"Hochelaga" the Indians called their city--the capital of the river into
which the sea had narrowed, a thousand miles inland from the coasts of
Labrador which but a few years before were the dim verge of the world and
were believed even then to be infested with griffins and fiends--a city
which vanished within the next three quarters of a century. For when
Champlain came in 1611 to this site to build his outpost, not a trace was
left of the palisades which Cartier describes and one of his men pictures,
not an Indian was left of the population that gave such cordial welcome to
Cartier. And for all Champlain's planning it was still a meadow and a
forest--the spring flowers "blooming in the young grass" and birds of
varied plumage flitting "among the boughs"--when the mystic and soldier
Maisonneuve and his associates of Montreal, forty men and four women, in
an enterprise conceived in the ancient Church of St. Germain-des-Pres and
consecrated to the Holy Family by a solemn ceremonial at Notre-Dame, knelt
upon this same ground in 1642 before the hastily reared and decorated
altar while Father Vimont, standing in rich vestments, addressed them.
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