aded by the
friar, in his white robe with a young lad as his attendant and some
thirty people following. Gyles asked some of the prisoners, who had
lately been taken by privateers and brought to the Jemseg, whether
they would go back with him to witness the ceremony, but they
emphatically refused to witness it and when Gyles expressed his
determination to go, one of them, named Woodbury, said he was "as bad
as a papist and a d--d fool." The procession passed and re-passed from
end to end of the field with solemn words of exorcism accompanied by
the tinkling of a little bell, the blackbirds constantly rising before
them only to light behind them. "At their return," says Gyles, "I told
a French lad that the friar had done no service and recommended them
to shoot the birds. The lad left me, as I thought, to see what the
friar would say to my observation, which turned out to be the case,
for he told the lad that the sins of the people were so great that he
could not prevail against those birds."

A story analogous to this is related in Dr. Samuel Peters' history of
Connecticut, of the celebrated George Whitefield, the New England
Independent minister and revivalist: "Time not having destroyed the
wall of the fort at Saybrooke, Whitefield, in 1740, attempted to bring
down the wall as Joshua did those of Jericho, hoping thereby to
convince the multitude of his divine mission. He walked seven times
around the fort with prayer and ram's horn blowing, he called on the
angel of Joshua to do as he had done at the walls of Jericho; but the
angel was deaf to his call and the wall remained. Thereupon George
cried aloud: 'This town is accursed and the wall shall stand as a
monument of a sinful people!'"

Mathieu d'Amours, Sieur de Freneuse, seems to have thought seriously
of leaving the St. John river on account of the difficulties and
discouragements of his situation, for on the 6th August, 1696, he made
out to one Michel Chartier, of Schoodic, in Acadia, a lease of his
seignioral manor of Freneuse, consisting of 30 arpents (acres) of
arable land under the plough, meadow, forest and undergrowth, with
houses, barns and stables thereon, a cart and plough rigged ready for
work; also all the oxen, cows, bullocks, goats, pigs, poultry,
furniture and household utensils that might remain from the sale which
he proposed to make. Chartier was to enjoy the right of trade with the
Indians through the whole extent of the manor except where lan