The testimony of John Gyles, who spent three years in the family of Louis d'Amours at the Jemseg, conclusively disproves Villebon's assertion that the d'Amours tilled no land and kept no cattle. He speaks of a fine wheat field owned by his master, in which the blackbirds created great havoc and describes a curious attempt made by a friar to exorcise the birds. A procession was formed, headed by the friar, in his white robe with a young lad as his attendant and some thirty people following. Gyles asked some of the prisoners, who had lately been taken by privateers and brought to the Jemseg, whether they would go back with him to witness the ceremony, but they emphatically refused to witness it and when Gyles expressed his determination to go, one of them, named Woodbury, said he was "as bad as a papist and a d--d fool." The procession passed and re-passed from end to end of the field with solemn words of exorcism accompanied by the tinkling of a little bell, the blackbirds constantly rising before them only to light behind them. "At their return," says Gyles, "I told a French lad that the friar had done no service and recommended them to shoot the birds. The lad left me, as I thought, to see what the friar would say to my observation, which turned out to be the case, for he told the lad that the sins of the people were so great that he could not prevail against those birds." A story analogous to this is related in Dr. Samuel Peters' history of Connecticut, of the celebrated George Whitefield, the New England Independent minister and revivalist: "Time not having destroyed the wall of the fort at Saybrooke, Whitefield, in 1740, attempted to bring down the wall as Joshua did those of Jericho, hoping thereby to convince the multitude of his divine mission. He walked seven times around the fort with prayer and ram's horn blowing, he called on the angel of Joshua to do as he had done at the walls of Jericho; but the angel was deaf to his call and the wall remained. Thereupon George cried aloud: 'This town is accursed and the wall shall stand as a monument of a sinful people!'"