canoes around almost forty waterfalls, slept on the bare earth with no covering but the sky, while their principal food was jerked venison and pounded corn. Brebeuf carried with him the materials for the administration of the holy communion; while around the neck of each was a cord holding a heavy breviary or orders of the daily service in the Roman Catholic Church.

The Indians were taught to believe in Jesus Christ as the guardian spirit of their lives, and that it was He and not the many deities with which their wild fancy had peopled earth and water, that they must worship. The worship of the Roman Catholic Church, from its solemn and impressive ceremonial, early took a fast hold on the Indians. Balboa, Cortez and Pizarro early impressed the natives with their worship. The French Jesuits soon had a firm grasp on the mind of the savages, and held a controlling influence over the rude children of the forest from the gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. In their work, they were encouraged by the Church in France and the Pope at Rome; and a year before Massachusetts provided for the establishment of a college in that province, one was founded in Canada for the education of Indian boys, who, it was designed, should become missionaries and teach their people.

Soon after the establishment of this school, a

young French widow of great wealth established the Ursuline convent at Quebec for the religious training and education of Indian girls. This pious young woman, who devoted her fortune to the work of elevating the heathen from darkness, came to America with three nuns and was received on the shore at Quebec by the governor and garrison of the fort. On reaching the shore the devout women stooped and kissed the earth in token of their adoption of the new country as their home. Then they were escorted to the church, followed by a crowd of Indian men, women and children, where the Te Deum was chanted in the midst of thanksgiving.

With the spread of religion and French education in the new world, came the expansion of French dominion in America. In 1640 they took possession of Montreal, and a united prayer went up from the people of France that the Queen of Angels might take that region under her protection. Missionaries rapidly followed on the heels of each other, and, in the short space of thirteen years, sixty of them had carried the gospel and French power from the Niagara River to the remotest bounds of Lake Superior. Here, despite the many perils they encountered among the numerous tribes, which were continually at war, they established mission houses.

In 1641, Raymbault and Jogues visited the Indians at the falls of St. Mary's, at the outlet of Lake Superior. This was five years before the New England Elliot had preached to the Indians within a few miles of Boston Harbor. The missionaries themselves possessed the weakness and virtues of the order. For fifteen years Jean De Brebeuf endured the infinite labors and perils of the Huron mission, and exhibited, as it was said, "an absolute pattern of every religious virtue." Once, imparadised in a trance, he beheld the mother of Him whose cross he bore, surrounded by a crowd of virgins, in the beatitudes of heaven. Once, as he himself has recorded, while engaged in penance, he saw Christ unfold his arms to embrace him with the utmost love, promising oblivion for his sins. Once, late at night, while praying in silence, he had a vision of an infinite number of crosses, and, with a mighty heart, he strove again and again to grasp them all. Often he saw the shapes of foul fiends, now appearing as madmen, now as raging beasts, and often he beheld the image of Death, a bloodless form, by the side of a stake, struggling with bands, and at last falling as a harmless spectre at his feet. Having vowed to seek out suffering for the greater glory of God, he renewed that vow every day, at the moment of tasting the sacred water, and his desire for

martyrdom grew into a passion, until he exclaimed:

What shall I render to thee, Jesus, my Lord, for all thy benefits? I will accept thy cup and invoke thy name!" and in sight of the eternal Father and the Holy Spirit, of the Virgin Mary, most Holy Mother of Christ, before angels, saints, apostles and martyrs he made a vow never to decline the opportunity of martyrdom, and ever to receive the death-blow with joy.

The Jesuit missionaries suffered terribly from the Iroquois Indians, the hereditary enemies of the Hurons. Isaac Jogues, on his way to St. Mary's, was taken prisoner by the Mohawks on the St. Lawrence. He might have escaped; but there were unbaptized converts, and a Jesuit missionary was never known to save his own life at the risk of a soul. He was tormented with hunger and thirst and in several villages was compelled to run the gauntlet. Father Bressani was taken prisoner while on his way to the Hurons. Beaten, mangled, mutilated, driven bare-footed over rough paths, through briars and thickets, scourged by a whole village, burned, tortured, wounded and scarred. He was an eye-witness to the fate of one of his companions, who was boiled and eaten; yet some mysterious power seemed to preserve his life, and he and Jogues were humanely rescued by the

Dutch. The devoted missionaries encountered danger and suffering in every form, from the perils of nature as well as the inhumanity of savages. Some were drowned on the way to their missions; some starved to death; others, losing their way among the pathless snows, perished by intense cold.

In time, each solitary mission among the Hurons became a special point of attraction to the invading Iroquois and liable to the horrors of an Indian massacre. Such a fate befell the village of St. Joseph. On the morning of July 4th, 1648, when the warriors were absent on a hunt, the village was attacked by the Mohawks. A group of helpless women and children flew to the missionary, Father Anthony Daniel, to escape the tomahawk, as if his lips uttering messages of love, could produce a spell that would curb the madness of destruction. Those who had formerly scoffed at his mission implored the benefit of baptism. Bidding them ask forgiveness of God, he dipped his handkerchief in water and baptized the crowd of frightened suppliants. He had just accomplished this important duty, when the palisades were forced. Instead of flying, the holy man of God, ran to the wigwams to baptize the sick, give absolution, and then, when the wigwams were set on fire and the Mohawks approached his chapel, he serenely advanced to resign his life as a sacrifice to his vows.

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