having even been consulted in this matter,
fearing to see the interests of his nation sacrificed, he lies in wait
with his troop at Famine Creek, falls upon the delegates, and, killing a
number of them, makes the rest prisoners. On the statement of the latter
that they were going on an embassy to Ville-Marie, he feigns surprise,
and is astonished that the French governor-general should have sent him
to attack men who were going to treat with him. He then sets them at
liberty, keeping a single one of them, whom he hastens to deliver to M.
de Durantaye, governor of Michilimackinac; the latter, ignorant of the
negotiations with the Iroquois, has the prisoner shot in spite of the
protestations of the wretched man, who the Rat pretends is mad. The plan
of the Huron chief has succeeded; it remains now only to reap the fruits
of it. He frees an old Iroquois who has long been detained in captivity
and sends him to announce to his compatriots that the French are seeking
in the negotiations a cowardly means of ridding themselves of their
foes. This news exasperated the Five Nations; henceforth peace was
impossible, and the Iroquois went to join the English, with whom, on the
pretext of the dethronement of James II, war was again about to break
out. M. de Callieres, governor of Montreal, set out for France to lay
before the king a plan for the conquest of New York; the monarch adopted
it, but, not daring to trust its execution to M. de Denonville, he
recalled him in order to entrust it to Count de Frontenac, now again
appointed governor.

We can easily conceive that in the danger thus threatening the colony M.
de Denonville should have taken pains to surround himself with all the
men whose aid might be valuable to him. "You will have this year," wrote
M. de Brisacier to M. Glandelet, "the joy of seeing again our two
prelates. You will find the first more holy and more than ever dead to
himself; and the second will appear to you all that you can desire him
to be for the particular consolation of the seminary and the good of New
France." On the request of the governor-general, in fact, Mgr. de Laval
saw the obstacle disappear which had opposed his departure, and he
hastened to take advantage of it. He set out in the spring of 1688, at
that period of the year when vegetation begins to display on all sides
its festoons of verdure and flowers, and transforms Normandy and
Touraine, that garden of France, into genuine groves; the calm of