s which interest the student and
antiquary as they wander in the summer-time through the picturesque
country where the nation was once supreme.

[1] It was so called in 1753, after the reigning sovereign of England
by an ambitions and politic Irishman, Sir William Johnson, whose name
is constantly occurring in the history of the wars between England and
France.

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X.

YEARS OF GLOOM--THE KING COMES TO THE RESCUE OF
CANADA--THE IROQUOIS HUMBLED.

(1652-1667.)

It was noon on the 20th May, 1656, when the residents of Quebec were
startled by the remarkable spectacle of a long line of bark canoes
drawn up on the river immediately in front of the town. They could
hear the shouts of the Mohawk warriors making boast of the murder and
capture of unhappy Hurons, whom they had surprised on the Isle of
Orleans close by. The voices of Huron girls--"the very flower of the
tribe," says the Jesuit narrator--were raised in plaintive chants at
the rude command of their savage captors, who even forced them to dance
in sight of the French, on whose protection they had relied. The
governor, M. de Lauzon, a weak, incapable man, only noted for his
greed, was perfectly paralysed at a scene without example, even in
those days of terror, when the Iroquois were virtually masters of the
St. Lawrence valley from Huron to Gaspe.

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At this very time a number of Frenchmen--probably fifty in all--were in
the power of the Iroquois, and the governor had no nerve to make even
an effort to save the Hurons from their fate. To understand the
situation of affairs, it is necessary to go back for a few years.
After the dispersion of the Hurons, the Iroquois, principally the
Mohawks, became bolder than ever on the St. Lawrence. M. du
Plessis-Bochat, the governor of Three Rivers, lost his life in a
courageous but ill-advised attempt to chastise a band of warriors that
were in ambush not far from the fort. Father Buteux was killed on his
way to his mission of the Attikamegs or White Fish tribe, at the
headwaters of the St. Maurice. In 1653, Father Poucet was carried off
to a Mohawk village, where he was tortured in the usual fashion, and
then sent back to Canada with offers of peace. The Senecas and Cayugas
were then busily engaged in exterminating the Eries, who had burned one
of their most famous chiefs, whose last words at the stake were
prophetic: "Eries, you burn in me an entire nation!"

A peace, or rather a truc