prayers soon appeared, he tells us, in a direct interposition of
Providence, which so disposed the heart of Pierre that he quarrelled with
the French commandant, who thereupon closed the fort against him.
He then repaired to his friends and relatives in the woods, but only to
encounter a rebuff from a young squaw to whom he made his addresses.
On this, he turned his steps towards the mission-house, and, being
unfitted by his French education for supporting himself by hunting,
begged food and shelter from the priests. Le Jeune gratefully accepted
him as a gift vouchsafed by Heaven to his prayers, persuaded a lackey at
the fort to give him a cast-off suit of clothes, promised him maintenance,
and installed him as his teacher.

Seated on wooden stools by the rough table in the refectory, the priest
and the Indian pursued their studies. "How thankful I am," writes Le
Jeune, "to those who gave me tobacco last year! At every difficulty I
give my master a piece of it, to make him more attentive."

[ Relation, 1633, 7. He continues: "Ie ne scaurois assez rendre graces a
Nostre Seigneur de cet heureux rencontre. . . . Que Dieu soit beny pour
vn iamais, sa prouidence est adorable, et sa bonte n'a point de limites." ]

Meanwhile, winter closed in with a severity rare even in Canada. The
St. Lawrence and the St. Charles were hard frozen; rivers, forests,
and rocks were mantled alike in dazzling sheets of snow. The humble
mission-house of Notre-Dame des Anges was half buried in the drifts,
which, heaped up in front where a path had been dug through them, rose
two feet above the low eaves. The priests, sitting at night before the
blazing logs of their wide-throated chimney, heard the trees in the
neighboring forest cracking with frost, with a sound like the report of a
pistol. Le Jeune's ink froze, and his fingers were benumbed, as he