to a tract of land, provisions and stores sufficient for their first two years in the colony.  For his part, Hebert agreed to serve without pay as general medical officer of the settlement, to give his other services to the company when needed, and to keep his hands out of the fur trade.  Nothing was said about his serving as legal officer of the colony as well; but that task became part o his varied experience.  Not long after his arrival at Quebec, Hebert’s name appears, with the title of procureur du Roi, at the foot of a petition sent home by the colonists to the king.

All this looked fair enough on its face, but as matters turned out, Hebert made a poor bargain.  The company gave him only half the promised bonus, granted him no title to any land, and for three years insisted upon having all his time for its own service.  A man of ordinary tenacity would have made his way back to France at the earliest opportunity.  But Hebert was loyal to Champlain, whom he in no way blamed for his bad treatment.  At Champlain’s suggestion he simply took a piece of land above the settlement at Quebec, and without waiting for any formal title-deed began devoting all his spare hours to the task of getting it cleared and cultivated.  His small tract comprised only about a dozen arpents on the heights above the village; and as he had no one to help him the work of clearing it moved slowly.  Trees had to be felled and cut up, the stumps burned and removed, stones gathered into piles, and every foot of soil upturned with a spade.  There were no ploughs in the colony at this time.  To have brought ploughs from France or to have made them in the colony would have availed nothing, for there were no horses at Quebec.  It was not until after the sturdy pioneer had finished his lifework that ploughs and horses came to lessen the labour of breaking new land.

Nevertheless, Hebert was able by unremitting industry to get the entire twelve arpents into cultivable shape within four or five years.  With his labours he mingled intelligence.  Part of the land was sown with maize, part sown with peas, beans, and other vegetables, a part set off as an orchard, and part reserved as pasture.  The land was fertile and produced abundantly.  A few head of cattle were easily provided for in all seasons by the wild hay which grew in plenty on the flats by the river.  Here was an indication of what the colony could hope to do if all its settlers were men of Hebert’s persistence and stability.  But the other prominent men of the little settlement, although they may have turned their hands to gardening in a desultory way, let him remain, for the time being, the only real colonist in the land.  On his farm, moreover, a house had been built during these same years with the aid of two artisans, but chiefly by the labour of the owner himself.  It was a stone house, about twenty feet by forty in size, a one-story affair, unpretentious and unadorned, but regarded as one of