re was
picturesque scenery by the way. But what charm had the beauties of Lake
Champlain and distant glimpses of the Adirondacks for the poor prisoners,
harassed by the pain and fever of their wounds, in the day cruelly beaten
by their captors and at {157} night so tormented by clouds of mosquitoes
that they could not sleep? In time they passed the sites of Crown Point
and Ticonderoga, sighted romantic Lake George, which these three lonely
white men were the first of their race to see, and landed from their
canoes at the place where afterward rose Fort William Henry, the scene of
one of the most shocking tragedies of the Colonial Wars.

Thirteen dreadful days the journey occupied, from the St. Lawrence to its
termination at a palisaded town on the banks of the Mohawk. On Lake
Champlain they had met a war-party of Iroquois, and the prisoners, for
their delight, had been compelled to run the gauntlet between a double
line of braves armed with clubs and thorny sticks. When Jogues fell
drenched in blood and half-dead, he was recalled to consciousness by fire
applied to his body. Couture's experience illustrates a singular trait
of the ferocious Iroquois. There was nothing that they admired so much
as bulldog courage; and though he had exasperated them by killing one of
their warriors, they punished him only by subjecting him to excruciating
tortures. His fortitude under these still further increased their
admiration and they ended by adopting him {158} into the tribe. Many
years later we read of him still living among the Mohawks. Jogues and
Goupil they dragged from town to town, in each place exposing them on a
scaffold and subjecting them to atrocities contrived to cause the utmost
suffering without endangering life. Yet, in an interval between
tortures, Jogues seized an opportunity to baptize some Huron prisoners
with a few rain-drops gathered from the husks of an ear of green corn
thrown to him for food.

Three of the Hurons were burned to death, and the two Frenchmen expected
the same fate. Goupil did indeed meet with his death, but in a different
way. He was once seen to make the sign of the cross on the forehead of a
grandchild of the Indian in whose lodge he lived. The old man's
superstition was aroused, having been told by the Dutch that the sign of
the cross came from the Devil. So he imagined that Goupil had bewitched
the child.

The next morning, as the two Frenchmen were walking together, talkin