h slush and
water up to their knees; then came the shivering northwest wind, and all
was hard again. In nineteen days they reached the town of Cahiague,
and, lounging around their smoky lodge-fires, the hunters forgot the
hardships of the past.

For Champlain there was no rest. A double motive urged him,--discovery,
and the strengthening of his colony by widening its circle of trade.
First, he repaired to Carhagouha; and here he found the friar, in his
hermitage, still praying, preaching, making catechisms, and struggling
with the manifold difficulties of the Huron tongue. After spending
several weeks together, they began their journeyings, and in three days
reached the chief village of the Nation of Tobacco, a powerful
tribe akin to the Hurons, and soon to be incorporated with them. The
travellers visited seven of their towns, and then passed westward to
those of the people whom Champlain calls the Cheveax Releves, and whom
he commends for neatness and ingenuity no less than he condemns them for
the nullity of their summer attire. As the strangers passed from town
to town, their arrival was everywhere the signal of festivity. Champlain
exchanged pledges of amity with his hosts, and urged them to come down
with the Hurons to the yearly trade at Montreal.

Spring was now advancing, and, anxious for his colony, he turned
homeward, following that long circuit of Lake Huron and the Ottawa which
Iroquois hostility made the only practicable route. Scarcely had he
reached the Nipissings, and gained from them a pledge to guide him to
that delusive northern sea which never ceased to possess his thoughts,
when evil news called him back in haste to the Huron towns. A band of
those Algonquins who dwelt on the great island in the Ottawa had spent
the winter encamped near Cahiague, whose inhabitants made them a present
of an Iroquois prisoner, with the friendly intention that they should
enjoy the pleasure of torturing him. The Algonquins, on the contrary,
fed, clothed, and adopted him. On this, the donors, in a rage, sent a
warrior to kill the Iroquois. He stabbed him, accordingly, in the midst
of the Algonquin chiefs, who in requital killed the murderer. Here was
a casus belli involving most serious issues for the French, since the
Algonquins, by their position on the Ottawa, could cut off the Hurons
and all their allies from coming down to trade. Already a fight had
taken place at Cahiague the principal Algonquin chief had been