But Samuel de Champlain, the colony-maker who followed Cartier, was a man of pride who understood how to make war, but had left unlearned the greater art of bidding for peace. In 1609, acting under what he believed to be a flash of genius, Champlain brought against the Iroquois the Algonquins, their bitter hereditary enemies; and with their aid, and the use of the magic firearms which had never before been heard in the country of the wild north, he had utterly defeated the proud and unforgiving people who had won the admiration and respect of Cartier the pioneer, thus making the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy sworn enemies of France for ever. Had Providence been pleased to make Samuel de Champlain another Cartier, had the latter even succeeded the former, Canada, from the rough Atlantic seaboard to the soft Pacific slope, might well have been one great colony of France to-day. It was, however, not the past history of that land, nor even its present necessities, which occupied the mind of the Abbé La Salle, great-uncle of the future Robert of that name, who, half-a-century later, was to discover the mighty river of Mississippi--which was to deprive the St. Lawrence of its proud birth-title, the Father of Waters--and explore the plains of Michigan. The abbé was lying, that spring evening, on the heights, smoking a stone pipe filled with coarse black tobacco from Virginia, and watching a heavy ship which rocked upon the swift current where it raced round the bend in the shore. He was building up a future for himself, a fabric of ambition upon foundations of diplomacy and daring. This senior priest of the fortress--there were two others, Laroche the bully, and St Agapit the ascetic--was a handsome man, powerfully built, of fair complexion marred only by a sword-cut above the left eye. Although priest in name, he was more at his ease flicking a rapier than thumbing a breviary; an oath was habitually upon his tongue; a hot patriot was he, and above all a fighter. He had fought a duel before his early mass, and had left the altar to brag of his prowess. He was, in short, one of the most notorious of that band of martial Churchmen, imitators of Armand du Plessis Richelieu, for which colonial France at that age was noted. Far from the eye of the mighty Cardinal and the feeble mind of Louis the Just, they swaggered through life, preaching the divine mission of the Church to the natives one hour, drinking deeply, or duelling in terrible earnest, the next. The lives of the fighting priests of Quebec make not the least interesting page of that romance which three centuries have written around the heights.