2+0 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Paris in 1688, reprinted at Quebec in 1857. He speaks of the Cru- 

 ciantaux Indians, who " have a particular respect for the cross," 

 which they wore on their persons, planted over their graves, and 

 attached to their canoes. An Indian " one hundred or one hun- 

 dred and twenty years old " related that he had witnessed the 

 arrival of the first ship that came from Europe to that part of the 

 country. But the use of the cross among the Indians antedated 

 that event and had not been introduced by outsiders. Once upon 

 a time, during a famine, when the spirits had been appealed to in 

 vain by the medicine men, an old savage saw in a dream a yonng 

 man who promised the band an early deliverance by virtue of the 

 cross, and showed him three crosses one to protect them from 

 visitations, another to serve them in their councils, the third to 

 guard them in their journeys. When the old man woke he whit- 

 tled three crosses just like them, and this is how the cult began. 

 The incantations and jongleries of medicine men were sometimes 

 blamed by the early white settlers for causing a failure of the 

 crops. In these modern days the blasphemy of the habitant is 

 blamed, though as a rule he seldom blasphemes except when 

 plowing with fractious oxen. In a book (Une Mine, etc.) pub- 

 lished in 1880 a worthy Oblat father asks, " Why these bush 

 fires, droughts, wet seasons, frosts, hailstorms, worms, and flies 

 that rnin your crops ? " and goes on to ascribe them to the " tor- 

 rent of bad language that deluges your fields." 



When Father Labrosse, a famous Gulf missionary, died at 

 Tadousac, the bells of all the churches were tolled by angels. The 

 crucifix outrage is among the relics of the Hotel-Dieu ; it was used 

 by a soldier in divinations by which he undertook to find lost 

 money. A fete was established by way of public atonement, and 

 miracles have since been performed with it. Here, as elsewhere, 

 the corruption of names has given rise to legends of the miracu- 

 lous and the uncanny. Thus Cap d'Espoir, Cape of Hope, has 

 been twisted by English sailors into Cape Despair; the French 

 have accepted the corruption and made it Cap D^sespoir. Then 

 to account for the name, tradition says one of the vessels of Sir 

 Hovenden Walker's expedition against Quebec was cast away at 

 the spot, and the remains of a wreck are still shown and known 

 as the naufrage anglais. Till a few years ago the fishermen at 

 Cap Ddsespoir used to be warned of storms by the apparition of 

 this English frigate, with her terror-stricken officers and men 

 gazing landward and the captain apparently upbraiding the pilot. 

 The fishermen of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are as superstitious as 

 fishermen elsewhere. They hear the lamentations of lost souls 

 like the braillard off Rivifere de la Madeleine and see supernatural 

 lights like the feu des Roussis at Paspebiac. The haddock, le 

 poisson de Saint-Pierre, was the first fish caught at the miracu- 



