yellow apples.

We drive through a fertile valley, where runs a placid river amid many
meadows, gardens, and orchards, until at last it empties into a
picturesque basin, where the landscape shows a harmonious blending of
mountain and water, of cultivated fields and ancient forest trees.
Here we see a quiet old town, whose roofs are green with the moss of
many years, where willows and grassy mounds tell of a historic past,
where the bells of ox-teams tinkle in the streets, and commerce itself
wears a look of reminiscence. For we have come to the banks of that
basin where the French, in the first years of the seventeenth century,
laid the foundations of a settlement which, despite all its early
misfortunes, has lasted until the present time, though it is the
English tongue that is now spoken and the Englishman who is now the
occupant.

Early in the leafy month of June, 1604, the French under De Monts
sailed into this spacious basin, and saw for the first time its grassy
meadows, its numerous streams, its cascades tumbling from the hills,
its forest-clad mountains. "This," said Champlain, who called it Port
Royal, "was the most commodious and pleasant place that we had yet seen
in this country."

{53}

It appears that the adventurers left France in the early part of April.
When the King had been once won over to the project, he consented to
give De Monts and his associates an entire monopoly of the fur-trade
throughout the wide domain of which he was to be the viceroy. The
expedition was chiefly supported by the merchants of the Protestant
town of La Rochelle, and was regarded with much jealousy by other
commercial cities. Protestants were to enjoy in the new colony all the
advantages they were then allowed in France. The Catholics were
appeased by the condition that the conversion of the natives should be
reserved especially for the priests of their own church.

The man of most note, after De Monts and Champlain, was Jean de
Biencourt, a rich nobleman of Picardy, better known in Acadian history
as the Baron de Poutrincourt, who had distinguished himself as a
soldier in the civil wars. A man of energy and enterprise, he was well
fitted to assist in the establishment of a colony.

De Monts and his associates reached without accident the low
fir-covered shores of Nova Scotia, visited several of its harbours, and
finally sailed into the Bay of Fundy, which was named Baie Francaise.
The French explored the coast