The emigrants, then, were received with a studious courtesy, which veiled but thinly a stiff and persistent opposition. The bishop and the Jesuits were especially anxious to prevent the La Flèche nuns from establishing themselves at Montreal, where they would form a separate community, under Sulpitian influence; and, in place of the newly arrived sisters, they wished to substitute nuns from the Hôtel Dieu of Quebec, who would be under their own control. That which most strikes the non-Catholic reader throughout this affair is the constant reticence and dissimulation practised, not only between Jesuits and Montrealists, but among the Montrealists themselves. Their self-devotion, great as it was, was fairly matched by their disingenuousness. * All difficulties being overcome, the Montrealists embarked in boats and ascended the St. Lawrence, leaving Quebec infected with the contagion they had brought. The journey now made in a single night cost them fifteen days of hardship and danger. At length they reached their new home. The little settlement lay before them, still gasping betwixt life and death, in a puny, precarious infancy. Some forty small, compact houses were ranged parallel to the river, chiefly along the fine of what is now St. Paul’s Street. On the left there was a fort, and on a rising ground at the right a massive windmill of stone, enclosed with a wall or palisade pierced for musketry, and answering the purpose of a redoubt or block-house. ** Fields, studded with charred and blackened stumps, * See, for example, chapter iv. of Faillon’s Life of Mademoiselle Mance. The evidence is unanswerable, the writer being the partisan and admirer of most of those whose pieuse tromperie, to use the expression of Dollier de Casson, he describes in apparent unconsciousness that any body will see reason to cavil at it. ** Lettre du Vicomte d’Argenson, Gouverneur du Canada, 4 Août, 1659, MS between which crops were growing, stretched away to the edges of the bordering forest; and the green, shaggy back of the mountain towered over all.