ce, and anchored off the mouth of the River of Cap Rouge. It
was late in August, and the leafy landscape sweltered in the sun. The
Frenchmen landed, picked up quartz crystals on the shore and thought
them diamonds, climbed the steep promontory, drank at the spring near
the top, looked abroad on the wooded slopes beyond the little river,
waded through the tall grass of the meadow, found a quarry of slate,
and gathered scales of a yellow mineral which glistened like gold, then
returned to their boats, crossed to the south shore of the St. Lawrence,
and, languid with the heat, rested in the shade of forests laced with an
entanglement of grape-vines.

Now their task began, and while some cleared off the woods and sowed
turnip-seed, others cut a zigzag road up the height, and others built
two forts, one at the summit, and one on the shore below. The forts
finished, the Vicomte de Beaupre took command, while Cartier went with
two boats to explore the rapids above Hochelaga. When at length he
returned, the autumn was far advanced; and with the gloom of a Canadian
November came distrust, foreboding, and homesickness. Roberval had not
appeared; the Indians kept jealously aloof; the motley colony was
sullen as the dull, raw air around it. There was disgust and ire at
Charlesbourg-Royal, for so the place was called.

Meanwhile, unexpected delays had detained the impatient Roberval; nor
was it until the sixteenth of April, 1542, that, with three ships and
two hundred colonists, he set sail from Rochelle. When, on the eighth
of June, he entered the harbor of St. John, he found seventeen
fishing-vessels lying there at anchor. Soon after, he descried three
other sail rounding the entrance of the haven, and, with anger and
amazement, recognized the ships of Jacques Cartier. That voyager had
broken up his colony and abandoned New France. What motives had prompted
a desertion little consonant with the resolute spirit of the man it is
impossible to say,--whether sickness within, or Indian enemies without,
disgust with an enterprise whose unripened fruits had proved so hard
and bitter, or discontent at finding himself reduced to a post of
subordination in a country which he had discovered and where he had
commanded. The Viceroy ordered him to return; but Cartier escaped with
his vessels under cover of night, and made sail for France, carrying
with him as trophies a few quartz diamonds from Cap Rouge, and grains
of sham gold from the neigh