It was from St. Malo that Carrier set sail on the highroad to Cathay, as he imagined, one April day in 1534 in two ships of sixty tons each. [Footnote: I crossed back over the same ocean, nearly four hundred years later, to a French port in a steamship of a tonnage equal to that of a fleet of four hundred of Carrier's boats; so has the sea bred giant children of such hardy parentage.] There is preserved in St. Malo what is thought to be a list of those who signed the ship's papers subscribed under Carrier's own hand. It is no such instrument as the "Compact" which the men of the _Mayflower_ signed as they approached the continent nearly a century later, but it is none the less fateful. The autumn leaves had not yet fallen from the trees of Brittany when the two ships that started out in April appeared again in the harbor of St. Malo, carrying two dusky passengers from the New World as proofs of Carrier's ventures. He had made reconnoissance of the gulf behind Newfoundland and returned for fresh means of farther quest toward Cathay. The leaves were but come again on the trees of Brittany when, with a larger crew in three small vessels (one of only forty tons), he again went out with the ebb-tide from St. Malo; his men, some of whom had been gathered from the jails, having all made their confession and attended mass, and received the benediction of the bishop. In August he entered the great river St. Lawrence, whose volume of water was so great as to brighten Carrier's hopes of having found the northern way to India. On he sailed, with his two dusky captives for pilots, seeing with regret the banks of the river gradually draw together and hearing unwelcome word of the freshening of its waters--on past the "gorge of the gloomy Saguenay with its towering cliffs and sullen depths, depths which no sounding-line can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling eagle seems a speck"; on past frowning promontory and wild vineyards, to the foot of the scarped cliff of Quebec, now "rich with heroic memories, then but the site of a nameless barbarism"; thence, after parley with the Indian chief Donnacona and his people, on through walls of autumn foliage and frost- touched meadows to where the Lachine Rapids mocked with unceasing laughter those who dreamed of an easy way to China. There, entertained at the Indian capital, he was led to the top of a hill, such as Montmartre, from whose height he saw his Cathay fade into a stretch of leafy desert bounded only by the horizon and threaded by two narrow but hopeful ribbons of water. There, hundreds of miles from the sea, he stood, probably the only European, save for his companions, inside the continent, between Mexico and the Pole; for De Soto had not yet started for his burial in the Mississippi; the fathers of the Pilgrim Fathers were still in their cradles; Narvaez's men had come a little way in shore and vanished; Cabeça de Vaca was making his almost incredible journey from the Texas coast to