To make the blot upon his escutcheon yet fouler, Charnisay actually had the rope placed around the neck of the chatelaine herself; but, though her heroic spirit disdained to plead for safety to such a monster, either whim or some fear of results, for he could not be accused of any humane impulse, caused him to remit the sentence. It might almost as well have been carried out, however, for in a few days the lady died from grief at her defeat and the baseness of treachery to which she and her followers had been subjected. Whittier has sung the wrath of the husband of the Lady de la Tour; but he omits to mention, nor would it chime well with the rest of the poem, that years afterward that husband married the widow of the man who had placed the rope around the neck of the heroic lady, and who had been drowned in the Penobscot River while on a voyage. The marriage, which found its celebrants at an advanced age for matrimonial union, settled forever the sternest struggle that Acadia had known; but even this desirable result scarcely enables us to forgive the Seigneur de la Tour for his treason to the memory of his devoted wife in thus allying himself to the house of him who had done her to death. With this story of the most famous of the women of Acadia let us turn to Canada proper. It was not for some time after the first futile and later partially successful attempts to found a colony upon the bleak shores of the Saint Lawrence that there was to be found on those shores the refining influence that comes from feminine companionship. The first permanent colony, however, which established itself on the heights of Quebec, held among its members one of the gentler sex, Dame Hebert, the wife of Louis Hebert, who had been an Acadian. His wife was a woman of courage and resource, as befitted a pioneer colonist; and she had need of both qualities in her fight with the conditions that pressed so hardly upon the new colonists. She first set her foot upon Canadian soil in 1617, and she lived through the most remarkable of the mutations of the first colony, including the surrender to the English and the treaty of Saint Germain which again gave Canada to France. For the first three years of her sojourn in the new land she was the only woman on those shores; and when in 1620 she was joined in her isolation by Helene de Champlain, wife of the great pioneer of New France, it was but for a time, hardly four years in all. At the expiration of that period Madame de Champlain returned, broken in health and spirits by her exile, to her beloved France, held by her in higher esteem than her gallant but cold husband, and there she entered a convent, leaving behind her a memory as one of the two women who first inhabited the wilderness of New France, and leaving also her name to an island in the Saint Lawrence. Though much may be said in extenuation of the homesickness and lack of endurance found in the young wife of the great Champlain, she was no