appeared at the camp, foaming at the mouth, threw down the lodges,
overset the kettle, and chased the shrieking squaws into the woods.
His brother Mestigoit rekindled the fire, and slung the kettle anew; when
Pierre, who meanwhile had been raving like a madman along the shore,
reeled in a fury to the spot to repeat his former exploit. Mestigoit
anticipated him, snatched the kettle from the fire, and threw the
scalding contents in his face. "He was never so well washed before in
his life," says Le Jeune; "he lost all the skin of his face and breast.
Would to God his heart had changed also!" [ 1 ] He roared in his frenzy
for a hatchet to kill the missionary, who therefore thought it prudent to
spend the night in the neighboring woods. Here he stretched himself on
the earth, while a charitable squaw covered him with a sheet of
birch-bark. "Though my bed," he writes, "had not been made up since the
creation of the world, it was not hard enough to prevent me from
sleeping."

[ "Iamais il ne fut si bien laue, il changea de peau en la face et en
tout l'estomach: pleust a Dieu que son ame eust change aussi bien que son
corps!"--Relation, 1634, 59. ]

Such was his initiation into Indian winter life. Passing over numerous
adventures by water and land, we find the party, on the twelfth of
November, leaving their canoes on an island, and wading ashore at low
tide over the flats to the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. As two
other bands had joined them, their number was increased to forty-five
persons. Now, leaving the river behind, they entered those savage
highlands whence issue the springs of the St. John,--a wilderness of
rugged mountain-ranges, clad in dense, continuous forests, with no human
tenant but this troop of miserable rovers, and here and there some
kindred band, as miserable as they. Winter had set in, and already dead