is early summer of 1604. Pontgrave
leaves stores with De Monts and sails on up to Tadoussac. De Monts
enters the little bay of St. Mary's, off the northwest corner of Nova
Scotia, and sends his people ashore to explore.

Signs of minerals they seek, rushing pellmell through the woods, gleeful
as boys out of school. The forest is pathless and dense with June
undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction. The company
scatters. Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than
to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill.
Going in the direction of his comrades' voices, he suddenly realizes that
he has left his sword at the spring. The priest hurries back for the
sword, loses his companions' voices, and when he would return, finds that
he is hopelessly lost. The last shafts of {35} sunlight disappear. The
chill of night settles on the darkening woods. The priest shouts till he
is hoarse and fires off his pistol; but the woods muffle all sound but
the scream of the wild cat or the uncanny hoot of the screech owl. Aubry
wanders desperately on and on in the dark, his cassock torn to tatters by
the brushwood, his way blocked by the undisturbed windfall of countless
ages, . . . on and on, . . . till gray dawn steals through the forest and
midday wears to a second night.

Back at the boat were wild alarm and wilder suspicions. Could the
Huguenots, with whom Aubry had battled so violently, have murdered him?
De Monts scouted the notion as unworthy, but the suspicion clung in spite
of fiercest denials. All night cannon were fired from the vessel and
bonfires kept blazing on shore; but two or three days passed, and the
priest did not come.

De Monts then sails on up the Bay of Fundy, which he calls French Bay,
and by the merest chance sheers through an opening eight hundred feet
wide to the right and finds himself in the beautiful lakelike Basin of
Annapolis, broad chough to harbor all the French navy, with a shore line
of wooded meadows like home-land parks. Poutrincourt is so delighted, he
at once asks for an estate here and names the domain Port Royal.

On up Fundy Bay sails De Monts, Samuel Champlain ever leaning over decks,
making those maps and drawings which have come down from that early
voyage. The tides carry to a broad river on the north side. It is St.
John's Day. They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking
vainly for more minerals. Wes