1646.] DE NOUE'S JOURNEY. 257 



conspired with their native fierceness to form a 

 character of unrelenting cruelty rarely equalled. 



The perils which beset the missionaries did not 

 spring from the fury of the Iroquois alone, for Na- 

 ture herself was armed with terror in this stern 

 wilderness of New France. On the thirtieth of 

 January, 1646, Father Anne de None set out from 

 Three Rivers to go to the fort built by the French 

 at the mouth of the E-iver Richelieu, where he was 

 to say mass and hear confessions. De None was 

 sixty-three years old, and had come to Canada in 

 1625.-^ As an indifferent memory disabled him 

 from mastering the Indian languages, he devoted 

 himself to the spiritual charge of the French, and 

 of the Indians about the forts, within reach of an 

 interpreter. For the rest, he attended the sick, and, 

 in times of scarcity, fished in the river or dug roots 

 in the woods for the subsistence of his fiock. In 

 short, though sprung from a noble family of Cham- 

 pagne, he shrank from no toil, however humble, 

 to which his idea of duty or his vow of obedience 

 called him.^ 



The old missionary had for companions two sol- 

 diers and a Huron Indian. They were all on 

 snow-shoes, and the soldiers dragged their baggage 

 on small sledges. Their highway was the St. Law- 

 rence, transformed to solid ice, and buried, like all 

 the country, beneath two or three feet of snow, 



1 See "Pioneers of France," 393. 



2 He was peculiarly sensitive as regarded the cardinal Jesuit virtue 

 of obedience ; and both Lalemant and Bressani say, that, at the age of 

 sixty and upwards, lie was sometimes seen in tears, when he imagined 

 that he had not fulfilled to the utmost the commands of his Superior. 



22* 



