upon the new colonists. She first set her foot upon Canadian soil
in 1617, and she lived through the most remarkable of the mutations of
the first colony, including the surrender to the English and the treaty
of Saint Germain which again gave Canada to France. For the first three
years of her sojourn in the new land she was the only woman on those
shores; and when in 1620 she was joined in her isolation by Helene de
Champlain, wife of the great pioneer of New France, it was but for a
time, hardly four years in all. At the expiration of that period Madame
de Champlain returned, broken in health and spirits by her exile, to her
beloved France, held by her in higher esteem than her gallant but cold
husband, and there she entered a convent, leaving behind her a memory as
one of the two women who first inhabited the wilderness of New France,
and leaving also her name to an island in the Saint Lawrence. Though
much may be said in extenuation of the homesickness and lack of
endurance found in the young wife of the great Champlain, she was no
heroine as was Dame Hebert, and her easy acceptance of the Catholic
faith as her own after her marriage,--she had been a staunch
Huguenot,--moved thereto rather by the atmosphere of her new home than
by any conviction, is suggestive of the real lack of strength in her
character. Yet she is worthy of remembrance as one of the women pioneers
of Canada. Those of her sex who followed in her westward footsteps were
generally made of sterner stuff than the faint-hearted Helene; but it
was long before she knew a successor as one of the women of New France,
for her return to the land of her birth was in 1624, and it was not
until 1634 that the third woman, the wife of the surgeon Giffard, came
to found a home amid the wilds of the west. It is true that there were
two girls, the daughters of Dame Hebert, in the colony even before the
coming of Madame de Champlain; but these could be considered only as
involuntary pioneers and do not deserve to be placed among those who
came of their free will, or for love of their husbands. One of these
daughters of Dame Hebert, however, furnished in her union with Stephen
Jonquest occasion for the first marriage ceremony celebrated in Canada,
a ceremony which preceded by more than two years that first celebrated
in New England.

For more than two decades after the death of Champlain in 1635, the tide
of immigration was very feeble; but it bore on its bosom two not