184 DEVOTEES AND NUNS. [1639-42, 



Quebec, at the brink of the river. Here they were 

 soon beset with such a host of children, that the 

 floor of their wretched tenement was covered with 

 beds, and their toil had no respite. Then came 

 the small-pox, carrying death and terror among the 

 neighboring Indians. These thronged to Quebec 

 in misery and desperation, begging succor from the 

 French. The labors both of the Ursulines and 

 of the hospital nuns were prodigious. In the in- 

 fected air of then- miserable hovels, where sick and 

 dying savages covered the floor, and were packed 

 one above another in berths, — amid all that is 

 most distressing and most revolting, with little food 

 and less sleep, these women passed the rough be- 

 ginning of their new life. Several of them fell ill. 

 But the excess of the evil at length brought relief; 

 for so many of the Indians died in these pest-houses 

 that the survivors shunned them in horror. 



But how did these women bear themselves amid 

 toils so arduous'? A pleasant record has come 

 down to us of one of them, — that fak and deli- 

 cate girl, Marie de St. Bernard, called, in the con- 

 vent. Sister St. Joseph, who had been chosen at 

 Tours as the companion of Marie de ITncarnation. 

 Another Ursuline, writing at a period when the 

 severity of then- labors was somewhat relaxed, 

 says, "Her disposition is charming. In our times 

 of recreation, she often makes us cry with laugh- 

 ing : it would be hard to be melancholy when she 

 is near."^ 



1 Lettre de la Mere S^ Claire a une de ses Soeurs Ursulines de Paris. 

 Quebec, 2 Sept., 1640. — See Les Ursulines de Quebec, I. 38. 



