igors of the Canadian winter. The rocks, the shores, the pine-trees,
the solid floor of the frozen river, all alike were blanketed in snow
beneath the keen cold rays of the dazzling sun. The drifts rose above
the sides of their ships; masts, spars, and cordage were thick with
glittering incrustations and sparkling rows of icicles; a frosty armor,
four inches thick, encased the bulwarks. Yet, in the bitterest weather,
the neighboring Indians, "hardy," says the journal, "as so many beasts,"
came daily to the fort, wading, half naked, waist-deep through the
snow. At length, their friendship began to abate; their visits grew less
frequent, and during December had wholly ceased, when a calamity fell
upon the French.

A malignant scurvy broke out among them. Man after man went down before
the hideous disease, till twenty-five were dead, and only three or four
were left in health. The sound were too few to attend the sick, and the
wretched sufferers lay in helpless despair, dreaming of the sun and the
vines of France. The ground, hard as flint, defied their feeble efforts,
and, unable to bury their dead, they hid them in snow-drifts. Cartier
appealed to the saints; but they turned a deaf ear. Then he nailed
against a tree an image of the Virgin, and on a Sunday summoned forth
his woe-begone followers, who, haggard, reeling, bloated with their
maladies, moved in procession to the spot, and, kneeling in the snow,
sang litanies and psalms of David. That day died Philippe Rougemont,
of Amboise, aged twenty-two years. The Holy Virgin deigned no other
response.

There was fear that the Indians, learning their misery, might finish
the work that scurvy had begun. None of them, therefore, were allowed to
approach the fort; and when a party of savages lingered within hearing,
Cartier forced his invalid garrison to beat with sticks and stones
against the walls, that their dangerous neighbors, deluded by the
clatter, might think them engaged in hard labor. These objects of their
fear proved, however, the instruments of their salvation. Cartier,
walking one day near the river, met an Indian, who not long before had
been prostrate, like many of his fellows, with the scurvy, but who was
now, to all appearance, in high health and spirits. What agency had
wrought this marvellous recovery? According to the Indian, it was a
certain evergreen, called by him ameda, a decoction of the leaves of
which was sovereign against the disease. The experime