Joseph Antoine Poncet de la Rivière, of aristocratic birth, was born in Paris and entered the Society of Jesus in his nineteenth year as a novice. His studies finished, he came to New France in 1639. He shortly went to the Huron mission. We next find him, 1642-4, the first priest in charge of the mission chapel at the fort of Montreal. After this he ministered at Quebec. On his return from a visit to the Iroquois, he went down the St. Lawrence and was the first white man to glide through the Thousand Islands. He was giving the alarm to the colonists at Cape Rouge in the summer of 1653, when he was himself seized by the savages. He bore a remembrance of the ill treatment of his captivity in the form of a lost finger, which a little child had been ordered to cut off. He was afterwards released to the Dutch at Fort Orange and returned to Quebec on November 5th, "just nine times nine days after my capture," he says. We next know him as the storm centre of ecclesiastical differences between Montreal and Quebec. As a result of this Poncet was sent back to Europe. He was installed as French penitentiary at Loretto, and later was sent to Martinique, where he died on June 18, 1675. ISAAC JOGUES Isaac Jogues was born at Orléans, France, January 10, 1607. His first schooling was at Rouen and he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Paris in his seventeenth year. Having finished his studies and period of teaching we find him in his twenty-ninth year reaching Canada in 1636 in the same vessel as Champlain's successor, Montmagny. Two or three weeks later, that same October, Jogues began his missionary work, joining a flotilla of Huron canoes and sailing 900 miles over dangerous rivers and lakes, skirting rapids and precipices and making many toilsome "portages" through dense forests, pools and marshes, to the great Lake Huron which was known as "Fresh Water Sea." [Illustration: JOGUES, THE JESUIT MISSIONARY] Such was Jogues' first experience of missionary life. Living on Indian corn and water, sleeping on rocks and in the woods, battling day after day against a rapid current, dragging heavy burdens over the long portages, a part of the time with a sick boy on his shoulder--till he staggered through the triple stockade of the Indian town of Ihonitiria and fell into the arms of de Brébeuf and his Jesuit companions. In this new mission field one of the first works entrusted to his practical sagacity, which stood his fellow missionaries in good stead, was the construction of Fort Ste. Marie, whose ruins, discovered in 1859, testify to the solidity of the outworks. His first apostolic work away from Fort Ste. Marie was among the Petuns, or Tobacco Indians. In September, 1641, he went with the Jesuit Raimbault to found a mission among the Ojibways or Chippewas on the upper reaches of Lake Huron at a place called by the missionaries Sault Ste. Marie, today a great centre of commerce. They were the first white men to stand on the shores of Lake Superior.