His cheery temper now stood him in good stead; for there was dreary work before him, and he was not the man to flinch from it. The garrison of St. Anne had nothing to live on but salt pork and half-spoiled flour. Their hogshead of vinegar had sprung a leak, and the contents had all oozed out. They had rejoiced in the supposed possession of a reasonable stock of brandy; but they soon discovered that the sailors, on the voyage from France, had emptied the casks and filled them again with saltwater. The scurvy broke out with fury. In a short time, forty out of the sixty men became victims of the loathsome malady. Day or night, Doilier de Casson and Forestier, the equally devoted young surgeon, had no rest. The surgeon’s strength failed, and the priest was himself slightly attacked with the disease. Eleven men * Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, cited by Faillon, Colonie Française, III. 395, 396 died; and others languished for want of help, for their comrades shrank from entering the infected dens where they lay. In their extremity some of them devised an ingenious expedient. Though they had nothing to bequeath, they made wills in which they left imaginary sums of money to those who had befriended them, and thenceforth they found no lack of nursing. In the intervals of his labors, Dollier de Casson would run to and fro for warmth and exercise on a certain track of beaten snow, between two of the bastions, reciting his breviary as he went, so that those who saw him might have thought him out of his wits. One day La Motte called out to him as he was thus engaged, “Eh, Monsieur le curé, if the Iroquois should come, you must defend that bastion. My men are all deserting me, and going over to you and the doctor.” To which the father replied, “Get me some litters with wheels, and I will bring them out to man my bastion. They are brave enough now; no fear of their running away.” With banter like this, they sought to beguile their miseries; and thus the winter wore on at Fort St. Anne. * Early in spring they saw a troop of Iroquois approaching, and prepared as well as they could to make fight; but the strangers proved to be * The above curious incidents are told by Dollier de Casson, in his Histoire du Montréal, preserved in manuscript in the Mazarin Library at Paris. He gives no hint that the person in question was himself, but speaks of him as un ecclésiastique. His identity is, however, made certain by internal evidence, by a passage in the Notice of Grandet, and by other contemporary allusions.