Excerpt from Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, Vol. 6: Session of 1867-8 and 1868-9 When the Red Cross replaced the Lilies, the vast interior fell into the hands of other powerful and exclusive trading com panies, and became a terra incognita, a land of hobgoblins and chimeras dire, where ingress was always discounte nanced and often forbidden. By degrees, the few traces of civilization disappeared; the voice of the missionary was heard at rare intervals the quiet homestead, the cornfield and the garden, which the patient industry of the Jesuits had reclaimed from the wilderness, returned again to the dank vegetation of the forest. The dust gathered around their records, and their voices at length waxed faint and unreal as the utterances of a fairy tale. And thus the world in which they lived and moved and acted has become to us as a drama of the past. The lava and scoriae have hardened over it, as over the Ausonian cities of Old; and now that it has been exhumed, it still seems to remain apart and far-removed from. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.