and the nuns were so spent with their labors that seven of them were brought to the point of death. The priests were busied in converting the Huguenots, a number of whom were detected among the soldiers and emigrants. One of them proved refractory, declaring with oaths that he would never renounce his faith. Falling dangerously ill, he was carried to the hospital, where Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin bethought her of a plan of conversion. She ground to powder a small piece of a bone of Father Brebeuf, the Jesuit martyr, and secretly mixed the sacred dust with the patient’s gruel; whereupon, says Mother Juchereau, “this intractable man forthwith became gentle as an angel, begged to be instructed, embraced the faith, and abjured his errors publicly with an admirable fervor.” * Two or three years before, the church of Quebec had received as a gift from the Pope, the bodies or bones of two saints; Saint Flavian and Saint Félicité. They were enclosed in four large coffers or reliquaries, and a grand procession was now ordered in their honor. Tracy, Courcelle, Talon, and the agent of the company, bore the canopy of the Host. Then came the four coffers on four decorated litters, carried by the principal ecclesiastics. Laval followed in pontificals. Forty-seven priests, and a long file of officers, nobles, soldiers, and inhabitants, followed the precious relics amid the sound of music and the roar of cannon. ** * Le Mercier tells the same story in the Relation of 1665. ** Compare Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre, 16 Oct., 1660, with La Tour Vie de Laval, chap. x. “It is a ravishing thing,” says Mother Mary, “to see how marvellously exact is Monsieur de Tracy, at all these holy ceremonies, where he is always the first to come, for he would not lose a single moment of them. He has been seen in church for six hours together, without once going out.” But while the lieutenant-general thus edified the colony, he betrayed no lack of qualities equally needful in his position. In Canada, as in the West Indies, he showed both vigor and conduct. First of all, he had been ordered to subdue or destroy the Iroquois, and the regiment of Carignan-Salières was the weapon placed in his hands for this end, Four companies of this corps had arrived early in the season, four more came with Tracy, more yet with Salières, their colonel, and now the number was complete. As with slouched hat and plume, bandoleer, and shouldered firelock, these bronzed veterans of the Turkish wars marched at the tap of drum through the narrow street, or mounted the rugged way that led up to the fort, the inhabitants gazed with a sense of profound relief. Tame Indians from the neighboring missions, wild Indians from the woods, stared in silent wonder at their new defenders. Their numbers, their discipline, their uniform, and their martial bearing, filled the savage beholders with admiration.