The central mission of Sainte Marie was meanwhile in the flush of prosperity. The buildings included a church, a kitchen, a refectory, large rooms for spiritual instruction and the exercises of retreat, and lodgings for at least sixty persons. Around these principal houses ran a fortified line of palisades and masonry, outside which was a hospital and a large bark hut for the reception of wandering Indians. Here every alternate week the converts from all the Huron villages gathered in immense crowds to attend divine service, celebrated with all the pomp which the resources of the mission allowed, and to partake for three days of the bounteous hospitality of the good fathers. In times of pestilence and famine they flocked hither for relief, and at one time, in a year of scarcity, as many as three thousand received food and shelter at Sainte Marie. Hither, also, two or three times every year, the Jesuits--now twenty-two in number, including four lay-brothers--came together from their outlying missions, to refresh their souls by mutual counsel, and gather strength in prayer and meditation for the work of the next twelve months. To assist in the manual labor of the establishment there were seven hired men and four boys, and as a defence against the dreaded Iroquois the commandant of Quebec had sent them a guard of eight soldiers. {206} They received also much valuable help from the _donnés_, or "given men"--French laymen, who from pure zeal devoted themselves to the service of the mission, travelling with the fathers on their dangerous journeys, and sometimes sharing--like Goupil, called "the good Réné"--in the glories of their martyrdom. These pious men--"seculars in garb," Father Gamier called them, "but religious in heart"--received no pay except a bare maintenance. There were eleven smaller missions dependent upon Sainte Marie, eight among the Hurons and three among the Algonquins. At several of them there was a church where every morning a bell summoned the dusky converts to Mass, and every evening they met again for prayer. Despite the enormous difficulties of transportation through that tangled wilderness, the fathers had found means to carry with them from place to place large colored pictures, gay draperies, and many a showy ornament for the altar or the walls, which they well knew would invest their rude chapels with an almost irresistible attraction for the savage mind. In many villages the Christians, by the year 1649, outnumbered the pagans. Sundays and feast-days were almost wholly devoted to religious exercises; and if the Indians had not wholly abandoned their barbarous and cruel practices, it is certain that the ferocity even of those who refused to become Christians was sensibly tamed.