sable, fisher, otter, and beaver, and lived among them
as members of the tribe, marrying copper-colored squaws, and rearing
dusky children. When the trader had exchanged his goods for the peltries
of these red and white skin-hunters, he returned to his home, having
been absent perhaps a year or eighteen months. It was a hard life; many
a trader perished in the wilderness by cold or starvation, by an upset
where the icy current ran down the rapids like a mill-race, by the
attack of a hostile tribe, or even in a drunken brawl with the friendly
Indians, when voyageur, half-breed, and Indian alike had been frenzied
by draughts of fiery liquor.[27]

Next to the commandant in power came the priest. He bore unquestioned
rule over his congregation, but only within certain limits; for the
French of the backwoods, leavened by the presence among them of so many
wild and bold spirits, could not be treated quite in the same way as the
more peaceful _habitants_ of Lower Canada. The duty of the priest
was to look after the souls of his sovereign's subjects, to baptize,
marry, and bury them, to confess and absolve them, and keep them from
backsliding, to say mass, and to receive the salary due him for
celebrating divine service; but, though his personal influence was of
course very great, he had no temporal authority, and could not order his
people either to fight or to work. Still less could he dispose of their
laud, a privilege inhering only in the commandant and in the
commissaries of the villages, where they were expressly authorized so to
do by the sovereign.[28]

The average inhabitant, though often loose in his morals, was very
religious. He was superstitious also, for he firmly believed in omens,
charms, and witchcraft, and when worked upon by his dread of the unseen
and the unknown he sometimes did terrible deeds, as will be related
farther on.

Under ordinary circumstances he was a good-humored, kindly man, always
polite--his manners offering an agreeable contrast to those of some of
our own frontiersmen,--with a ready smile and laugh, and ever eager to
join in any merrymaking. On Sundays and fast-days he was summoned to the
little parish church by the tolling of the old bell in the small wooden
belfry. The church was a rude oblong building, the walls made out of
peeled logs, thrust upright in the ground, chinked with moss and coated
with clay or cement. Thither every man went, clad in a capote or blanket
coat, a bright si