There were at this time a hundred and sixty men at Montreal, about fifty of whom had families, or at least wives. They greeted the newcomers with a welcome which, this time, was as sincere as it was warm, and bestirred themselves with alacrity to provide them with shelter for the winter. As for the three nuns from La Flèche, a chamber was hastily made for them over two low rooms which had served as Mademoiselle Mance’s hospital. This chamber was twenty-five feet square, with four cells for the nuns, and a closet for stores and clothing, which for the present was empty, as they had landed in such destitution that they were forced to sell all their scanty equipment to gain the bare necessaries of existence. Little could be hoped from the colonists, who were scarcely less destitute than they. Such was their poverty,--thanks to Dauversiere’s breach of trust,--that when their clothes were worn out, they were unable to replace them, and were forced to patch them with such material as came to hand. Maisonneuve, the governor, and the pious Madame d’Aillebout, being once on a visit to the hospital, amused themselves with trying to guess of what stuff the habits of the nuns had originally been made, and were unable to agree on the point in question. * * Annales des Hospitalières de Villemarie, par la Sœur Morin, a contemporary record, from which Faillon gives long extracts. Their chamber, which they occupied for many years, being hastily built of illseasoned planks, let in the piercing cold of the Canadian winter through countless cracks and chinks; and the driving snow sifted through in such quantities that they were sometimes obliged, the morning after a storm, to remove it with shovels. Their food would freeze on the table before them, and their coarse brown bread had to be thawed on the hearth before they could cut it. These women had been nurtured in ease, if not in luxury. One of them, Judith de Brésoles, had in her youth, by advice of her confessor, run away from parents who were devoted to her, and immured herself in a convent, leaving them in agonies of doubt as to her fate. She now acted as superior of the little community. One of her nuns records of her that she had a fervent devotion for the Infant Jesus; and that, along with many more spiritual graces, he inspired her with so transcendent a skill in cookery, that “with a small piece of lean pork and a few herbs she could make soup of a marvellous relish.” * Sister Macé was charged with the care of the pigs and hens, to whose wants she attended in person, though she, too, had been delicately bred. In course of time, the sisterhood was increased by additions from without; though more than twenty girls who entered the hospital as novices recoiled from the hardship, and took husbands in the colony. Among * “C’était par son recours à l’Enfant Jésus qu’elle trouvait tous ces secrets et d’autres semblables,” writes in our own day the excellent annalist, Faillon.