

Champlain remained in France until the spring of 1613, the year in which Port Royal was destroyed by Argall the Englishman. Of this, of course, he knew nothing at the time, and fortunately for Quebec the destroyer seems not to have heard of the little settlement under this lonely rock of the St. Lawrence.

While his friends in Acadia were meeting with such overwhelming Inisfortunes, Champlain was ascending the Ottawa on another exploring expedition, to which he was lured by the false report of a young Frenchman who had volunteered to winter with the Indians. This young man brought to France a wonderful story of having ascended a northern river from the interior, and having discovered the shore of the Eastern sea. Champlain believed him and hastened to Canada to follow up the welcome discovery. He, with four Frenchmen and two Indians, set out from Mont Royal, in two small canoes which they dragged with great labor up the foaming rapids near Carillon, and reached the calmer stream which sweeps on between high hills to the present capital of Canada. They lighted their camp-fires at night on the shore, passed the snowy cascade of the Rideau and drew up their canoes below the point where the great caldron of the Chaudière sends up its clouds of boiling spray. Champlain's Indians did not fail to follow the usual Indian custom of throwing an offering of tobacco into the cataract to please its Manitou or guardian spirit.

Paddling on over Lake Chaudière-obliged to carry their canoes across a portage, where the silvery cascades of the Chats Rapids dashed down. among wooded islets-then paddling un Lake Coulonge, they reached at last the settlement of the Ottawa chief, Tessouat, with its maize fields and bark

wigwams. Here the young Frenchman had spent the winter, and from this point had set out upon his supposed discovery.

Tessouat hospitably made a feast for Champlain at which the viands were broiled fish and meat with a sort of brose made of maize and scraps of meat thrown in.

After the feast, when the pipes were being smoked, Champlain made his request for canoes and guides to follow up the journey of his informant. But he found, to his great vexation, that the young Frenchman's story was a lie, and that he had never gone farther than the settlement of Tessouat. Disappointed and disheartened, Champlain returned to Montreal, attended by a flotilla of Huron canoes; and, magnanimously leaving the deceiver unpunished, he sailed in a trading ship for France.

It was two years before he returned to Canada, bringing with him four Recollet friars, who had answered his appeal for aid in the Mission to New France. They chose a site for their home near the Habitation of Champlain, and said the first mass with the entire settlement kneeling around them, while a salute of cannon burst forth to honor the occasion. Two of the friars set out to join the Indians in their roving life, living in their filthy and smoky lodges, and sharing their privations in the hope of winning them to the true faith. One of them, Le Caron, persevered in braving all the hardships of a winter among them, with this great end in view.

Meantime the Hurons and Algonquins were again begging Champlain for help against the Iroquois. This it seemed necessary to give them, in order to keep them united by a common fear, and under his own influence. They met at Montreal in a great council, and Champlain promised again to join them with his men, while they undertook to muster an army of twenty-five hundred men for the proposed raid on the Iroquois. But when he returned to join them, the whole body of Indians, impatient of delay, had departed to their homes.

Disgusted with the childish caprice of his Indian allies, Champlain set out once more to explore the region of the Ottawa. He reached the limit of his former journey and pressed onward, avoiding rapids by portages, paddling on the stream or forcing his way through the wilderness, till he