claimed to have made 14 converts as of 1635 and, by the next year, he claimed 86. He wrote a detailed account in 1636 of The Huron Feast of the Dead, a mass reburial of remains of loved ones after a community moved the location of its village. It was accompanied by elaborate ritual and gift-giving. In 1638, Brébeuf turned over direction of the mission at Saint-Joseph I to Jérôme Lalemant; he was called to become Superior at his newly founded Saint-Joseph II. In 1640, after an unsuccessful mission into Neutral Nation territory, Brébeuf broke his collarbone. He was sent to Québec to recover, and worked there as a mission procurator. He taught the Huron, acting as confessor and advisor to the Ursulines and Religious Hospitallers. On Sundays and feast days, he preached to French colonists. Brébeuf is credited with composing the "Huron Carol", Canada's oldest Christmas song, written around 1642. He wrote the lyrics in the native language of the Huron/Wendat people. The song's melody is based on a traditional French folk song, "Une Jeune Pucelle" (A Young Maid). Linguistic work The educational rigor of the Jesuit seminaries prepared missionaries to acquire native languages. But, as they had learned the classical and Romance languages, they likely had difficulty with the very different conventions of the New World indigenous languages. Brébeuf's study of the languages was also shaped by his religious training. Current Catholic theology tried to reconcile knowledge of world languages with accounts in the Bible of the tower of Babel, as this was the basis of European history. This influence can be seen in his discussion of language in his accounts collected in The Jesuit Relations. Jean de Brébeuf's remarkable facility with language was one of the reasons he was chosen for the Huron mission in 1626. He is distinguished for his commitment to learning the Huron (Wyandot) language. People with a strong positive attitude towards the language often learn the language much more easily. Brébeuf was widely acknowledged to have best mastered the Native oratory style, which used metaphor, circumlocution and repetition. Learning the language was still onerous, and he wrote to warn other missionaries of the difficulties. To explain the low number of converts, Brébeuf noted that missionaries first had to master the Huron language. His commitment to this work demonstrates he understood that mutual intelligibility was vital for communicating complex and abstract religious ideas. He