with joy the arrival of the sons of the blessed Jean Baptiste de la
Salle, the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, so well known throughout
the world for their modesty and success in teaching.

The girls of the colony were no less well looked after than the boys; at
Quebec, the Ursuline nuns, established in that city by Madame de la
Peltrie, trained them for the future irreproachable mothers of families.
The attempts made to Gallicize the young savages met with no success in
the case of the boys, but were better rewarded by the young Indian
girls. "We have Gallicized," writes Mother Mary of the Incarnation, "a
number of Indian girls, both Hurons and Algonquins, whom we subsequently
married to Frenchmen, who get along with them very well. There is one
among them who reads and writes to perfection, both in her native Huron
tongue and in French; no one can discern or believe that she was born a
savage. The commissioner was so delighted at this that he induced her to
write for him something in the two languages, in order to take it to
France and show it as an extraordinary production." Further on she adds,
"It is a very difficult thing, not to say impossible, to Gallicize or
civilize them. We have more experience in this than any one else, and we
have observed that of a hundred who have passed through our hands we
have hardly civilized one. We find in them docility and intelligence,
but when we least expect it, they climb over our fence and go off to run
the woods with their parents, where they find more pleasure than in all
the comforts of our French houses."

At Montreal it was the venerable Marguerite Bourgeoys who began to teach
in a poor hovel the rudiments of the French tongue. This humble school
was transformed a little more than two centuries later into one of the
most vast and imposing edifices of the city of Montreal. Fire destroyed
it in 1893, but we must hope that this majestic monument of Ville-Marie