Hither and thither the wind rushed, bold and blusterous, sometimes carrying landward the intermittent crashing of the surf as it fell, wrathful yet impotent, on the great dike by which, twenty-odd years before, the immortal Richelieu had snuffed the last heroic spark of the Reformists.
The little ships, the great ships, the fisherman's sloop, the king's corvette, and the merchantman, all lay anchored in the basin and harbor, their prows boring into the gale, their crude hulls rising and falling, tossing and plunging, tugging like living things at their hempen cables.

The snow fell upon them, changing them into phantoms, all seemingly eager to join in the mad revel of the storm.

And the lights at the mastheads, swooping now downward, now upward, now from side to side, dappled the troubled waters with sickly gold.

A desert of marshes behind it, a limitless sea before it, gave to this brave old city an isolation at once splendid and melancholy; and thrice melancholy it stood this wild March night, witnessing as it did the final travail of winter, pregnant with spring.
At seven o'clock the ice-clad packet from Dieppe entered the harbor and dropped anchor.

Among those who disembarked were two Jesuit priests and an Iroquois Indian, who immediately set out for the episcopal palace.