eches. "These are our fathers," he had announced
to the sixty chiefs gathered for the nonce in the quadrangle of the
Fort. "We love them more than we love ourselves. The whole French
nation honours them. They do not go among you for your furs. They have
left their friends and their country to show you the way to the happy
hunting-grounds. If you love the French, as you say you do, then love
and honour these our fathers, and care for them in your distant
villages."

But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the Indian mind was no more
sure. Above all else it lacked definiteness; it was touched by
rhetoric. Champlain's auditors had been thrilled with deep emotion.
They were for embarking at once with the Jesuits. Then they had
faltered, and by the next day they had decided to depart without them.
For another year, therefore, the fathers had remained at Notre Dame
des Anges, studying the Huron language for future use, and caring
meantime for the spiritual welfare of the half-hundred French
residents of Quebec.

The summer of 1634 once more saw the city given over to the visiting
Hurons. The old persuasive palaver was repeated, and this time with
more success. When the trading fair was over, Brebeuf, Daniel, and
Davost set off with the savage fleet, each in a different canoe,
facing a journey of nine hundred miles fraught with many perils, but
with none so ominous as the sullen and menacing mood of their heathen
conductors.

Week after week they pressed toilfully up the St. Lawrence and Ottawa;
barefooted they struggled over the rocky portages, with a pittance of
pounded maize for their daily ration, and mother-earth for their
nightly couch. Davost's guide robbed and abandoned him at an island in
the Upper Ottawa. Daniel was likewise deserted; but the giant Brebeuf
yielded to no hardships, and surpassed even the seasoned savages in
strength and endurance. On the shore of the Georgian Bay, however, his
guide at length abandoned him. But Brebeuf had been here in a former
year, and his instinctive woodcraft guided him twenty miles through
the forest to the palisaded village of Ihonatiria.

"Echom has come again," cried the inhabitants, as they recognised the
towering figure of the Jesuit who had departed from them five years
before; and they opened again their lodges to the missionary.

[Illustration: MONUMENT TO THE FIRST CANADIAN MISSIONARY]

After days of anxious waiting, Brebeuf had the joy of seeing Daniel
and Da