Canadian history is one record of toil and struggle—of the advance of the whites, of the retreat of the native races. Foremost in suffering were the French. In 1608 the first permanent settlement in Canada was made by Champlain, who founded Quebec, and afterwards discovered the lake which still bears his name. It was he who taught the Iroquois to stand in awe of gunpowder; but, alas! familiarity bred contempt, and the Red Indian was more than once on the point of exterminating the white man. It was only by the intercession of the Saints that the feeble colony was preserved. At Montreal, for instance, the advanced guard of the settlements, some two hundred Iroquois fell upon twenty-six Frenchmen. The Christians were out-matched eight to one, but, says the Chronicle, ‘the Queen of Heaven was on their side, and the Son of Mary refuses nothing to His holy Mother. Through her intercession the Iroquois shot so wildly, that at their first fire every bullet missed its mark, and they met with a bloody defeat.’ No wonder the French were animated with renewed zeal. Father Le Mercier writes: ‘On the day of Visitation of the Holy Virgin, the chief Aontarisati, so regretted by the Iroquois, was taken prisoner by our Indians, instructed by our fathers, and baptized; and on the same day, being put to death, I doubt not he thanked the Virgin for his misfortune and the blessing that followed, and he prayed to God for his countrymen.’ It was no common faith that led the French monks to seek to make Canada theirs. Their sufferings from cold, from starvation, from the savages, from want of all the comforts of life, seem to have been as much as mortal men could bear. But they made many converts. On one occasion, when the French Chaumont had delivered an address, his Indian auditors declared that if he had spoken all day they should not have had enough of it. ‘The Dutch,’ said they, ‘have neither brains nor tongues; they never tell us about paradise or hell. On the contrary, they lead us into bad ways.’ Nothing could daunt the Jesuits—not the loss of all they had, nor protracted suffering, nor cruel death. ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,’ said one of them; ‘and if we die by the fires of the Iroquois, we shall have won eternal life by snatching souls from the fires of hell.’