with a canoe as was his Spanish brother, the _vaquero_, with the horse. We meet him constantly in the Wilderness, and all the waterways leading to it, his airy verses echoing through the forest till the sombre pine trees seemed more lightly to wave their drooping branches; or dying across limitless stretches of prairie, in conflict, perhaps, with the stranger notes of some Amerindian chant. By these songs the _voyageurs_ united the strokes of their oars or paddles, and they were often responsive, like the sailor-songs on shipboard, between one party and the other; the steersman and the rowers, or the forward and the stern oarsmen. One stanza of a _voyageur's_ song will serve to give their character: "Derrière chéz nous, il y a un etang,[50] Ye, ye, ment. Trois canards s'en vont baignans, Tous du lóng de la rivière, Legèrement ma bergère, Legerment ye ment." TRANSLATION "Behind our house there is a pond, Fal lal de ra. There came three ducks to swim thereon; All along the river clear, Lightly my shepherdess dear, Lightly, fal de ra." Cartier opened the way as far as Hochelaga, now the site of Montreal, which was soon to become the very centre of all commerce with the Wilderness. Attempts were made by the French to found settlements down the coast, and one, on St. John's River, in Florida, seemed to have some life in it till the Spaniards entrenched themselves at St. Augustine, and from there crushed the French fort and the French power in that quarter for all time. This St. Augustine of the Spaniards was the first permanent settlement of Europeans within the limits of the United States (1565), antedating by forty years Oñate's founding of his first village at San Juan, New Mexico, now marked, as previously mentioned, by the little town of Chamita.