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On her arrival he desired to test her zeal and courage as a postulant, and represented the difficulty of such an enterprise for a young, friendless girl. He spoke of his intention to found Ville-Marie, but added that it might be reddened with human blood, if the savages should attack the colonists, and that she might possibly have to attend alone in the hospital on the wounded and dying.
As their young voices floated through the forest glades, and they lay down to sleep under the stars of the sweet May skies, they thought of the bells tinkling in the still air of their loved Ville-Marie, where those they had come to die for sent up for them Aves around hearth and altar. In the words of a Canadian poet, it is thus described:
They deserve the attention of the tourist, if only by reason of their antiquity, and on account of the old clock which surmounts them, for though it is the most ancient of all in North America, this clock still marks the hours with average exactness. Behind these old walls extends a magnificent garden. The spectacle presented by Ville-Marie at this time was most edifying.
There were found also about Ville-Marie many partridge and duck, and since the colonists could not go out after game in the woods, where they would have been exposed to the ambuscades of the Iroquois, the friendly Indians brought to market the bear, the elk, the deer, the buffalo, the caribou, the beaver and the muskrat.
It had been specially venerated, and carefully preserved for more than a century. Their intention was to send it to Ville-Marie, where they hoped it would be more religiously taken care of than elsewhere, as that city was really the city of Mary, having been built in her honor, and consecrated to her service.
Her desire was complied with as soon as known, the act of registration taking place on the 17th of October, 1672, after which she set out for Ville-Marie to join her daughters, and labor anew in the service of God. Glorying in being the custodian of the miraculous statue, she hastened to relate its wonderful history to Messrs.
Furnished with this letter, Messrs. de Maisonneuve and Dauversiere labored in concert to procure a third fleet and a new set of recruits, and they were quite as successful as on the two former occasions. The volunteers were select and numerous, their voyage across the Atlantic safe and pleasant, and at the end of July that year they arrived at Ville-Marie.
There had been chosen the name of the Purification, because this day was the anniversary of that on which MM. Olier and de la Dauversière had caught the first glimpses of their vocation to work at the establishment of Ville-Marie, and because this festival had always remained in high honour among the Montrealers.
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