"Six months before the Pilgrims began their meeting-house on the burial hill at Plymouth," he and his brother priests laid the corner-stone of "the earliest church erected in French-America." It was a bitter disappointment when, in 1629, he was carried away by the English from his infant mission to spend his latter days far from his savage converts, perhaps in his whitewashed cell in the convent of Brouage, and to administer before an altar where it was not necessary to have neophytes wave green boughs to drive off the mosquitoes--those pestiferous insects from whose persecutions a brother Récollet said he suffered his "worst martyrdom" in America. But more bitter chagrin was in store for Le Caron, for when the French returned to Quebec, in 1632, after the restoration under the treaty, the Gray Apostles of the White Cord (who had invited the Black Gowns to join them in their missions years before and had so hospitably entertained them when denied shelter elsewhere in Quebec) were not permitted to be of the company. [Footnote: Le Caron, says Le Clercq, when he "saw all his efforts were useless, experienced the same fate as Saint Francis Xavier, who when on the point of entering China, found so many secret obstacles to his pious design that he fell sick and died of chagrin. So was Father Joseph a martyr to the zeal which consumed him, and of that ardent charity which burned in his heart to visit his church again."--Le Clercq, 1.c. 1:324.] The Jesuits went alone. Repairing their dilapidated buildings of Notre Dame des Anges, a little way out of Quebec on the St. Charles River, where Cartier had spent his first miserable winter in America, they began their enterprises _ad majorem Dei gloriam_ in a field of labor whose vastness "might," as Parkman says, "tire the wings of thought itself." Le Jeune left the convent at Dieppe, De Noue that at Rouen, and they went out from Havre together to begin their labors among a people whose first representatives came aboard the vessel at Tadoussac with faces variously painted, black and red and yellow, as a party of "carnival maskers." One cannot well conjecture a more hopeless undertaking than that of making those half-naked, painted barbarians understand the mystery of the Trinity, for example, or the significance of the cross. Think of this gentle, holy father, Le Jeune, seated in a hovel beside one of these savages, whose language he is trying to learn, bribing his Indian tutor with a piece of tobacco at every difficulty to make him more attentive, or with half-frozen fingers writing his Algonquin exercises, or making translations of prayers for the tongues of his prospective converts--and you will be able to appreciate the beginnings of the task to which these men without the slightest question set themselves.