At the outset the long, dangerous voyage barred the weak and the faint of heat. The French proverb, "whoever would learn to pray to God must go upon the sea", dates from this age. It was a perilous undertaking to put to sea in a sailing vessel of two hundred tons and become the sport of every wind and wave for any time from fifty to ninety days. The discomforts of life on board these wooden prisons can scarcely be conceived. Even fresh drinking water was a luxury beyond their reach, very ofen from the outset, and always after four or five days. Mother Marie de l'Incarnation mentions that the greatest suffering came from thirst, as all the water had become bad before the ship left the roadstead. Another nun, explaining her unbounded delight over the poor, cramped accommodation awaiting her at Quebec, write, "But poverty and discomfort in homes that are built upon the land seem palaces and riches to those who come forth from a house floating at the will of the winds and waves". Winds and waves, however, were not the only dangers. When the French captain eluded his English, Dutch and Spanish rivals of the high seas, he had still to face the fog-wrapped icebergs and the dangerous rocks and currents of the great gulf and river. No wonder Father le Jeune left the boat with a clearer understanding of David's words, "I hold my soul always ready et any moment to sacrifice it to God."

Wild and strange was the new land's greeting. The white whales floundering in the gulf, the seals, the walruses and the screaming wild fowl, the solitary inhabitants of the islands in the Lower St. Lawrence, gave their welcome a distinctly artic setting. Pines, firs and birches, interspersed by huge desolate rocks, made up a frowing landscape, whenever their little boat sailed closely enough by either shore to see it, and over all this vast sweep of water and wood hung solitude and silence supreme. "Dull would he be of soul who could pass by" this stern poetry of the wilderness without a solemn realization that life in that great beyond was going to call forth whatever of the patient, the courageous and heroic in him lay.

Rarely below Tadoussac would the voyager meet even a prowling Indian. But once this earliest trading post was reached the Red Men swarmed about in appalling numbers. When the Récollet Friar, Gervais Mothier, met here his first band of sauvages, he was greatly frightened, suspecting them to be demons. His experience was not unique. We find many comments on the terrifying aspects of those hundreds of bold, hilarious savages in the first flush of excitement from barter and newly acquired wealth. At Tadoussac, too, the newcomers made their first unpleasant acquaintance with the insect life of the woods. As one writer describles it, "I went ashore at Tadoussac and I thought I would be eaten up by mosquitoes, which are little troublesome in the extreme... They are diagreeable beyond description... some people are compelled to go to bed after coming from the woods, they are so badly stung. I have seen men whose necks, cheeks and faces were so swollen that you could not see their eyes." One of the Récollet fathers who came over with the Héberts in 1617 celebrated his first mass at Tadoussac in a chapel built of branches, while two sailors stood beside him with green boughs to drive off the mosquitoes.

The way was rough and the welcome wild, but few were the French who proved this. More than eighty years elapsed afer Breton, Jacques Cartier, had explored the St. Lawrence and clamed its banks for his king before a real settler made his home there. A few stray fur-traders, about the close of the sixteenth century, were the first to come, but they always hurried home after a brief summer visit. Them, in 1608, there came a company bolder than the rest, who decided to risk a permanent stake in the country, since this would give them a tremendous advantage over all competitors. The leader of this enterprise was an experienced trader, de Monts, and he had with him the king's geographer, Samuel de Champlain, to whom, of course, was delegated the important part of choosing a suitable site for the future trading post. As every school child knows to-day, Champlain's choice fell on the rock of Québec, and our famous city had beginning in a fur-trader's warehouse and winter "habitation". The record of this first winter at Quebec, 1608-1609, while in no degree unique in early colonization experience, was not likely to make spendig the winter in Canada a very popular idea. Only eight of the twenty-eight men left behind were alive to greet the ships the next spring.

No, there was no clamour of men and women in France to emigrate to Canada. A land of ice and snow and scurvy did not appeal to any as a future home. Nor was there any call from Canada for men. The fur-traders had no desire for settlers, particularly as the king would send such people over at their expense, in part payement for the monopoly of trade he granted to them. But the king was not pressing this part of their agreement. The reorganisation of old France, rather than the planning and bulding of New-France, filled his mind and ambitions. Nevertheless, Old France was soon to found a colony in the New World. One man achieved this. Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec, was the fouder of Canada also.

Chanplain had no definite plan of his life-work before him in 1608. The exigencies of the time and his own high ideals of patriotism and duty unfolded it to him gradually. He had now almost a decade achivement in the New World, in the West Indies and Acadia, to his credit. This reputation had won for him the position of geographer for his sovereign in connection with the fur- traders' expeditions. The fur-traders welcomed him on these terms. Each journey of exploration he made inland enlarged their trading area and brought them pelts from new tribes.

For Champlain himself this work seemed but a stepping-stone to a yet dearer project. His innermost desire was to find through the New World a short cut to China. Lescarbot writes of him three years before, "Champlain promise never to cease his efforts until he has found either a western or northen sea opening the route to China", and adds the ominous summing up, "which sa many have thus sought in vain". If such a sea was to be found Champlain was the man to do it. He was a born explorer. His life and aspirations rang true to the old Ulysses spirit:

In 1609 Champlain looked on Canada as merely his stepping-stone to China. His next five years of travel and exploration changed his attitude. The inevitable happenend. The magnificient country wove its spell around him. He became enamoured with its charms and possibilities. The grandeur of the St. Laurence and Great Lakes, the beauty of Lake Champlain and the Falls of Montnorency, both discovered and named by him, and the vastness of the Ottawa valley and the inland country it drained, had, by 1616, converted the explorer's heart into a founder's and builder's. He had noticed that the farther up the St. Lawrence he went the richer became the soil and the prospects for settlers. As the country, it is beautiful and pleasant, and brings all sorts of grains and seeds to maturity. There are all the kinds of trees therre that we have in our own forets,... and a great many fruits... such as walnuts, cherries, plum trees, vines, raspberries, strawberries, green and red gooseberries, and good many other fruits... There are several kinds of good herbs and roots. There are plenty of fish to be caught in the rivers and there are a great many meadows and an enormous quantity of game.

Certainly it was goodly land. If the French did not enter in now and possess it, how long until their rivals, the English or Dutch, would do so? Champlain's patriotism was stirred. Yet he knew well the cost. Neither his unbounded faith for, and administration in, the new land, nor his patriotic love for the old and its prestige, blinded him to the humdrum, prosaic business it would be to plant and nurse a colony on the rock of Quebec. He saw clearly the inherent difficulties. He had spent too many fearful winters with the Fur Company's labourers sickening and dying around their smoky caboose fire of green wood, with nothing to eat but salt pork and musty flour from France, not to realise the practical difficulties and the dearth of men fitted and willing to cope with them and to make homes for themselves and families on those densely wooded shores.

With exultation Champlain remembered, in his hour of question and need, one man and one woman who could build up a genuine home under such untoward conditions. He had met them some dozen years before in Acadia. In 1604, he and his comrades of de Monts' Fur Company had founded their first trading post in New France, and their most efficient helper had been Louis Hébert at St. Croix ; after a horrible winter there they moved the following year to Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, and after another winter here Hébert returned to France, but in 1610 sailed again for Port Royal with his wife. Champlain was perfectly satisfied now that if he could persuade these Port Royal friends to come to Quebec, to be pattern, so to speak, for his other settlers, all would be well with his colony. It was on the pratical, solid, sterling worth of Louis Hébert and his wife Marie Rollet that Champlain's hopes for the future of New France were builded. Time was nobly to prove how staunch a bulwark he had chosen.

Louis Hébert was the apothecary at Port Royal and one of the most trusted and useful men there. Lescarbot writes, "Apart from the training he possesses in his profession, he took pleasure in working the soil". After the destruction of this settlement by the English en 1613, he returned to a chemist shop in his native city, Paris. Champlain now promised him, partly as the representative of the King's Government in New France, and partly on behalf of the Fur Compagny, which was obliged by its agreement with the King to undertake the expense of settlers, that if he would bring his family to Quebec they would be supported for two years and paid two hundred crowns for three years. On this understanding Hébert and his wife sold their Paris shop to buy the equipment needed for the new home, and set sail with their three children from Honfleur, April 11th, 1617. No sooner had the Compagny been able to pledge the Héberts, than it broke faith. It would give them only halt the money, and this condition that they all agreed to serve the Compagny during the said three years. Beside, whatever they grew was was to sold to the Compagny at home prices and to be paid in merchandise at Canadian prices. They were bound by writings to take no part in the fur trade. Lastly, the apothecary was always to serve the Compagny professionally without reward.

It was a hard bargain, and it was a hard prospect ahead. A few wooden houses, more or less dilapidated, since they had been run up quickly out of green lumber eight years before, made up Quebec in 1617. In the semi-clearing about them there was only an arpent and a half in cultivation, the garden of peas and onions of the Récollet Friars, who had come as missionaries to trading post two years before. Few domestic animals or fowl were in sight, for the stock had been sacrificed in the general dearth of food before the arrival of the long-expected supply boat. Its coming brought only cruel disappointment. The callous, money-grasping Compagny, while forbidding food to be grown at Quebec for fear the interest in hunting would be diminished, grudged to send out ample supplies from France. The length of this voyage, about sixty-five days, caused a characteristic shortage. The settlers' supplies had been largely eaten up on board, as well as a large part of the stores which Madame Hébert had pacted for her own family's use: it did not take long, evidently, for Madame Marie Rollet`s kind and provident ways to become known to her neighbours. For the famishing men at Quebec there was left but a barrel of pork, so small that Father Sagar relates that one man carried it on his shoulder from the dock to the warehouse.

The newcomers were met by a motley throng. First they would be petrified by the numerous Indians, who, were at that time in very riotous temper. The strife and rivalry of the traders debauched them in every possible way. They had unlimited supplies of drink and not few firearms. Eight years later, when, however, they were more restrained, as an attempt had been made to set up an administration of justice in the meantime, a Jesuit father writes: "In fact, since I have been here I have seen none but drunken savages ; they are heard shouting and raving day and night ; they fight and wound each other, they kill the cattle of Madame Hébert, and when they have returned to their senses they say to you, 'It is not we who did that, but thou who gravest us this drink'". In 1617 the Indians were in a very sullen mood, due to the unjust dealings and disorderly acts of many of the traders. Shortly after the Héberts landed they murdered tow Frenchmen, and although Champlain was too openly at their mercy to punish them, they became fearful of results, and, mustering four hundred strong, determined to annihilate the French. Champlain was able to buy them off, like children, with generous gifts of food, but this expedient left the victors to face, unarmed, their more deadly foes, famine and scurvy, during the following winter.

But among the Indians Madame Marie Rollet would soon spy out some of her own people. In 1617 there were three families at the "habitation" in the employ of the Compagny. They were Abraham Martin, with his wife Marguerite Langlois and their daughter Anne: Pierre Desportes, and his wife Marie Françoise Langlois and their daughter Hélène, who in the years to come was to marry a son of Louis Hébert ; and Nicolas Pivert and his wife Marguerite Le Sage, who had no children. Beside, there were about fifty other Frenchmen then at Quebec as workmen for the Compagny.

Champlain returned to France in the autumn and left the Hébert family alone with their neighbours for the next three years. And eventful years they were for them. During the first their daughter was married and died. And then her husband died also. This first marriage of New- France, when Anne Hébert became the wife of Etienne Jonquest, a native of Normandy, was celebrated in little wooden chapel of the Récollet Friars, and in the midst of forest splendid in its autumn dress of bronze and red and yellow frost-touched leaves. It is sad to remember that Madame Jonquest was not only the first white bride in Canada or New-England, but also the first white mother to lay down her life for her child. Neither her mother's nursing nor her father's medicine could counteract the first winter of famine and disease, and she died un child-birth in the spring. And very shortly after his wife's death Etienne Jonquest fell a victim to the same cruel conditions.

What terrible days of sadness and sorrow for the poor mother! Her husband, in accordance with his agreement, was away most of the time surperintending the Fur Compagny's trade at Tadoussac, or taking charge of their boats down the river. Louis Hébert had a hard, busy life, full of the usual drudgeries of pioneer labour, but he shared it with bold companions in the open amid the most magnificient surroundings of forest and streams. The stout-hearted wife whom he left behind faced a harder lot. Since she had reached the new land the area of her exploits had been very limited. She knew only the arrow quarters of her rude home and scarcely larger gardens. Among the burnt stumps of their unsightly clearing she could find consolation only in her work - heavy and unremitting, yet done in the spirit of love and ambition for her dear ones - and in her religious faith. Change, recreation, friendly intercourse with neighbours and other such homeland comforts were not for her.

But Marie Hébert never wavered. With unflinching energy and self-reliant courage she worked on. Two years later Sagar gives us the result in an attractive, if modest, picture of the little clearing up on the height, a mile away from the first houses on the water. He speaks of their stock, and of their field of Indian corn and peas, and of their garden, which contained a young apple tree brought from Normandy. This apple tree had a characteristic ending - some Indians tore it up one night in drunken sport. The Héberts' stump clearing was only seven acres in extent, but their house was of stone, thirty-eight feet by nineteen. It had fitted doors and windows, and probably a chimney for the smoke to escape, which would make it a veritable mansion in those days of caboose heating. Champlain's view of the Hébert home and surroundings is given by Madame Laura Conan thus:

"Champlain viewed with profound joy the building of his house. It appeared to him a flower of hope under the wide blue sky. The day the family settled there was for him a day of joy. He had at last true fireside in New France...

"With what happiness Hébert kindled the first fire on the hearth! Very sweet was that hour. The flame of the fire, the thousand little cracklings of the burning stick, carried joy to all hearts. Instead of a tent soaked with dew, they had at last a solid roof over their heads and the confort of warmth and shelter. Their household furnishings, brought from Paris, saw again the light of day. It could be forgetten that they were in a savage land and in a forest without bounds.

"Madame Marie Rollet Hébert, with bright and shining eyes, went to and fro, placing her furniture, arranging her linen in cupboards, and setting on the dresser her pretty dishes and near the fire her cooper bake-kettle.

"It was with deep feeling that Father Joseph Le Caron blessed the household of the pionner. It was as if he were celebrating the alliance of man and the soil of Canada. Futher, he saw, as in a dream, the workers of the earth, all those valiant pionniers who, axe in hand, thrust their way into the forest, to establish there their hearths, and he offered to God their heavy labour and heroic sacrifice".

The Hébert dwelling, if not the very first, was one of the first two stone buildings erected in New France. Until the first year, when the Récollet Fathers built a lime kiln, everything had been built of wood. The friars began their stone monastery and Indian school this year, as well as their chapel, Notre Dame des Anges, but these larger structures were not completed until Champlain's return whith more funds for them from friends in France. However, they seem also to have built a small stone house a mile from the Fort, beside the Hébert clearing, house a mile from the Fort, beside the Hébert clearing, and if so, those neighbouring abodes would be of the same age. Le Jeune's picture of a similar enterprise some years later brings home to us what labour the building of such a house involved. "It must be confessed that the work is great in these beginnings ; the men are the horses and oxen, they carry or drag wood, trees or stones... We must look after the castle, the little ground we have must be tilled, the harvest must be cut and gathered in. We must prepare firewood, which they have to get at some distance aways and without a cart.... They have made boards, have gone to the woods to get trees,... have made some furniture, tables and stools."

By the way, it is interesting, while we are surveying these new homesteads, to count the stock about the door of the Récollet Friars, since probablay their neigbours' was then much the same. We find several hogs, a pair of asses, a pair of geese, seven pairs of fowl and four pairs of ducks.

The prosperous appearance and prospects of the Hébert household in 1620 devived not a little nurture from the optimistic enthusiasm which Champlain that year radiated everywhere on his return from France, while, in its turn, this small nook of order and comparative plenty must have cheered and strengthened the zealous leader's sorely-tried faith in his own dreams of success. The fondation of his "castle in Spain" rested on Fur Compagny promises which had been made in France only to be broken in Canada. The Compagny had agreed to send eighty new settlers, some of whom were to help him rebuild the habitation and erect a new stone fort. They promised forty muskets, four arquebuses, and twenty-four pikes to defend the fort, and twenty-four spades and twelve reaping-hooks were to make up the pathetically primitive equipement for the men who were to plant and reap the harvest on the forest-cad promontory of Quebec. Two corn mills are mentioned, but they never got past Tadoussac. The increassing of live stock was left most conveniently vague. They were to bring over two bulls and as many heifers and sheep as they could. Poor as were these supplies, Champlain and his wife set sail in good spirits, feeling that a new day of prosperity was dawning. It needed all their landing. There years` absence had wrought havoc in his house. I found the habitation sa tumbled down and ruined it made me sad. The rain came in at all parts and the wind entered between the joinings of the planks, which had shrunken in drying. One wing had tumbled down.

In this dilemma we are tempted to picture Madame Rollet Hébert's hospitable roof becoming a haven of rest and encouragement for the weary and beatiful Helen Champlain. It so proved itself very often for others. The Récollet Friars and their Jesuit sucessors, when tired and disgusted by their labours in the unspeakable filth of the Indian wigwams, came to this estimable family to enjoyy the conforts of a clean French home, and the found there always a warm, heart-cheering welcome. Even the Indians were kindly treated there, and a little negro waif made it his home. But Madame Champlain, atthough stranded in Canadian wilds, evidently did not forget her rank. The Ursuline chronicles tell us definitely that during her four year's sojourn in Cananda she saw no other white woman than the three of her own household whom she brought with her. Let us hope the Ursuline Mother was not accurately informed.

It would darken our tradition of Madame Champlain's beauty and goodness if we had to believe that the four solitary women in the habitation and the three other solitary women in the little farm- house a mile aways had no cheering intercourse with one another.

But whether Marie Rollet had the honour of Madame Champlain's acquaintance or not, there is no doubt that her husband was fast becoming one of the foremost men in the little settlement. In their first Court of Justice, established in 1620, he was King's Procurator, and in the following year his name appears as one of the influential settlers, on a petition against the Fur Compagny presented to the king. However, it is to be feared that Marie Rollet had little time just then to discuss this petition with her husband, as only six days after the signing of it, on August 26th, 1621, thier only remaining daughter, Guillemette, was married to Guillaume Couillard. Couillard was a carpenter who had been in the employ of the Compagny since 1613, and was looked upon as one of their intelligent and trustworthy men. Champlain praises his energy and excellent disposition. The Couillards had ten children, six daughters and four sons.

Guillaume Hébert, Louis and Marie's other child, did not marry until 1634, when Hélène Desportes became his wife. They had three children, one sons and tow daughters. From these grandchildren and Couillards have sprung some of our most illustrious Canadians - the families of Jolliet, De Lery de Ramesay, d'Eschambault, Fournier, Dumais, Rinfret, as well as Mgr. Cardinal Taschereau, Archbishop Blanchet of Oregon, and Mgr. Taché of Red River.

On February 4th, 1623, the Héberts' industrious cultivating of their clearing had its reward. The Duc de Montmorency, then Viceroy of Canada, granted them free and full possession of their enclosure, which was to be henceforth known as the Seigneury of Sault au Matelot. In 1626 they acquired another grant, that of St. Joseph, situated on the River St-Charles, and with it was joined the title of Sieur d'Espinay.

The ever-growing prosperity of this plucky family shines out brightly in its setting of stagnation and adversity. Never did man strive harder than Champlain, and never did one batter himself more vainly against a stone wall of opposition than it was his lot to do from 1620 until his surrender of Quebec to the Kirkes in 1629. It mattered not whether he was trying to build a fort, or to establish a stock farm among the rank meadows of Cape Tourment, or to placate the Indians by the exchange of hostages and prisoners, he gained nothing. The Fur Compagny could pay a dividend of forty per cent., but they had no funds to bring out settlers, no funds to provide supplies for their own traders there, no funds to fortify Quebec, although rival merchants could always sell firearms to the Indians, and lastly, no funds for the establishment of justice and a strong government at their post. No wonder Champlain wrote in simple bitterness: "When a Compagny holds the purse in a country such as this and when they buy and assist those things only which seem good to them, those who command for the king are but little obeyed".

In these discouraging circumstances, Champlain and the poverty-pledged Récollets turned - very reluctantly, it must be admitted - to the Jesuits. The great material resources of this Order, their influence at Court, and their well-known energy and perseverence made our illstarred, but tenacious, colony builders believe that if the impossible could be done, these were the allies to help them to do it. Arrangements were made accordingly, and 1625 saw the first Jesuit Fathers, Lalemant, Brébeuf and Massé, arrive at Quebec. They started at once in a most workmanlike and pratical way to redeem both mission and colony. Workmen and supplies were brought over, land cleared and houses built, but the hand of fate was against them, an against Champlain. A fatal disaster in the early summer of 1627, in which their reinforcements and supplies from France were all lost in shipwreck off the Isle of Canseau, compelled Father Lalement to send his followers home that autumn, and to abandon their undertaking, at least for a season. He left six to hold the mission.

The year 1627 brought other griefs to the little band huddled around Cape Diamond, besides the withdrawal of the Jesuits. On january 26th, Louis Hébert, the patriarch of the colony, had a fall which caused his death. Father Sagard recounts in touching words the brave exhortation the infortunate man addressed to his family. And surely there were never survivors left more in need of comfortable words of counsel and faith to strengthen their hearts than Marie Rollet and her children.

When at last it becamee evident that some misfortune had befallen the colony's supplies this year, despair seized all but the bravest. Some threw themselves on the charity of the savages and went off to winter with them ; others attempted to make Gaspé, one hundred and thirty miles aways, in hopes of reaching France by a fishing-boat from there. Champlain selected some of the most weak and helpless - women and children whom the Compagny had sent out in their callous irony to augment the number of the settlers he was always so urgently demanding - and having built a boat with the aid of Couillard, commended him, as the most skilful and able-bodied man left, to pilot the boat and its passagers to Gaspé. But Couillard, afraid to being killed on the way by Indians, refused, even when threatened with imprisonment for disobedience. It is not hard to understand the feelings of his wife and her mother at his critical time. Only nine months before they had lost the head of their family, and if now their mainstay was to be snatched from them, what could they do? Share their last ounce of peas with hungry neighbors would they gladly, but to encourage their dearest to undertake this danger-fraught venture they simply could not and would not.

The next spring, however, find Marie Rollet and her son-in-law a lesson to all. Their colony may have fallen on evil days, but they have still unshaken faith in the future, as their great innovation of getting the first plough in the district bears ample testimony. But, alas! more was needed than Marie Rollet's buoyant, thrifty energy could accomplish. Once more succour for New France was started out plenteously from the home shores - this time by the Compagny of New France, generally called the Conpagny of the Hundred Associates, which had just been founded by Richelieu on a mush grander scale than its predecessor delinquents - but once more the help reached not the starving sons on the rock of Quebec.

The same spring of 1628 which saw the fleet of the Hundred Associates sail from Dieppe saw a very similar fleet leave an English port. It, too, was destined for Quebec. War had broken out again between France and England, and his small English squadron, under the command of the Kirkes brothers, was intented to capture New-France. When the Kirkes appeared before Quebec, Champlain's bold answer decided them to defer conclusions for the season. They turned back down the St. Laurence instead, burning the buildings and killing the animals on the stock farm at Cap Tourment. Then followed their supreme good fortune. They fell in with the French supply boats and were able to capture them all.

Two years had passed since provisions and ammunition had been received from home. Quebec was thrown entirely on her own resources. How inefficient these were is painfully revealed in the extremity of that following winter. None of the inhabitants about the fort had prepared even that most elementary necessity of Canadian winter life, summer-cut and summer-dried wood. Champlain tells us that in the depth of winter the cutting and dragging of their wood some two thousand paces exhausted all their strength. None of them had planted a single field. None of them could fish. The eel fishing was good, but Indians took advantage of their need and ignorance and made them sacrifice a new beaver skin for ten eels. Yet, so great was the necessity, they would stell their very coats to get them at his price. It would even seem that few of them could trap or hunt. Champlain speaks of one moose being taken, but devoured like wolves by the slayers, only twenty pounds being left to share with the others. True, gunpowder was very scare. At the fort there was only thirty or forty pounds left, which all agreed should be kept for some greater emergency. It was not hard to imagine such arising, surrounded as they were by Indians well aware of their weakness and want. Champlain seriously thought of leaning the sick, the women and children what little food they had and leading the men on an expedition against the Iroquois in hopes of seizing the buried stores of maize in some Iroquois village. But at this juncture Madame Marie Rollet Hébert came to the rescue and gave the colonists two barrels of peas. Seven ounces of these became the daily allowance for each until the end of May, when they, too, failed. Men, women and children betook themselves then to the woods, hunting for roots and leaves.

In July the Kirkes returned and Quebec became theirs without a struggle. Champain had then to bid farewell to his little colony, as had also the Récollet Friars and the remaining Jesuits. Ther inhabitants were encouraged by a gift of twenty crowns apiece to remain. It was a hard decission for our heroine to make. On one side her religion and her motherland drew her. On the other she was held by all the roots and feelers which had been stretching ever deeper and firmer into Canadian soil for the past twelve years. The latter were too strong for her. She had become too goog a Canadian settler to be uprooted at once. No, she and her family would cling to their own soil in the hopes that brighter days might dawn. Then if they did not, it would be time enough face an upheaval.

On the 16th of May that year, Marie Rollet had been married to Guillaume Hubou. We know very little of her second husband, but that little is good. He was of Norman blood and an honourable man. On the 18th of the same month her first grandson was born, who was later to inherit his gradfather's title of Sieur de l'Espinay.

Marie Rollet Hubou made the same name for herself with the English that she had with her own countrymen. They looked upon her as the one kind, efficient woman in the stettlement, whose heart and house were always large enough to welcome one more. Champlain an his departure entrusted three Indian girl hostages to her ; the English, on theirs, left her a little negro waif.

When the French returned in 1632, the Jesuit Fathers give us a joyful picture of her:

"We went to celebrate the holy mass in the oldest house in this contry, the house of Madame Marie Rollet Hébert, who settled near the fort in the lifetime of her husband ; she has a fine family, one of her daughters being married to a respectable Frenchman here. God is continually blessing them. He was given them beautiful children, their cattle are flourishing, their land bears fine grain. This is the only French family settled in Canada. They were trying to get back to France, but learning that the French would soon return to Quebec, they took courage and resolved to stay. When they saw the white flags on the masts of our ships, their joy was indescribale ; but when they found us in their own house saying holy mass, which they had not heard for three years, God! what joy! Tears of bratitude fell from their eyes. Oh, how heartily we all sang the Te Deum Laudamus!"

Alter the return of her countrymen Marie Rollet Hubou lived for seventeen years. She spent this evening of heir life very fittingly, considering that her family worries and active pioneering were over. Her time was given freely to others. The Jesuit Fathers sent for her from far and near to nurse the sick, to care for little children and to stand sponsor for the dying converts who were to be baptized. She devoted much time and cere to little Indian girls - clothing, training and bringing them up. Many of them lived in her own house. For some of these the Jesuits paid the board, but for others she cared at her own expence. Indeed, so many little Indian girls did she look after that her home might well be considered as the forerunner of the future Ursuline School.

Although none could call Marie Rollet a celebrity, yet how admirable have we found her in all the obscure vicissitudes of her life. Well this is, since she, and she alone, has to speak to us to-day for the countless hundreds of silent French-Canadian frontierswomen who shared with their husbands the hardships and dangers of the early life, and at the same time brought up those large families of sons and daughters that have ever been the pride of their nation. Of Marie Rollet, the first of them, and simply on account ot the novelty of her being the first, and a worthy first, the historians have handed down many little glimpses. We have followed the course of her life and have seen the surroundings in wich it was passed. The woman herself we can only picture as we find her in them. She must have had a wonderful constitution, with good nerves and a sane mind. She was a trifty, provident, hospitable matron, an excellent manager of her house and her resources. She was ambitious and a woman of strong character, but just and kind and deeply devoted to her Church and religion.

Her day drew to its close, but not so the way of life she and her husband established. This backwoods settler class which they sa excellenty typify came to the backstone of our nation. Champlain's colony had to pass through dark days, but none the less did time justify Le Clercq's words: "But we may say the most fortunate thing he effected was his persuading Sieur Hébert to go to Canada with all his family, which has produced, and will hereafter produce, good subjects, the most important and zealous in the colony." And could Champlain come back to-day and see the flourishing land that is possessed and peopled by the descendants of just such settlers as were his Héberts, he would realize how auspicious had been his efforts. His grain of mustard seedd has flourished exceedingly.