The Baron d'Avaugour only remained two years in the country. When he arrived an earnest effort was being made by the clergy, headed by the bishop, to have the law against selling liquor to the Indians strictly enforced. The law was not popular in the country, and Avaugour thought it altogether too severe; still he allowed it to take effect in the case of two men who had been sentenced to death, and of one who had been condemned to be publicly whipped. Shortly afterwards a woman was imprisoned for a similar offence, and the Jesuit father, Lalemant, having pleaded for a relaxation of the law in her case, Avaugour, glad of a pretext to do away with it altogether, said that if the woman was not to be punished, no one should be. The result was that liquor began to be sold to the natives almost without restraint, and with effects which one of the ecclesiastics said he had no ink black enough to describe. Doubtless they were bad enough. The bishop fulminated from his episcopal throne against the practice, and launched excommunications right and left, but with little effect. He then decided on going to France and laying the whole matter before the government. He left in the summer of 1662; and it was while he was absent, that is to say in February of the following year, that an earthquake occurred of which the most extraordinary descriptions have come down to us. The only moderate account is that given by Avaugour himself, who says in a despatch: "On the 5th of February we had an earthquake, which continued during half a quarter of an hour, and was sufficiently strong to extort from us a good act of contrition. It was repeated from time to time during nine days, and was perceptible until the last of the month, but steadily diminishing." This was all an unimaginative mind like that of the baron could make of it, but not so with minds of another order. One pious soul saw four demons tugging at the four corners of the sky, and threatening universal ruin, which they would have effected had not a higher spirit appeared on the scene. We read that the air was filled with howlings as of lost spirits, and flashings of strange, unearthly lights, not to speak of a little detail of blazing serpents flying abroad on wings of fire. But the marvels that took place in the aerial regions were surpassed, if possible, by those that were witnessed on the solid earth. To take only one example out of many: some sailors coming from Gaspe, as Pere Charlevoix relates, saw a mountain "skipping like a ram," after which it spun round several times, and finally sank out of sight. Houses swayed to and fro till their walls nearly touched the street, and yet righted themselves in the end. Quebec and Montreal, which, even at this early period, did not pull well together, were somewhat at variance concerning the significance of the phenomenon. At Montreal the favourite theory was that the devil was enraged to find God