they declared, it was from the box that had come all the ills which had befallen them.  Jogues protested his innocence; but as well might he have tried to reason with a pack of wolves.  They demanded his death, and the inevitable blow soon fell.  On the 18th of October, as he sat wounded and bruised and starving in a wigwam, a chief approached and bade him come to a feast.  He knew what the invitation meant; it was a feast of death; but he calmly rose, his spirit steeled for the worst.  His guide entered a wigwam and ordered him to follow; and, as he bent his head to enter, a savage concealed by the door cleft his skull with a tomahawk.  On the following day Lalande shared a similar fate.  Their heads were chopped off and placed on the palisades of the town, and their bodies thrown into the Mohawk river.  The Mission of the Martyrs was at an end for the time being.

Ten years were to pass before missionary work was renewed among the Iroquois—­ten years of disaster to the Jesuits and to the colony.  In these years, as we have already seen, the Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals were destroyed or scattered, and the French and Indian settlements along the St Lawrence were continually in danger.  There was no safety outside the fortified posts, and agriculture and trade were at a standstill.  The year 1653 was particularly disastrous; a horde of Mohawks were abroad, hammering at the palisades of every settlement and spreading terror even in the strongly guarded towns of Ville Marie, Three Rivers, and Quebec.  But light broke when all seemed darkest.  The western Iroquois—­the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas—­were at war with the Eries.  While thus engaged it seemed to them good policy to make peace with the French, and they dispatched an embassy to Ville Marie to open negotiations.  The Mohawks, too, fearing that their western kinsmen might gain some advantage over them, sent messengers to New France.  A grand council was held at Quebec.  But even while making peace the Iroquois were intent on war.  They desired nothing short of the utter extermination of the Huron nation, and viewed with jealousy the Huron settlement under the wing of the French on the island of Orleans.  Both Onondagas and Mohawks plotted to destroy this community.  The proposed peace was merely a ruse to open a way to attack the Hurons in order to kill them or to adopt them into the Five Nations, which, on account of losses in war, needed recruits.  The Mohawks requested that the Hurons be removed to the Mohawk villages; the Onondagas stipulated for a French colony in their country, in the hope that the Hurons would be attracted to such a settlement, and that then both French and Hurons would be in their power.  The governor of New France, now Jean de Lauzon, a weak old man who thought more of the profits of the fur trade and of land-grants for himself and his family than of the welfare of the colony, knew not how to act.  A negative answer he dared not give; and he equally feared the effect of a definite promise.  On the one hand was the certainty that war would break out again in all its fury; on the other the equal certainty that the fate which had befallen the Hurons in Huronia would almost inevitably overtake the poor remnant of Christian Hurons whom it was his duty to protect.