After the display of Iroquois ferocity, and the murder of Jogues, of which that seemed the signal, war was resumed. The proud Iroquois determined on the destruction or dispersion of the Hurons and Wyandots, and the missionaries labouring among these nations shared their fate. On the morning of July 4, 1648, the village of St. Joseph, in the absence of the Indians, who were on the chase, and when only women and children remained, was surprised by a war-party of Mohawks. The village was fired, and the remorseless tomahawk began its bloody work. The terrified women and children flocked round the missionary, Father Daniel, who seeing the destruction which was at hand, hastened through the village, speaking words of Christian comfort and baptizing the dying. When the enemy advanced to the chapel, the calm, devoted preacher stood before them to oppose their entrance of the sacred building. For a moment they were awe-stricken, and paused as if to retire; the next they discharged against him a shower of arrows. Bleeding from many wounds, he lifted up his hands and voice, and overpowering the yells of the savages by his words of pity and forgiveness, he received finally his death-blow from a hatchet. The following winter, in the dead of night, a thousand Iroquois warriors attacked the village of St. Ignatius and murdered its four hundred inhabitants; the same fate befell St. Louis, in which dwelt the missionaries Brebeuf and Lallemand. Both could have escaped, but that their Christian zeal and love forbade them to desert converts who might need baptism in the hour of death. Faithful to the last, these servants of Christ, having spent their lives in works of love, died as martyrs. Brebeuf for three hours, and Lallemand for seventeen, were subjected to the direst Indian tortures, the stoic Indians themselves beholding with amazement the firmness of their victims. Wonderful was the Christian heroism of these missionaries. The history of man hardly contains any greater. Charlevoix says truly, writing of these men, “The Lord communicates himself without measure to those who sacrifice themselves without reserve.” And, speaking of them personally, he adds, “I myself knew some of them in my youth, and I found them such as I have painted them, bending under the labour of a long apostleship, with bodies exhausted by fatigues and broken with age, but still preserving all the vigour of the apostolic spirit.” It had been the desire of the missionaries, after this Huron calamity, to have collected the scattered remains of the nation on the Grand Manitoulin Isle, in Lake Huron. But it was not accomplished. The Huron nation was never again to be collected, and the station on the Manitoulin was abandoned.