The month following, September, 1662, de Maisonneuve wished to go to France, his object being to secure troops and to arrange for the transfer of the seigneurship of the island from the nearly moribund Company of Montreal to the Seminary of St. Sulpice. Before leaving he appointed the town major, Zacharie Dupuis to take his place and an ordinance to that effect was put up at the door of the parish church dated September 10, 1662. On September 16th he started with Jeanne Mance and the Abbé Souart, conducted by M. Jacques Leber. When at Quebec d'Avaugour forbade Maisonneuve to depart on the ground that he was needed in Montreal to quell the sedition that had arisen there in July in reference to the establishment of a storehouse by the Company of One Hundred Associates. This was but a pretext. Maisonneuve, however, consented to return. Mademoiselle Mance set sail alone on September 20th. On his return to Montreal Maisonneuve busied himself in promoting agriculture. There were four classes now living at Montreal: The "habitants," or settlers, who took up the lands and were self-supporting, these alone having the rights of trading in peltry; the soldiers of the garrison; hired workers by contract for a definite time; and day labourers. By an ordinance of November 4, 1662, Maisonneuve gave permission to soldiers and hired workers to cultivate four arpents on the seigneurs' domain, till four others equally cultivated were given them elsewhere. As a further inducement, those taking up land would be granted peltry privileges like the habitants. Sixty-three responded to this before the end of the year. FOOTNOTES: [88] Moffatt's island, five-eighths of a mile from the south shore, now the wharf terminus of the Champlain branch of the Grand Trunk Railway. [89] Two of these were "travailleurs ou volontaires," or day labourers. In his ordinance of November 4, 1662, Maisonneuve showed no favour to these who, for the most part, were rather a charge on the young colony than a benefit. At Three Rivers they early became a considerable nuisance. In 1653, on January 14, Pierre Boucher, the local governor, ordered them to become habitants, or servants of habitants, and on March 2, 1668, he made a new ordinance conceived in these terms: "On the advice which has been given us that there are still labourers who are neither habitants, nor servants of habitants, and who live under the name of 'volontaires' (free workers), we forbid them to take more than twenty sous a day and fifteen _livres_ a month with their food, under penalty of prison and of the cat-o'-nine tails (fouet) at the hands of the hangman, and it is forbidden them to trade any peltry with the savages." At Montreal at this date the labourers were not so troublesome, but out of them later developed many of the restless "coureurs de bois." CHAPTER XV 1663-1664 THE SOVEREIGN COUNCIL AND THE SEIGNEURS OF THE ISLAND GREAT CHANGES, PHYSICAL AND POLITICAL