At Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, under the shadow of savage
and inaccessible rocks, feathered with pines, firs, and birch-trees,
they built a cluster of wooden huts and store-houses. Here they left
sixteen men to gather the expected harvest of furs. Before the winter
was over, several of them were dead, and the rest scattered through the
woods, living on the charity of the Indians.

But a new era had dawned on France. Exhausted with thirty years of
conflict, she had sunk at last to a repose, uneasy and disturbed, yet
the harbinger of recovery. The rugged soldier whom, for the weal of
France and of mankind, Providence had cast to the troubled surface of
affairs, was throned in the Louvre, composing the strife of factions and
the quarrels of his mistresses. The bear-hunting prince of the Pyrenees
wore the crown of France; and to this day, as one gazes on the time-worn
front of the Tuileries, above all other memories rises the small, strong
finger, the brow wrinkled with cares of love and war, the bristling
moustache, the grizzled beard, the bold, vigorous, and withal somewhat
odd features of the mountaineer of Warn. To few has human liberty owed
so deep a gratitude or so deep a grudge. He cared little for creeds or
dogmas. Impressible, quick in sympathy, his grim lip lighted often with
a smile, and his war-worn cheek was no stranger to a tear. He forgave
his enemies and forgot his friends. Many loved him; none but fools
trusted him. Mingled of mortal good and ill, frailty and force, of all
the kings who for two centuries and more sat on the throne of France
Henry the Fourth alone was a man.

Art, industry, and commerce, so long crushed and overborne, were
stirring into renewed life, and a crowd of adventurous men, nurtured
in war and incapable of repose, must seek employment for their restless
energies in fields of peaceful enterprise.

Two small, quaint vessels, not larger than the fishing-craft of
Gloucester and Marblehead,--one was of twelve, the other of fifteen
tons,--held their way across the Atlantic, passed the tempestuous
headlands of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence, and, with adventurous
knight-errantry, glided deep into the heart of the Canadian wilderness.
On board of one of them was the Breton merchant, Pontgrave, and with him
a man of spirit widely different, a Catholic of good family,--Samuel de
Champlain, born in 1567 at the small seaport of Bronage on the Bay of
Biscay. His father was a