the town of Ludington now
stands on the Michigan shore. This was where Father Marquette died,
about one hundred and forty years before, and we saw the remains of a
red-cedar cross, erected by his men at the time of his death to mark his
grave; and though his remains had been removed to the Mission, at Point
St. Ignace, the cross was held sacred by the voyageurs, who, in passing,
paid reverence to it, by kneeling and making the sign of the cross. It
was about three feet above the ground, and in a falling condition. We
reset it, leaving it out of the ground about two feet, and as I never
saw it after, I doubt not that it was covered by the drifting sands of
the following winter, and that no white man ever saw it afterwards."

III.

THE MAN WITH THE COPPER HAND.

One day at the end of August, when Marquette's bones had lain under
his chapel altar nearly two years and a half, the first ship ever seen
upon the lakes was sighted off St. Ignace. Hurons and Ottawas, French
traders, and coureurs de bois, or wood-rangers, ran out to see the
huge winged creature scudding betwixt Michilimackinac Island and Round
Island. She was of about forty-five tons' burden. Five cannon showed
through her port-holes, and as she came nearer, a carved dragon was seen
to be her figurehead; she displayed the name Griffin and bore the white
flag of France. The priest himself felt obliged to receive her company,
for three Recollet friars, in the gray robe of St. Francis, appeared on
the deck. But two men, one in a mantle of scarlet and gold, and the
other in white and gold French uniform, were most watched by all eyes.

[Illustration: THE BUILDING OF THE GRIFFIN.
From the Original Engraving in Father Hennepin's "Nouvelle Decouverte,"
Amsterdam, 1704.]

The ship fired a salute, and the Indians howled with terror and started
to run; then turned back to see her drop her sails and her anchor, and
come up in that deep crescent-shaped bay. She had weathered a hard storm
in Lake Huron; but the men who handled her ropes were of little interest
to coureurs de bois on shore, who watched her masters coming to land.

[Illustration: La Salle.]

"It is the Sieur de la Salle in the scarlet mantle," one coureur de bois
said to another. "And this is the ship he hath been building at Niagara.
First one hears that creditors have seized his fort of Frontenac, and
then one beholds him sailing here in state, as though naught on earth
could daunt him."

"I