CHAPTER XXVIII.
IN THE POOL OF QUEBEC.
A singular colony it was of which the shipwrecked party found themselves now to be members.

The _St.Christophe_ had left Rochelle three weeks before with four small consorts conveying five hundred soldiers to help the struggling colony on the St.Lawrence.

The squadron had become separated, however, and the governor was pursuing his way alone in the hope of picking up the others in the river.

Aboard he had a company of the regiment of Quercy, the staff of his own household, Saint Vallier, the new Bishop of Canada, with several of his attendants, three Recollet friars, and five Jesuits bound for the fatal Iroquois mission, half-a-dozen ladies on their way out to join their husbands, two Ursuline nuns, ten or twelve gallants whom love of adventure and the hope of bettering their fortunes had drawn across the seas, and lastly some twenty peasant maidens of Anjou who were secure of finding husbands waiting for them upon the beach, if only for the sake of the sheets, the pot, the tin plates and the kettle which the king would provide for each of his humble wards.
To add a handful of New England Independents, a Puritan of Boston, and three Huguenots to such a gathering, was indeed to bring fire-brand and powder-barrel together.

And yet all aboard were so busy with their own concerns that the castaways were left very much to themselves.