mortification, prayers deep into the night-such was his life. Yet all the more increased his love for the Master whom he served, and his desire to suffer in His service. He thirsted after it as others thirst after the delights of life. He made a vow never to decline the opportunity of martyrdom, and never to receive the death-blow except with joy.

Such was a faith to remove mountains; and it did more, it implanted the vitalizing love of Christ in the bloodthirsty heart of the savage. The great warrior Ahasistari said," Before you came to this country, where I have incurred the greatest perils, and have alone escaped, have I said to myself, 'Some powerful spirit has the guardianship of my days!' And he professed his belief in Jesus as the good Genius and Protector, whom he had before unconsciously adored. After trials of his sincerity he was baptized; and enlisting a troop of converts, savages like himself, "Let us strive," he exclaimed, "to make the whole world embrace the faith in Jesus."*

Further and further still advanced the missionaries toward the West; they heard of powerful and warlike Indian races, such as the mighty Sioux, who dwelt by the great River Mississippi, of the Erie, and Chippewas, and Potawatomies, and others who dwelt by the great lakes. Dangers, fatigues, wildernesses, savages, all stood in threatening array before them, but only the more to allure them.

Hostile tribes overcame the Indians who conducted them. The savage Mohawks took the missionary Isaac Jogues prisoner, and with him the noble chief Ahasistari. Ahasistari had succeeded in finding a hiding-place; but when he saw Jogues a captive, he stepped forth to him, saying, "My brother, I made a vow to thee that I would share thy fate, whether life or death-How am I to keep my vow?" The savages exercised their cruelty upon them for sev

* Bancroft.

eral days and nights. When Jogues ran the gauntlet, he consoled himself with a vision of the glory of the Queen of Heaven. One evening, after a day of torture, an ear of Indian corn was thrown to the good father, and see! upon the broad leaf there were drops of water, or of dew, sufficient to baptize two captive Christian converts!

Ahasistari and two of his people were burned. He met death with the pride of an Indian and the calmness of a Christian.

Father Jogues had expected the same fate; but his life was spared and his liberty granted to him. Roaming through the magnificent forests of the Mohawk Valley, he wrote the name of Jesus on the bark of trees, graved the cross, and took possession of these countries in the name of God. Often lifting up his voice in thanksgiving, consoling himself in his sorrow with the thought that he alone, in that vast region, adored the true God, the God of heaven and of earth.

He returned safely to his own people in Canada, but merely, two years afterward, to set out once more to seek new perils in the same service. "I shall go, but shall never return," said he, on setting out; and soon afterward was taken prisoner by the Mohawks, who said that he, by his enchantments, had blighted their harvest. Timid by nature, yet courageous through his zeal, he received his death-blow with calmness.

Bribeuf, Anthony, Daniel, and the mild Lallemand, all suffered martyrdom amid such torments as only Indians can devise; suffered it with that pious courage which only the love of Christ can inspire.

The villages and settlements founded by the good fathers were burned, and the Christian converts perished by fire and sword. All the many years' labor of the Jesuits was destroyed, and the wilderness seemed once more to grow over their traces.

Such great adversities might be supposed sufficient to

quench the ardor of the missionaries. Not at all! They pressed forward anew.

While the savage nations were carrying on cruel wars one with another, and converting all the paths through the forest of the West into paths of death, the Bishop of Quebec, Francis de Laval, was animated by the desire of conveying the doctrines of peace to the shores of the Great River. He desired to go himself; but the lot fell on René Mesnard. Every personal consideration seemed to retain him at Quebec, but powerful instincts urged him to risk his life in the enterprise. He was already old when he entered on the path still red with the blood of his prede"In three or four months," wrote he to a friend, on his journey, "and you may add my name to those of the dead."

cessors.

He went, never again to return. Afar off in the wilderness of the West, while his attendant was one day occupied in the transport of a boat, he entered a forest and was never more seen: his cassock and breviary were long retained as amulets among the Sioux! Another missionary was killed by the arrows of the Indians during a fight between two hostile tribes.

It is a refreshment to turn from these bloody and cruel scenes, which marked the first introduction of Christianity by Europe into the West, to the idyllian and peaceful episode of the Jesuit missionary, Marquette, and his labors amid those savage, warlike Indian tribes. It is like a sunbeam between thunder-clouds.

Already had the indefatigable Father Aloüez visited most of the Indian tribes around Lake Superior, and during two residences among them had taught the Chippewas to chant the Paternoster and Ave Maria, had been invited by the Potawatomies, the worshipers of the sun, to their huts; had smoked the pipe of peace with the Illinois tribes, who told him of their great fields overgrown with tall grass, where troops of wild deer and buffaloes grazed;

he had even met the quarrelsome and mighty Sioux, who lived on wild rice, covered their huts with skins of animals instead of bark, and dwelt upon the prairie near the Great River, which they called Messipi.

Marquette determined to discover and sail down the Great River.

He had gathered around him the remains of the Huron nation, and settled down with them on the shores of Lake Michigan, where there was abundance of fish. There they built themselves huts.

It was from this place that Marquette, accompanied by a Frenchman named Joliet, and a young Indian of the Illinois tribe as guide, set forth on his journey of discovery. The French intendant of Canada, Talon, favored Marquette's enterprise, wishing to ascertain whether the banner of France could be carried down the Great River as far as the Pacific Ocean, or planted side by side with that of Spain on the Gulf of Mexico.

Marquette sought by his journey the honor of a higher master than an earthly sovereign: "I shall gladly lay down my life for the salvation of souls," said he, in answer to a messenger of the Potawatomies, who warned him "that these distant nations never spared strangers; that their mutual wars filled the shores with warriors; and that the Great River abounded with monsters which devoured both men and canoes; and that the excessive heat was mortal." And on hearing his reply, the children of the wilderness united with him in prayer for his preservation.

"At the last village on Fox River ever visited by the French," using the words of Bancroft the historian, for I can not have a better guide, "where Kickapoos, Mascoutins, and Miamis dwelt together on a beautiful hill, in the centre of the prairies and magnificent groves that extended as far as the eye could reach, and where Aloüez had already raised the cross, which the savages ornamented with

brilliant skins and crimson belts, a thanksgiving offering to the great Manitou, the ancients assembled in council to receive the pilgrims.

"My companion,' said Marquette, 'is an envoy of France to discover new countries, and I am embassador from God to enlighten them with the Gospel ;' and offering presents, he begged two guides for the morrow. The wild men answered courteously, and gave in return a mat, to serve as a couch during the long voyage.

"Behold then, in 1673, on the 10th of June, the meek, single-hearted, unpretending, illustrious Marquette, with Joliet for his associate, five Frenchmen as his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting their canoes on their backs, and walking across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin. They reach the water-shed; uttering a special prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they leave the streams that, flowing onward, could have borne their greetings to the castle of Quebec; already they stand by the Wisconsin. The guides returned,' says the gentle Marquette, 'leaving us alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence.'

"France and Christianity stood in the valley of the Mississippi.

"Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers as they sailed west went solitarily down the stream, between alternate prairies and hill-sides, beholding neither man nor the wonted beasts of the forests. No sound broke the appalling silence, but the ripple of their canoe and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven days 'they entered happily the Great River with a joy that could not be expressed; and the two birch-bark canoes, raising their happy sails under new skies and to unknown breezes, floated down the calm magnificence of the ocean stream over the broad, clear sand-bars, the resort of innumerable water-fowl; gliding past islets that swelled from the bosom of the stream, with their tufts of massive thickets, and