the
Faith. Their zeal ran high. They would take no refusal. Membertou was
for war on all who would not turn Christian. A living skeleton was seen
crawling from hut to hut in search of the priest and his saving waters;
while another neophyte, at the point of death, asked anxiously whether,
in the realms of bliss to which he was bound, pies were to be had
comparable to those with which the French regaled him.

A formal register of baptisms was drawn up to be carried to France in
the returning ship, of which Pontrincourt's son, Biencourt, a spirited
youth of eighteen, was to take charge. He sailed in July, his father
keeping him company as far as Port la Have, whence, bidding the young
man farewell, he attempted to return in an open boat to Port Royal. A
north wind blew him out to sea; and for six days he was out of sight of
land, subsisting on rain-water wrung from the boat's sail, and on a few
wild-fowl which he had shot on an island. Five weeks passed before he
could rejoin his colonists, who, despairing of his safety, were about to
choose a new chief.

Meanwhile, young Biencourt, speeding on his way, heard dire news from a
fisherman on the Grand Bank. The knife of Ravaillac had done its work.
Henry the Fourth was dead.

There is an ancient street in Paris, where a great thoroughfare
contracts to a narrow pass, the Rue de la Ferronnerie. Tall buildings
overshadow it, packed from pavement to tiles with human life, and from
the dingy front of one of them the sculptured head of a man looks down
on the throng that ceaselessly defiles beneath. On the fourteenth of
May, 1610, a ponderous coach, studded with fleurs-de-lis and rich with
gilding, rolled along this street. In it was a small man, well advanced
in life, whose profile once seen could not be forgotten,--a hooked nose,
a protruding chin, a brow full of wrinkles, grizzled hair, a short,
grizzled beard, and stiff, gray moustaches, bristling like a cat's.
One would have thought him some whiskered satyr, grim from the rack of
tumultuous years; but his alert, upright port bespoke unshaken vigor,
and his clear eye was full of buoyant life. Following on the footway
strode a tall, strong, and somewhat corpulent man, with sinister,
deep-set eyes and a red beard, his arm and shoulder covered with his
cloak. In the throat of the thoroughfare, where the sculptured image of
Henry the Fourth still guards the spot, a collision of two carts stopped
the coach. Ravaillac quickened