Hebert died in 1627.  Little as we know about his life, the clerical chroniclers tell us a good deal about his death, which proves that he must have had all the externals of piety.  He was extolled as the Abraham of a new Israel.  His immediate descendants were numerous, and it was predicted that his seed would replenish the earth.  Assuredly, this portion of the earth needed replenishing, for at the time of Hebert’s death Quebec was still a struggling hamlet of sixty-five souls, two-thirds of whom were women and children unable to till the fields.  Hebert certainly did his share.  His daughters married in the colony and had large families.  By these marriages a close alliance was formed with the Couillards and other prominent families of the colony’s earliest days.  From these and later alliances some of the best-known families in the history of French Canada have come down,—­the Jolliets, De Lerys, De Ramesays, Fourniers and Taschereaus,—­and the entire category of Hebert’s descendants must run well into the thousands.  All but unknown by a busy world outside, the memory of this Paris apothecary has none the less been cherished for nearly three hundred years in many a Canadian home.  Had all the seigneurs of the old regime served their king with half his zeal the colony would not have been left in later days so naked to its enemies.

But not all the seigneurs of Old Canada were of Hebert’s type.  Too many of them, whether owing to inherited Norman traits, to their previous environment in France, or to the opportunities which they found in the colony, developed an incurable love of the forest life.  On the slightest pretext they were off on a military or trading expedition, leaving their lands, tenants, and often their own families to shift as best they might.  Fields grew wild while the seigneurs, and often their habitants with them, spent the entire spring, summer, and autumn in any enterprise that promised to be more exciting than sowing and reaping grain.  Among the military seigneurs of the upper St Lawrence and Richelieu regions not a few were of this type.  They were good soldiers and quickly adapted themselves to the circumstances of combat in the New World, meeting the Iroquois with his own arts and often combining a good deal of the red man’s craftiness with a white man’s superior intelligence.  Insatiable in their thirst for adventure, they were willing to assume all manner of risks or privations.  Spring might find them at Lake Champlain, autumn at the head-waters of the Mississippi, a trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand miles between.  Their work did not figure very heavily in the colony’s annual balance-sheet of progress with its statistics of acreage newly cleared, homes built and harvests stowed safely away.  But according to their own ideals of service they valiantly served the king, and they furnish the historian of the old regime with an interesting and unusual group of men.  Neither New England nor the New Netherlands possessed this type within their borders, and this is one reason why the pages of their history lack the contrast of light and shade which marks from start to finish the annals of New France.