ine,
with a direction to tell the four ringleaders that they had been given
him by his Basque friends at Tadoussac, and to invite them to share
the good cheer. They came aboard in the evening, and were seized and
secured. "Voyla done mes galants bien estonnez," writes Champlain.

It was ten o'clock, and most of the men on shore were asleep. They were
wakened suddenly, and told of the discovery of the plot and the arrest
of the ringleaders. Pardon was then promised them, and they were
dismissed again to their beds, greatly relieved; for they had lived
in trepidation, each fearing the other. Duval's body, swinging from a
gibbet, gave wholesome warning to those he had seduced; and his head was
displayed on a pike, from the highest roof of the buildings, food for
birds and a lesson to sedition. His three accomplices were carried by
Pontgrave to France, where they made their atonement in the galleys.

It was on the eighteenth of September that Pontgrave set sail, leaving
Champlain with twenty-eight men to hold Quebec through the winter.
Three weeks later, and shores and hills glowed with gay prognostics of
approaching desolation,--the yellow and scarlet of the maples, the deep
purple of the ash, the garnet hue of young oaks, the crimson of the
tupelo at the water's edge, and the golden plumage of birch saplings
in the fissures of the cliff. It was a short-lived beauty. The forest
dropped its festal robes. Shrivelled and faded, they rustled to the
earth. The crystal air and laughing sun of October passed away, and
November sank upon the shivering waste, chill and sombre as the tomb.

A roving band of Montagnais had built their huts near the buildings,
and were busying themselves with their autumn eel-fishery, on which
they greatly relied to sustain their miserable lives through the winter.
Their slimy harvest being gathered, and duly smoked and dried, they gave
it for safe-keeping to Champlain, and set out to hunt beavers. It was
deep in the winter before they came back, reclaimed their eels, built
their birch cabins again, and disposed themselves for a life of ease,
until famine or their enemies should put an end to their enjoyments.
These were by no means without alloy. While, gorged with food, they
lay dozing on piles of branches in their smoky huts, where, through the
crevices of the thin birch bark, streamed in a cold capable at times of
congealing mercury, their slumbers were beset with nightmare visions of
Iroquois f