About a mile above Wolfe’s Cove they passed the historic little village of Sillery, where, in the stormy days of the Christian conquest of Canada, the Jesuits called about them the Hurons and preached to them in a language of which the wondering Indians, listening with stoical patience, understood not a word.
In later years there came a dispute as to whether the land about Sillery belonged to the Jesuits or the Hurons. The British decided in favor of the Jesuits, but offered the Hurons other lands. These they refused, and the red men soon melted away into the forests to dwindle ultimately to extinction.
About midway between Quebec and Montreal the boys stopped at the town of Three Rivers, so called from the fact of its being on the triple junction of the St. Maurice River with the St. Lawrence. Three Rivers was an important early trading post, being the head of tide water on the St. Lawrence. Champlain erected a fort there on the site of a primitive defense built by the Algonquins and destroyed by the Iroquois. It was from here, too, so Ralph was able to inform his chums, that Father Brebeuf set forth with a party of Hurons to preach in the farthest wilderness.
The good father, according to history, was as much of a fighting man as a preacher. He taught the Indians how to build fortifications and to palisade squares with flanking towers, which were a vast improvement on their round stockades.
The boys stopped at a dock adjoining a small farmhouse, not far from Three Rivers, to buy some fresh provisions, for Persimmons’ experiments in cookery had proved disastrous to their larder.
The place was kept by a descendant of the old “habitants” of the country, a man as brown as a berry, with high, Indian-like cheek bones and beady black eyes. His house must have stood there for hundreds of years. It was of rough, whitewashed stone, and had a steep roof, with a huge chimney at one end.
While they were waiting for the fresh milk and the eggs that the habitant promised to produce promptly, they gazed about the living room into which they had been ushered.
Its rough walls were whitewashed and adorned with crude pictures, chiefly of religious subjects. Ropes of onions, hams and dried fruit hung from the roof beams. In a corner, snowshoes and sleds and firearms told a mute story of the severity of the Canadian winter. It was all as it might have been in the days of the earliest settler.
But, if the people were primitive, they had a clear idea of how to charge for their viands! There was no help for it but to pay the bill, while the cunning little eyes of the habitant surveyed the roll from which Ralph peeled the required amount. He was plainly wishing that he had charged twice as much, particularly when he saw the fine boat the boys had.
The return trip through the canals with occasional stretches of clear water was monotonous. Nothing occurred out of the ordinary. But the delay in the canals and a slight overheating of the machinery resulted in its being dark by the time they neared their island.