The forests were full of snow; and the soft, moist flakes were still
falling thickly, obscuring the air, beplastering the gray trunks,
weighing to the earth the boughs of spruce and pine, and hiding every
footprint of the narrow path. The Fathers missed their way, and toiled
on till night, shaking down at every step from the burdened branches a
shower of fleecy white on their black cassocks. Night overtook them in a
spruce swamp. Here they made a fire with great difficulty, cut the
evergreen boughs, piled them for a bed, and lay down. The storm
presently ceased; and, "praised be God," writes one of the travellers,
"we passed a very good night." [ Jogues and Garnier in Lalemant, Relation
des Hurons, 1640, 95. ]

In the morning they breakfasted on a morsel of corn bread, and, resuming
their journey, fell in with a small party of Indians, whom they followed
all day without food. At eight in the evening they reached the first
Tobacco town, a miserable cluster of bark cabins, hidden among forests
and half buried in snow-drifts, where the savage children, seeing the two
black apparitions, screamed that Famine and the Pest were coming.
Their evil fame had gone before them. They were unwelcome guests;
nevertheless, shivering and famished as they were, in the cold and
darkness, they boldly pushed their way into one of these dens of
barbarism. It was precisely like a Huron house. Five or six fires
blazed on the earthen floor, and around them were huddled twice that
number of families, sitting, crouching, standing, or flat on the ground;
old and young, women and men, children and dogs, mingled pell-mell.
The scene would have been a strange one by daylight: it was doubly
strange by the flicker and glare of the lodge-fires. Scowling brows,
sidelong looks of distrust and fear, the screams of scared children,
the scolding of squaws, the growling of wolfish dogs,--this was the