144 THE NEUTRALS. [1640. 



Quebec, conceived that their object might be safely 

 gained by stirring up the Neutrals to become their 

 executioners. To that end, they sent two emissaries 

 to the Neutral towns, who, calling the chiefs and 

 young warriors to a council, denounced the Jesuits 

 as destroyers of the human race, and made their 

 auditors a gift of nine French hatchets on condi- 

 tion that they would put them to death. It was 

 now that Brebeuf, fully conscious of the danger, 

 half starved and half frozen, driven with revilings 

 from every door, struck and spit upon by pretended 

 maniacs, beheld in a vision that great cross, which, 

 as we have seen, moved onward through the air, 

 above the wintry forests that stretched towards the 

 land of the Iroquois.^ 



Chaumonot records yet another miracle. " One 

 evening, when all the chief men of the town were 

 deliberating in council whether to put us to death. 

 Father Brebeuf, while making his examination of 

 conscience, as we were together at prayers, saw 

 the vision of a spectre, full of fury, menacing us 

 both with three javelins which he held in his 

 hands. Then he hurled one of them at us ; but 

 a more powerful hand caught it as it flew : and 

 this took place a second and a third time, as he 

 hurled his two remaining javelins. . . . Late at 

 night our host came back from the council, where 

 the two Huron emissaries had made their gift of 

 hatchets to have us killed. He wakened us to 

 say that three times we had been at the point of 

 death ; for the young men had offered three times 



1 See ante, p. 109. 



