mingled emotions of wonder, perplexity, fear, respect, and awe. From the
first, they had held them answerable for the changes of the weather,
commending them when the crops were abundant, and upbraiding them in
times of scarcity. They thought them mighty magicians, masters of life
and death; and they came to them for spells, sometimes to destroy their
enemies, and sometimes to kill grasshoppers. And now it was whispered
abroad that it was they who had bewitched the nation, and caused the pest
which threatened to exterminate it.

It was Isaac Jogues who first heard this ominous rumor, at the town of
Onnentisati, and it proceeded from the dwarfish sorcerer already
mentioned, who boasted himself a devil incarnate. The slander spread
fast and far. Their friends looked at them askance; their enemies
clamored for their lives. Some said that they concealed in their houses
a corpse, which infected the country,--a perverted notion, derived from
some half-instructed neophyte, concerning the body of Christ in the
Eucharist. Others ascribed the evil to a serpent, others to a spotted
frog, others to a demon which the priests were supposed to carry in the
barrel of a gun. Others again gave out that they had pricked an infant
to death with awls in the forest, in order to kill the Huron children by
magic. "Perhaps," observes Father Le Mercier, "the Devil was enraged
because we had placed a great many of these little innocents in Heaven."

[ "Le diable enrageoit peutestre de ce que nous avions place dans le ciel
quantite de ces petits innocens."--Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1638,
12 (Cramoisy). ]

The picture of the Last Judgment became an object of the utmost terror.
It was regarded as a charm. The dragons and serpents were supposed to be
the demons of the pest, and the sinners whom they were so busily