orays, scalpings, butcherings, and burnings. As dreams were
their oracles, the camp was wild with fright. They sent out no scouts
and placed no guard; but, with each repetition of these nocturnal
terrors, they came flocking in a body to beg admission within the fort.
The women and children were allowed to enter the yard and remain during
the night, while anxious fathers and jealous husbands shivered in the
darkness without.

On one occasion, a group of wretched beings was seen on the farther bank
of the St. Lawrence, like wild animals driven by famine to the borders
of the settler's clearing. The river was full of drifting ice, and there
was no crossing without risk of life. The Indians, in their desperation,
made the attempt; and midway their canoes were ground to atoms among the
tossing masses. Agile as wild-cats, they all leaped upon a huge raft of
ice, the squaws carrying their children on their shoulders, a feat
at which Champlain marveled when he saw their starved and emaciated
condition. Here they began a wail of despair; when happily the pressure
of other masses thrust the sheet of ice against the northern shore. They
landed and soon made their appearance at the fort, worn to skeletons and
horrible to look upon. The French gave them food, which they devoured
with a frenzied avidity, and, unappeased, fell upon a dead dog left
on the snow by Champlain for two months past as a bait for foxes. They
broke this carrion into fragments, and thawed and devoured it, to the
disgust of the spectators, who tried vainly to prevent them.

This was but a severe access of the periodical famine which, during
winter, was a normal condition of the Algonquin tribes of Acadia and the
Lower St. Lawrence, who, unlike the cognate tribes of New England, never
tilled the soil, or made any reasonable provision against the time of
need.

One would gladly know how the founders of Quebec spent the long hours of
their first winter; but on this point the only man among them, perhaps,
who could write, has not thought it necessary to enlarge. He himself
beguiled his leisure with trapping foxes, or hanging a dead dog from
a tree and watching the hungry martens in their efforts to reach it.
Towards the close of winter, all found abundant employment in nursing
themselves or their neighbors, for the inevitable scurvy broke out with
virulence. At the middle of May, only eight men of the twenty-eight were
alive, and of these half were suffering from