he defence, and it is said that she even
laid some of the guns with her own hands. Her triumph was brief,
however, for Charnisay returned in two months' time; and though she
again gallantly defended her home and her husband's stronghold, her
situation grew at last so desperate that she yielded to fair proffers of
treaty and surrendered. But the victor had no intention of holding to
his plighted word, and he promptly hanged every man in the garrison,
with the exception of one who turned hangman as the price of his own
miserable life. To make the blot upon his escutcheon yet fouler,
Charnisay actually had the rope placed around the neck of the chatelaine
herself; but, though her heroic spirit disdained to plead for safety to
such a monster, either whim or some fear of results, for he could not be
accused of any humane impulse, caused him to remit the sentence. It
might almost as well have been carried out, however, for in a few days
the lady died from grief at her defeat and the baseness of treachery to
which she and her followers had been subjected.

Whittier has sung the wrath of the husband of the Lady de la Tour; but
he omits to mention, nor would it chime well with the rest of the poem,
that years afterward that husband married the widow of the man who had
placed the rope around the neck of the heroic lady, and who had been
drowned in the Penobscot River while on a voyage. The marriage, which
found its celebrants at an advanced age for matrimonial union, settled
forever the sternest struggle that Acadia had known; but even this
desirable result scarcely enables us to forgive the Seigneur de la Tour
for his treason to the memory of his devoted wife in thus allying
himself to the house of him who had done her to death.

With this story of the most famous of the women of Acadia let us turn to
Canada proper. It was not for some time after the first futile and later
partially successful attempts to found a colony upon the bleak shores of
the Saint Lawrence that there was to be found on those shores the
refining influence that comes from feminine companionship. The first
permanent colony, however, which established itself on the heights of
Quebec, held among its members one of the gentler sex, Dame Hebert, the
wife of Louis Hebert, who had been an Acadian. His wife was a woman of
courage and resource, as befitted a pioneer colonist; and she had need
of both qualities in her fight with the conditions that pressed so
hardly