Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/252

240 Paris in 1688, reprinted at Quebec in 1857. He speaks of the Cruciantaux 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 hundred 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 young 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 whittled 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.) published in 1880 a worthy Oblat father asks, "Why these bush fires, droughts, wet seasons, frosts, hailstorms, worms, and flies that ruin your crops?" and goes on to ascribe them to the "torrent 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 outragé is among the relics of the Hôtel-Dieu; it was used by a soldier in divinations by which he undertook to find lost money. A fête 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 miraculous 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 Désespoir. 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 Désespoir 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 Rivière 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