"Well. The dragon prowled around and around the convent walls, but of course he could not come in. At last he pretended to be sick and sent for Sainte Marthe to come and cure him. As soon as she set eyes on him she knew what a wicked lie he had told, and resolved to punish him for his impudence. Of course all he wanted of her was to get her recipes for sauces and stews so that he might cook and eat his victims without having indigestion—which is what a good sauce is for. Sainte Marthe promised to make him some broth if he would do no harm while she was gone, and just to make sure he kept his promise she made him hold out his fore-paws and tied them hard and fast with her girdle, while he sat with his fore-legs around his—er—knees, and her broomstick thrust crosswise between. Then she got out her largest kettle and made a good savory broth of all the herbs in her garden—there were three hundred and sixty-five kinds. She knew that if he drank it all, the blessed herbs would work such a change in his inside that he would be like a lamb forever after.
"But one thing neither she nor Tarasque had thought of, and that was, that the broth was hot. Of course he always took his food and drink very cold. When he smelled its delicious fragrance he opened his mouth wide, and she poured it hissing hot down his throat, and it melted him into a famous bubbling spring. People go there to be cured of colic."
Helêne drew a long breath. She did not believe that Lescarbot had found that story in any book of legends of the saints, but she liked it none the worse for that.
"I wonder if Sainte Marthe blessed this garden?" she said.
"I have no doubt she did, and that is why it flourishes from Easter to Michaelmas. But I came to-day for a potato. Sieur de Monts desires to see one and to understand the method of its cultivation."
"Oh, I know that," cried Helêne, eagerly, and she took one of the queer brown roots from the willow basket by the wall. "See, these are its eyes, one, two, three—seven eyes in this one. You must cut it in pieces, as many pieces as it has eyes, and plant each piece separately; and from each eye springs a plant."
"Ah!" said Lescarbot gravely, and he put the potato in his wallet.
For two years Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, and the valiant gentlemen Samuel de Champlain, Bienville de Poutrincourt, and others of his company, had been striving to maintain a settlement in the grant of La Cadie or L'Acadie, between the fortieth and forty-sixth degrees of north latitude in the New World, of which the King had made De Monts Lieutenant-General. De Monts engaged Champlain, who had already explored those coasts, as chief geographer, and the merchant Pontgravé was in charge of a store-ship laden with supplies. Fearing the severe winter of the St. Lawrence, the party steered south along the coast and anchored in a tranquil and beautiful harbor surrounded with forest, green lowlands, and hills laced with waterfalls. In his delight with the place Poutrincourt declared that he would ask nothing better than to make it his home; and he received a grant of the harbor, which he named Port Royal. The expedition finally came to rest on an island in a river flowing into Passamaquoddy Bay, where they began their settlement. Their wooden buildings—a house for their viceroy, one for Champlain and other gentlemen, barracks, lodgings, workshops and storehouses,—surrounded a square in the middle of which one fine cedar was left standing, while a belt of them remained to hedge the island from the north winds. The work done, Poutrincourt set sail for France, leaving seventy-nine men to spend the winter at Ile Sainte-Croix. Scurvy broke out, and before spring almost half the company were in their graves. Spring came, but no help from France. It was June 16 before Poutrincourt returned with forty men, and two days later Champlain set sail in a fifteen-ton barque with De Monts and several others, to explore the coast and discover if possible a better place for the colony. They went as far south as Nauset Harbor, and Champlain made charts and kept a journal quaintly illustrated with figures drawn and painted; but De Monts found no place that suited him. Then he bethought himself of the deep sheltered harbor of Port Royal, and they removed everything to that new site, on the north side of the basin below the mouth of a little river which they called the Équille. Even parts of the buildings were taken across the Bay of Fundy. But a ship from France brought news to De Monts that enemies at court were working against his Company, and leaving Pontgravé in command he and Poutrincourt returned home, to see what they could do to further the interests of the colony in Paris. Among other things Champlain, who had tried without success to make a garden in the sandy soil of the island, begged them to provide the settlers with seeds, roots, cuttings and implements by which they might raise grain and vegetables and other provisions for themselves. This would improve the health and also reduce the expenses of the colony, and the land about the new site was well adapted for cultivation.
Poutrincourt, foregathering with his friend Lescarbot soon after the lawyer had lost nearly all he possessed in a suit, recounted to him the woes of the colony, and found with pleasure that in spite of the doleful history of the last two years Lescarbot was eager to seek a new career in New France.
Helêne came running in one morning in the early spring of 1606, to find old Jacqueline on the steps of the root-cellar with a heap of sprouting potatoes beside her. Lescarbot was packing away in a panier such as she gave him, while under the whitening pear-tree a donkey stood, sleepily shaking his ears as he waited for orders.