Among all the incidents of endurance and pluck set forth in the annals of the history of North America, few can be found more remarkable than that which is contained in some very dusty pages to be read in quaint French in a Paris library, or in the transcription of them by one of our own historical authors--the “Statement of Mademoiselle Magdeleine de Verchères, aged Fourteen Years,” daughter of the commander of a lonely French fort, called after her father, which stood on the St. Lawrence River a score of miles below Montreal. It was October 22, 1692. The strong fort enclosure, stockade and block-house, were open, and the residents were at work in their fields at some distance. M. de Verchères was at Quebec on military business. His wife (who was the heroine of another famous incident of those perilous days) had gone to Quebec. In the stockade were actually only two soldiers, a couple of lads who were the young girl’s brothers, one very aged man, and a few women and children. Magdeleine--or, as we should now spell it, Madeleine--was standing at a considerable distance from the open gate of the fort with a servant, little suspecting any danger. All at once a rattle of arms from the direction where some of the agriculturists were busy startled her. It was repeated. She began to see men running in terror in the far-away fields. At the same moment the serving-man beside her, equally astonished, exclaimed, “Run, Mademoiselle, run; the Iroquois are upon us!” The young girl looked where he pointed, and lo! a troop of some forty or fifty of the wily savages, thinking to surprise the stockade while their main band attacked those who were outside, were running towards the gates, scarcely a hundred yards from where she stood trembling. There was not an instant to lose. It was life or death for her and all. She fled for the fort. The rest of her story can largely be quoted from Mademoiselle Madeleine’s own recitation, published at the time. “The Iroquois who chased me, seeing that they could not catch me alive before I reached the gate, stopped and fired at me. The bullets whistled about my ears, and [as she says, dryly] made the time seem very long. As soon as I was near enough to be heard, I cried out, ‘To arms! to arms!’ hoping that somebody would come out and help me, but it was no use. The two soldiers in the fort were so terrified that they had hidden within the block-house. “At the gate I found two women crying for their husbands, who had just been killed. I forced them to go in and shut the gate. I next thought what I could do to save myself and the few people with me. I went to inspect the fort, and found that several palisades had fallen down and left openings by which the enemy could easily get in. I ordered them to be set up again, and helped to carry them myself.”