PART II.

EXCELSIOR!

“Great news! Extra! Three sous!” The newsvender, a ragged little urchin who nearly collapsed under the weight and volume of his extras, was shouting out these three startling facts at the top of his voice as I went out early in the morning. Two rheumatic old rag-women, immediately suspending their investigation of the dust-heaps, dropped their crooks, and cried out to him to know the news. Was it a victory or a defeat, or was it anything about the siege? But the urchin, as hard-hearted as any editor, waved the momentous sheet majestically with one hand, and answered, “Three sous!” To the renewed entreaties of the rag-women he condescended so far as to say that it was well worth the money, that they never spent three sous more advantageously, for the news was wonderful news, but for less than three sous they should not have it. I did not altogether believe either in the extra or in the wonderful news, but the newspaper fever was on me like the rest of the world, so I produced the inexorable three sous and took the paper. The moment the two women saw this they came up to me, and, evidently taking for granted that I was going to give them the benefit of my extravagance, stood to hear the news. I read it aloud for them, as well as to a milk-boy who was passing at the moment and stood also to get his share of the three sous, and a remarkably sympathetic audience the three made. The news was none of the best. The Prussians were at Chalons, and they might be at the gates of Paris before another week.

“That was MacMahon’s plan from the first,” observed the milk-boy, “and, if the Prussians fall into the trap, the game is ours.”

The rag-women, not being so well up in military tactics and technicalities, meekly begged to be enlightened as to the nature and aim of the trap in question, and the young politician was so kind as to explain to them that the marshal had all along been luring on the Prussians to Paris, which was to be their pitfall; Mont Valérien and the fortifications would annihilate them like flies; not a man of them would go back alive; the only fear was that that rascally Bismarck would be too many guns for the marshal, and make him fight before Chalons, in which case, he observed, “it was all up with the marshal, and consequently with France.”

Having delivered himself of this masterly exposition of the case, the milk-boy swung his cans, touched his cap to me, and, having achieved the most preternaturally knowing wink I ever beheld, strode off without waiting to see the effect of his words on the two old women. They looked after him aghast. Had they been talking to a confidential agent of the War Office, or to an emissary of the rascally Bismarck himself? A spy, in fact?

“One ought to have one’s mouth sewed up these times,” observed the more ancient of the beldames, casting a half-suspicious glance at me as I folded my newspaper and put it into my pocket. “One never knows whom one may be speaking to.”

This remark was too deep and too fearfully suggestive to admit of any commentary from her companion; the only thing to be done in such a crisis was to take refuge in professional pursuits that offered no ground for suspicion, so seizing her crook the rag-woman plunged prudently once more into her rubbish.

A little further on, turning the corner of a street, I came on two gentlemen whom I knew, standing in animated conversation. I stopped to ask what news? None, except that the horizon was growing darker from hour to hour. The despatches from the frontier were as bad as could well be. As to pooh-poohing the siege now it was sheer stupidity, one of them declared, and, for his part, he only wished it were already begun: it was the last chance left us of rejecting the disasters of the campaign and crushing the remains of the enemy. His companion indignantly scouted both the certainty of the siege and the desirability of it. The city was not to be trusted; no great city ever was; there were hundreds of traitors only too ready to open the gates to the enemy at his own price. Look at the proprietors! Did any one suppose there were fifty proprietors in Paris who would not cry _Capitulons_! before one week was out?

“Well, let the proprietors be taken down to their own cellars, and kept there under lock and key, and let them sit on their money-bags till the siege is over!” suggested the advocate of the siege.

“Then you must lock up half the National Guard and the Mobiles,” resumed the other, “for they are full of those money-loving traitors.”

This was not very reassuring. I kept repeating to myself that public opinion at a moment like this was always an alarmist, and that the wisest plan would be to read no papers and to consult nobody, but just wait till events resolved themselves, as they infallibly do, sooner or later, to those who have patience to wait for them, and then act as they decided; but it was no use. I went home in dire perplexity, and began to wish myself in Timbuctoo or the Fiji Islands, or anywhere out of the centre of civilization and the fashions and chronic alarm and discontent. Things went on in this way for another week, the tide advancing rapidly, but so gradually that it was difficult for those on shore to note its progress and be guided by it. No one would own to being frightened, but it was impossible to see the scared faces of the people, as they stood in groups before every new placard setting forth either a fresh order from the Hôtel de Ville or some dubious and disheartening despatch from the seat of war, without feeling that the panic was upon them, and that the complicated problems of the great national struggle had resolved themselves into the immediate question: Shall we stay, or must we fly? When you met a friend in the street, the first, the sole, the supreme salutation was: “Do you believe in the siege? Are you going to stay?” The obduracy of the Parisians in refusing to believe in the siege up to the very last moment was certainly one of the strangest phases of the siege itself. They were possessed by a blind faith in the sacredness and inviolability of their capital, and they could not bring themselves to believe that all Europe did not look upon it with the same eyes; they thought that Prussia might indeed push audacity so far as to come and sit down before the gates, but beyond that Bismarck would not go; he would not dare; all Europe would stand up and cry shame on him, not out of sympathy for France, but out of sheer selfishness, for Paris was not the capital of France, but of Europe. So the walls were white with proclamations and advertisements and invitations to non-combatants to withdraw, and practical advice to the patriotic citizens whose glorious duty it was soon to be to defend the city; and the great exodus of the so-called poltroons and strangers had begun to pour out, and the much more inconvenient sort of non-combatants, the homeless population of the neighboring villages, poured in--a sorry sight it was to see the poor little _ménages_, the husband trundling the few sticks of furniture on a hand-cart, with the household cat perched on the top of the pile, while the wife carried a baby and bundle, and a little one trotted on by her side, carrying the canary bird in its painted cage--and still the real, born Parisian said in the bottom of his heart: “It will never come to a siege, they will never dare; England will interfere, Europe will not allow it.”

On the morning of the third of September I went out to make some purchases on the Boulevards. Coming back, I saw the Madeleine draped in black, and a number of mourning-coaches drawn up in ghastly array on the Place. The solemn cortége was descending the last steps. I stood to let it pass, and then cast a glance round to see if there was any one I knew in the crowd. To my surprise I saw Berthe in the midst of a group of several persons who had broken away from the stream, and were standing apart in the space inside the rails; she was talking very emphatically, and the others were listening to her apparently with great interest, and seemed excited by whatever she was telling them. When the crowd had nearly cleared away, I beckoned to her. She ran out to me at once.

“You are the very person I wanted to see,” she said, clutching me by the arm in her vehement way. “I was going straight to your house. I have just been to the Etat Major, and met General Trochu there. He came down on account of despatches that had just come in, and have put them all in a state of terrible consternation. There is not a doubt of it now; the city will be blockaded in ten days from this. The Prussians are within as many days’ march from us. I thought of you immediately, and I asked the general what you ought to do; he said by all means to go, and within forty-eight hours; after that the rails may be cut from one moment to another; he was very emphatic about it, and said it would be the maddest imprudence of you to remain; there is a terrible time before us, and no one should stay in Paris who could leave. Of course, you will leave at once.”

I was too much taken aback to say what I would do. The news was so bewildering. I had never looked upon the siege as the impossible joke it had been so long considered, neither did I share the infatuation of the Parisians about the inviolability of Paris in the eyes of Europe, and for the last fortnight we had come to expect the siege as almost a certainty, that was now only a question of time, and yet we were as much startled by this cool official announcement of it as if the thing had never been seriously mentioned before.

“I don’t know what I will do,” I said; “if we had nerves equal to it, it would be the most fearfully interesting experience to go through.”

“No doubt,” assented Berthe; “but it is an experience that will tax the strongest nerves; of that you may be sure; and unless one has duties to keep one here, I think it would be mad imprudence, as the general said, to run the risk.”

“You mean to leave, of course?” I said.

“No; I mean to stay. I am pretty sure of my nerves; besides, as a Frenchwoman, I have a duty to perform; I must bear my share of the common danger; it would be cowardly to fly; but with you it is different. I don’t think you would be justified in remaining for the interest of the thing. Only if you mean to go, you must set about it at once. Have you got your passport?”

“No; I had not gone that far in believing in the siege.”

“It was very foolish,” said Berthe; “all the foreigners we know have got theirs.”

“I will go for it now,” I said. “Come on with me, and let us talk it all over. Are you on foot?”

“No; but I shall be glad of the walk home; I will send away the carriage.”

She did so, and we went on together.

“It is like death,” I said; “no matter how long one is expecting it, it comes like a blow at the last; I can hardly realize even now that the siege is so near. Why, it was only the other day we were listening to those people joking about it all!”

“It was a sorry joke,” said Berthe; “but that is always the way with us; we go on joking to the end. I believe a Frenchman would joke in his coffin if he could speak.”

“And you really mean to stay, Berthe?”

“I do. I shall be of some use, I hope; at any rate, I will try my best. But we can talk of that presently. First about you; are you decided?”

“I cannot say; I feel bewildered,” I replied. “I long to stay, and yet I fear it; it is not the horrors of the siege that would deter me, at least I don’t think it is that; it is the dread of being taken up as a spy.”

She burst out into one of her loud, merry laughs.

“What a ridiculous idea! Why on earth should you be taken for a spy?”

“There is no why or wherefore in the case,” I said, “that is just the alarming part of it; the people are simply mad on the point; they have barked themselves rabid about it, and they are ready to bite every one that comes in their way. Twice on my way into town this morning I heard a hue and cry raised somewhere near, and when I asked what was the matter, a mad dog, or a house on fire, the answer was, ‘Oh, no; it’s an _espion_ they’ve started, and he’s giving them chase!’ One man said to me, half in joke, half in earnest: ‘Madame would do well to hide her fair hair under a wig; it’s dangerous to wear fair hair these times.’ I own it made me feel a little uncomfortable.”

“Well, that is not very comforting for me,” said Berthe, laughing, “my hair is _blond_ enough to excite suspicion.”

“Oh! your nationality is written on your face,” I said; “there is no fear of you ever being mistaken for anything but a Frenchwoman.”

On arriving at the Embassy, we found a throng of British subjects waiting for their passports, and considerably surprised at being kept waiting, and expressing their surprise in no measured terms. Surely they paid dear enough for the maintenance of their embassies abroad to be entitled to prompt and proper attendance when once in a way they called on their representatives for a service of this kind! The attachés were so overworked that it was impossible to avoid the delay? Then why were there not special attachés put on for the extra press of work? And so on. Some nervous old couples were anxious to have the benefit of his excellency’s personal opinion as to the prudence of leaving their plate behind them, and, if he really thought there was a risk in so doing, would he be so kind as to suggest the safest mode of conveying it to London? Also, whether it was quite prudent to leave their money in the Bank of France and other French securities, or whether it would be advisable to withdraw it at once at a loss? Also, whether it would be a wise precaution to hang the Union Jack out of the window, those who had furnished apartments in Paris, or whether the present state of feeling between England and France was such as to make such a step rather dangerous than otherwise? It was not for outsiders to know how things stood between the two countries so as to be able to guide their course in the present crisis, but his excellency being a diplomatist was well informed on the subject, and they would rely implicitly on his judgment and advice, etc.

Berthe and I were so highly entertained by the naïve egotism and infantine stupidity displayed by the various specimens of British nature around us, that we did not find it in our hearts to grumble at being kept waiting nearly two hours.

On reaching the Rond Point of the Champs Elysées, our curiosity was attracted by a silent, scared-looking crowd collected on the sidewalk in front of the Hôtel Meyerbeer. The blinds of the house were closed as if there were a death within, and a few _sergents-de-ville_ were standing at intervals with arms crossed, staring up at the windows. The owner of the hotel had been arrested with great noise the night before, on the strength of some foolish words which had escaped him about the possible entry of the Germans into Paris; but we neither of us knew anything of this, and I asked the nearest sergeant if anything had happened. The man turned round, and, without uncrossing his arms, bent two piercing eyes upon me--piercing is not a figure of speech, they literally stabbed us through like a pair of blades--and, after taking a deliberate view of my person from head to foot, he growled out: “Yes, something has happened. A spy has been found!” There was something so diabolical in the tone of his voice and his expression that it terrified me, and I suppose my terror got into my face and gave it a guilty hue, for another _sergent-de-ville_ who had turned round on hearing his colleague speak, strode up to me, and said nothing, but drove another pair of eyes into me with fierce suspicion. The crowd, attracted by the incident, turned round and stared at me, and I felt as if I had that morning posted a despatch to Bismarck or Bismarck’s master betraying every state secret in France. Despair, however, that makes cowards brave, came to my rescue, and, putting a bold face on it, I said, with extraordinary pluck and coolness:

“Has he been arrested?”

“He has.”

“Ah, it is well!” I observed. And in abject fear of being pounced upon there and then, and done equally well by, I walked away.

When we had got to a safe distance, I looked at Berthe. She was as white as ashes. Indeed, if I looked half as guilty, it is nothing short of a miracle that we were not both seized on the spot and carried off to the _Préfecture de Police_.

“Let this be a lesson to us never to speak to any one in the street while things are in this state,” said Berthe. “Indeed, the safest way would be not to speak at all, especially in a foreign language, for whatever they don’t understand they set down as German, and to be a German is of course to be a spy.”

After this we walked on in silence. Evidently Berthe no longer looked on my fears as chimerical or matter for laughter, and, puerile as the incident was, I believe it put an end to my hesitation, and decided me to leave Paris with as little delay as possible. She had not realized as much as I had, but the spy-fever had spread so alarmingly within the last few days that what had first been merely a recurring panic was now a fixed idea that had grown to insanity. You might read suspicion and fear written on the faces of the people as you went along. They walked in twos and threes without speaking, glancing timidly on every side, and trying to carry it off with an air of indifference or preoccupation. Every one was in mortal fear of being pointed at and hooted off to the nearest _poste_. No nationality was safe. A few Englishmen who had fallen victims to the popular mania, and been subjected to a night’s hospitality at the expense of the government, had published their experiences, and described the sort of entertainment prepared for casual visitors, and it was anything but enticing: a _salle_ crammed full of every kind and degree of sinner, from the imaginary spy whipped up on the pavement without proof or witness, to the lowest vagrants of the worst character, all put in for the same offence, and huddled up together without a chair to sit on or air to breathe. Those who were lucky enough to be set free after a short term of durance vile were warmly congratulated by their friends, and retired into private life without further _éclat_. Some English subjects were simple enough to venture a protest against the unceremonious proceeding on the part of the police, and were politely reminded that the gates of the city were still open and trains ready to convey them to many places of more agreeable manners where the sacred person of a British subject ran no risk of being mistaken for a common mortal, but that, while they choose to remain within the gates, they must take the consequences. And this was, after all, the best answer they could make, and it behooved all sensible British subjects to abide by it. I parted from Berthe at the corner of her own street, and went home to pack up and start the next day by the twelve o’clock train.

I stopped on my way to the station to take leave of her. It was near eleven o’clock. Contrary to my expectations, I found her up and dressed, instead of lolling in dishabille on her couch. But this was not the only surprise awaiting me. The whole appearance of the house was changed. The _portières_ and curtains were taken down; the two salons were emptied of their furniture, and four iron beds placed in the large one and two in the small one. A young woman was busy cutting out bandages with a great basket of linen beside her in Berthe’s room--that soft, Sybarite room, so unused to such company and such occupation. Her face was concealed by a broad-frilled Vendean cap, but on hearing us enter she turned round, and I recognized the bride-widow of the Bréton volunteer.

“We are going to work very hard together,” said Berthe, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Jeannette is to teach me to make poultices, and to dress wounds, and to do all kinds of useful things that one wants to know how to do for the wounded. She is quite an adept in the service, it seems, so I hope our little ambulance will be well managed and comfortable for the dear soldiers.”

Jeannette’s eyes filled with tears, and she took Berthe’s hand and kissed it. Just at this moment François came in to say there were some _Sœurs de Charité_ who wanted to speak to madame. Berthe and Jeannette went out to meet them, and as they left the room Antoinette came in through the dressing-room. She threw up her arms when she perceived me, and looked toward the salon with blank despair in her face.

“The world is upside down,” she said, “everything is going topsy-turvy; what between the war, and the siege, and the rest of it, one doesn’t know what to expect next; but of all the queer things going, the queerest is what is happening in this house. To think of _le salon de la comtesse_ being turned into a hospital! That I should live to see such things! Madame does well to go away; people are all going crazy in this country, and they say it’s catching.”

“So it is, Antoinette,” I said, “and the best thing I can wish you is that you may catch it yourself.”

Berthe wanted to come with me to the station, but I would not let her. I preferred to carry away my last impression of her as I saw her now. She was dressed in a plain dark silk, with a white apron before her, and a soft cambric handkerchief tied loosely round her head; the quaint, half-nunlike dress seemed to me to become her more than the most artistic of M. Grandhomme’s combinations, and as I watched her going from room to room with a duster in her hand, changing the chairs and tables, and working as deftly as an accomplished housemaid, her face flushed with the exercise and bright with a new-found joy, I thought I had never seen her look so beautiful. So we parted in that blue chamber that was henceforth to have a new memory of its own to both of us. Before I had started from my own house, the news of Sedan had come in, and spread like wild-fire. All that I had previously witnessed of popular excitement was cold and calm compared with what I beheld on my way to the station. The city was like a galvanized nightmare, electrifying and electrified into hubbub and madness. Rage and despair were riding the whirlwind with suspicion tied like a bandage on their eyes. The cry of _Treason!_ out-topped all other cries; every man suspected his brother and accused him; the air was filled with curses and threats, and there was no voice strong enough to rise above the popular tumult and subdue it. If there had been, what might not have come of it? If at that moment there had been a voice loud enough to speak to the hurricane, and compel those millions of tongues to be silent and listen to the truth, and then gather them into one great voice that would lift itself up in a unit of harmony and power that would have been heard, not only to the ends of Paris, but to the ends of France, What might not have been done? what might not have been saved? But it was not to be. Nothing came of the discord but discord. The strong hand that might even then have welded all these suicidal elements of hate, and fury, and suspicion into a vigorous bond of action was not forthcoming; the strife was to go on to the bitter end, till the soil of fair France was drenched with blood, and all her energies spent, and her youth and chivalry laid low in bootless butchery.

The blocks that stopped our progress in every street made it a difficult matter to get to the railway, and when we eventually did get there we were a quarter of an hour behind our time. But, as it happened, this was of no consequence; we had to wait another hour before the train started. Meantime the confusion was indescribable. Several wagons full of wounded had arrived by the last train, and a regiment of the line was waiting to start by the next. The Place was filled with soldiers, some were lying at full length fast asleep under the hot noon sun, others were smoking and chatting near their arms that were stacked here and there; some of the poor fellows had been out before, and were only just recovering from their wounds; they looked worn and weak as if hardly able to bear themselves; women were clinging to them, weeping and lamenting; inside the station, travellers were rushing frantically from bureau to bureau; then in despair at ever getting through the crowd that besieged every wicket, they would seize some unlucky porter with a band on his hat, and implore him in heart-rending tones to help them to a ticket, and, when he protested that such a service was not in his power they would belabor him vindictively with hard words, and make another rush at the bureau.

At last we were off. It was an exciting journey, such as I hope never to make again. The lines were encumbered with trains full of wounded coming and troops going, and our pace was regulated with a view to avoid running into those ahead or being run into by those behind. Now we darted on at a terrific speed, the engine wriggling from rail to rail like a snake gone mad; then we would pull up spasmodically and crawl almost at a foot-pace, then off we flew again like a telegram. Trains flashed past us on either side every now and then with a tremendous roar, and soldiers sang out snatches of war-songs, and we cheered them and waved hands and handkerchiefs to them in return. We had started an hour and a quarter behind our time, and we arrived three hours after we were due. For two hours before we reached Boulogne, the danger lights were flashing ahead, red and lurid in the darkness, and it was with something like the feeling of being rescued from a house on fire that we set foot at last on the platform. Once in safety, I was able to look back more calmly on the history of the last fortnight. It seemed to me that I had been standing on a rock, watching the tide roll in, creeping gradually higher and nearer to my standpoint till I felt the cold touch of the water on my feet, and leaped ashore.

And Berthe? She stood out like a bright star transfiguring the dense darkness of the picture. The change I had witnessed in her appeared to me like the promise of other changes, wider, deeper, universal. I had ceased to wonder at the choice she had made; the more I thought of it, the more I felt that she was worthy of it as it was of her, and the only wish I could form for her now was, that she might be strong to persevere unto the end. The course she had adopted was the noblest and the only true one for a Frenchwoman while France was suffering, and struggling, and bleeding to death. While the war-cry and the battle psalm were clanging around, it was not meant for the women of France to sit idly in luxurious ease, and watch the death-struggle of the nation in indifference or mere passive sympathy. We may none of us stand aloof from our brethren in such a crisis, or take refuge in cowardly neutrality. Neutrality in the brotherhood of Freedom is desertion, treachery. We have each our appointed post in the battle, and we cannot desert it without being traitors. We must all fight somehow. Not of necessity with iron or steel, but we must fight. Moses had neither bow nor arrow nor javelin when he got up on the mountain and watched with uplifted arms the conflict in the valley below, but yet he was not neutral. So to the end of time it must be with all of us. We must fight somehow; we may never abide in selfish peace or a sense of isolated security while the brethren around are at war; whithersoever the battle goes, to victory or defeat, to glory or humiliation, we must take our share in it, and let our hearts go on fighting faithfully to the end. We must love the combatants through good and evil alike; through the smoke and din we must discern every ennobling incident of the struggle, such as there abounds on every battle-field in every land, seeing all things in their true proportions, shutting our hearts inexorably to despair, making them wide to endless sympathy with the good, to inexhaustible pity for the wicked. The smoke must not blind us; the crash and the roar must not deafen us; through the agony of souls, despair, and hate, and sin, we must have our vision clear and strong to recognize the loveliness of virtue, the divine beauty of sacrifice, the infinite possibilities of repentance, the joy of the conquerors, the sweetness of the kiss of peace. Loving all love. Hating all hate. We must see angels outnumbering fiends in incalculable degree, light triumphing over darkness, and the breath of purity healing the blue corruption of the world.

TO BE CONTINUED.

THE CLERKE OF OXENFORDE.

At his beddes hed Twenty bokes clothed in blake or red, Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes riche, fidel or sautrie, For al be that he was a philosopher Yet hadde he but litel gold in coffer, And all that he might of his frendes hente On bokes and on learning he it spente, And besily gan for the soules praie Of them that gave him wherewith to scholaie. --_Chaucer._

A BAD BEGINNING FOR A SAINT;

OR, THE EARLY LIFE OF FATHER CHAUMONOT, A CELEBRATED MISSIONARY IN CANADA.

Lives of saints are somewhat discouraging reading at times to poor mortals, who feel that they have a good deal of human nature in them, and that somehow human nature is more disposed to play the part of mistress than of handmaiden to grace.

These holy souls seem from the cradle so innocent, so faithful, that they appear a higher creation than ourselves, and accordingly it is no less consoling than encouraging at times to find early shortcomings overcome by a tardy fidelity to grace, and sanctity attained.

In the early annals of Canada, there are few names more revered than that of Father Peter Mary Joseph Chaumonot, whose impassioned eloquence gathered round him at Onondaga the braves and sachems of the Iroquois, wondering to hear their unlabial language flow so smoothly from the lips of a white man--who founded at Montreal the Society of the Holy Family, which has been such a potent instrument in maintaining in Canadian homes the true family spirit of Catholicity and devotion--and who founded near Quebec a new Loretto in this Western world for the Huron Indians, whom he so long directed and guided, after he saw himself deprived of the martyr’s crown which so many of his fellow-laborers won near the shores of Lake Huron.

Yet good Father Chaumonot, we are sorry to say, began life as a young scamp; and to encourage those who sometimes despair of _mauvais sujets_ whom Providence has placed under their charge, we will give the story of his early years in Chaumonot’s own inimitable language. Late in life, by command of his superiors, he wrote an autobiographical account, and from it we extract:

“For my father I had a poor vine-dresser and for mother a poor schoolmaster’s daughter. At the age of six, they placed me with my grandfather, five or six leagues from our village, that I might learn to read and write. They then took me home, but only for a short time, one of my uncles, a priest residing at Châtillon-sur-Seine, having had the kindness to take me to his house, so that I might study in the college in that place.

“When I had made some progress in Latin, my uncle wished me to learn plain chant, under one of my class who was a musician. This fellow persuaded me to leave Châtillon and follow him to Beaune, where we were to study under the Fathers of the Oratory. As I did not wish to undertake this journey without funds, I stole about a hundred sous from my uncle while he was in the church. With this we took flight.

“We travelled by by-ways to Dijon, whence we made our way to Beaune. There we put up with a townsman, but as my finances were short, I wrote to ask my mother to have the goodness to supply me with money and clothes, so that I might pursue my studies at Beaune, where I hoped to make more rapid progress than at Châtillon. The letter fell into my father’s hands, and he answered me that he would send me nothing; that I must return; and that he would make peace with my uncle for me.

“This reply filled me with dismay. To return to my uncle was to expose myself to be pointed at as a thief, and yet to stay any longer at Beaune was out of the question. So I resolved to run around the world as a vagabond, rather than bear the shame my rascality deserved. I started from Beaune with the intention of going to Rome, though I had not a sou or a change. I travelled alone for half a day; then I fell in with two young men of Lorraine, who saluted me and asked me whither I was going. “To Rome,” quoth I, “to gain the pardons.” They applauded my design, and entertained me with the object of their own journey to Lyons.

“Meanwhile I was thinking what was to become of me, and what I was to live on, if I continued my journey. Begging was in my ideas too degrading, I could not bring myself to work for my living, and there was little chance of my doing it, for I was unaccustomed to labor and knew no trade. Fortunately, my two Lorrainers, who were no better stocked with money than I was, began to beg from door to door in the first town we came to. Who was dumfounded to see them ply this trade? Myself, who, after some deliberation, concluded to imitate them rather than starve, so powerfully had their example made easy what had previously appeared impossible. Such was my apprenticeship as a beggar, but as I was only a beginner at the trade, I gained but a wretched livelihood. However, I flattered myself that on reaching a city so large as Lyons, some good fortune would turn up. But, alas! I was astonished to find myself arrested by the sentinels, who let my companions pass on account of their passports, and detained me because I had none.

“I did not know what was to become of me, or even where I was to get shelter. I saw many large buildings, but I durst not ask the least corner there to pass the night in. At last, spying a wretched shed opposite a glass furnace, I crept under it. Would to heaven I had then had sense enough to take my sufferings as an expiation of my sins, and united my poverty to that of my Saviour lying in a stable!

“Next morning, seeing at the river-side a boat where people were embarking to cross the Rhone, I begged the boatman to give me a passage out of charity. This he did, because in fact the city paid him to carry beyond the river all the beggars who were refused entrance into the city.

“When I got to the other side, I met a young man who promised to make the tour to Italy with me.

“We had just started off together when we met a priest returning from Rome. He did his best to persuade us to forego our projected pilgrimage and return home. Among other reasons, he told us that our want of passports would prevent our getting entrance into any city on our way. I asked him whether he had one, and he had no sooner shown it to me than I begged him to allow me to make a copy of it, which I did on the spot, inserting my own name and my companion’s instead of his.

“Oh! why did I not then offer to God the hardships of nakedness, fatigue, heat, cold, and the thousand other miseries I suffered on that journey! I should have had the happiness of drawing down upon me the blessings of heaven. Our common Father would not have refused them to me, beholding in me some traits of the poverty and sufferings of his Son, but alas! my pride and other sins, which rendered me more like the devil than I was to our Lord by my poverty, were great obstacles to grace in me. Yet, O my God! thou hadst thy views in permitting me to commit fault on fault, folly on folly! Thou didst deign to set me free from all inordinate love to my parents, which, had I remained always with them, would have prevented my consecrating myself entirely to thee. Thou didst design that when I grew up the remembrance of my trials should make me sympathize with more love and gratitude in the sufferings of thy Son.

“But I should be tedious were I to recount all the faults I committed, and all the miseries that befel me on my way. I shall give only the principal adventures.

“The first that occurs to my mind is that, when in Savoy, I entered the court of our college at Chambéry, where I asked in Latin for alms. One of the fathers was so touched at my wretched state that he gave me supper, and even promised to take me back to Lyons, whither he was about to go, and send me from that point to Châtillon. At first I thanked him as well as I could, and promised to follow him, but as soon as he left me I took flight, my money always terrifying me from the thought of returning to my parents. Was I not out of my senses, and did I not well deserve all the evils that befel me, when I refused such kind offers for my own quiet, and the comfort of my poor family? How deplorable was the blindness of my proud spirit, to choose to face countless dangers and hardships, rather than undergo a wholesome reprimand!

“In a village in Savoy we met a good parish priest, who took us to his house, and, after giving us supper, allowed us to sleep on the bed of his servant, whom he had sent to Chambéry. This gentleman slept in a room over his valet’s, which was entered by a ladder, at the top of which was a trap-door, which our host neglected to close properly, so that about midnight a cat pursuing her prey threw it down. The noise was sufficient to awake the priest, who imagined that we were trying to enter his room for no good purpose. So he jumped out of bed and, attired as he was, rushed out on a balcony, crying Murder! murder! murder! at the top of his voice. No less alarmed, I ran up the ladder and reassured him by explaining the innocent cause of all the trouble. Fortunately for us, the neighbors were not awakened by their pastor’s voice.

“Here is another adventure where we ran greater risk. In a town in the Valteline we found a French garrison reduced to a very small number of soldiers, so that the officers urged us strongly to enlist. I would have consented to get my bread every day in this manner, in the hunger I suffered, but my wiser comrade would hear nothing of it. All they got from us was our consent to await the arrival of the commissary, who was daily expected. They led us to hope that we should receive the same pay as real soldiers. Meanwhile, they wished to see what figure we would cut on parade. It was easy enough to travesty into a soldier my comrade, who was a big fellow; but as I appeared a mere boy, from my youth and small body, there was some difficulty in finding a sword to suit me. That which they judged best suited to my size had an eel or snake skin scabbard, and for want of belt or baldric they tied it around with an ass’ halter. I appeared so ridiculous in this that they resolved to put me to bed as sick when the commissary came. While awaiting that event, we lived on the king’s bread, and my comrade was in a constant shiver lest we should be regarded as interlopers or be detained there in spite of ourselves. He made the danger out so great that I yielded to his urging. Bent on pursuing our pilgrimage to Rome, we started one fine morning, but had not travelled more than a mile and a half when we were arrested by some soldiers, who had orders to seize all deserters they found and take them back to their officers. ‘Alas!’ I cried with tears, ‘have I the look of a military man? I am a poor student, who has taken a vow to go to Rome.’ So pathetic was my accent that it touched them, and they let us go. If God had not given them compassion for us, what would have become of us? He saved us from another danger after we had entered Italy.

“Towards nightfall we reached a hostelry by the roadside, where we proposed to sleep, but we counted without our host. We had scarcely eaten our wretched supper, which he made us pay for as dearly as he wished, when, in spite of all our demands that he would at least give us shelter in one of his stables, he barbarously drove us out. It would not have been so bad could we have slept by the light of the stars, but there were none, and the weather, which was overcast, soon poured down on us a drenching rain. Our clothes were all soaked, and, to cap the climax, the road was full of holes and ditches that we did not see, so that we made almost as many tumbles as steps.

“We were well-nigh used up when a gleam of light enabled us to make out a stable. As we crawled towards it, we found a great stack of straw quite near it. We climbed up on it and made a hole in the top to creep in. As we were chilled through, especially our feet, we put them under each other’s arm-pits, lying so that my head was opposite my companion’s. We were just beginning to get warm when some large dogs, scenting us, came running up barking furiously. At this noise the people ran out of the farm-house and tried to drive us off with stones. This new kind of hail did not suffer us to remain in our quarters, and fear of the dogs prevented our leaving them. I then thought it high time to speak, and my skill in getting up tears served my turn here as it had already done in getting us off when arrested as deserters. So I began to shout out in Latin: _Nos sumus pauperes peregrini_. As the last word is Italian also, it informed these good people who we were. They took pity on us, called off their dogs, and left us to pass the rest of the night in peace.

“After many hardships and sufferings we reached Ancona. Alas! who can express the wretched condition to which my vagabond life had reduced me! From head to foot, everything about me inspired horror. I was barefooted, having been obliged to throw away my shoes, which were broken and galled me. My shirt was rotting, my tattered clothes swarmed with vermin, my uncombed head was filled with so horrible a disease that it swarmed with worms and matter of most loathsome stench.... It was only at Ancona that I was aware of the extent of this disease, when on scratching it I found a worm on my hand. At the sight of this my consternation was unspeakable. ‘Must I, then,’ I said to myself, ‘in punishment of my villanies, be eaten alive by worms and vermin? I no longer wonder that when I take off my hat before people, they show wonder and horror at the sight. What is to become of me? Am I not a sickening sight to all the world? O sad chastisement of my pride!’

“After all, I resumed courage as I approached the Holy House of Loretto. Perhaps the Blessed Virgin, who performs so many miracles in this sacred spot in favor of the wretched, will take pity on my misery! Ah! why had I not then the knowledge I subsequently acquired of the wonders wrought by her in that sanctuary in favor of soul and body? I should have had a far different confidence in her power and goodness!

“Although I invoked her coldly enough, she showed me that, independently of our merit and disposition, she is pleased to exercise towards us the duties of a real mother; and as one of these duties is to see to the cleanliness of their children, thou didst regard me in that light, O Blessed Virgin! unworthy as I was and am to be adopted by thee as thy son. Thou didst inspire a young man whom I was never able to discover with the will and power to heal my head. Thou knowest better than I how it was accomplished. Yet I will not omit in token of gratitude to set down what I know.

“On leaving the Holy House of Mary, an unknown person, who seemed to be a young man and who was perhaps an angel, said to me with an air and tone of pity: ‘My dear boy, what a wretched head you have! Come, follow me, I will try to apply some remedy.’ I followed him: he took me outside the church, behind a large pillar, where no one passed. Having reached this retired spot, he made me sit down, and bade me remove my hat. I obeyed. He cut off all my hair with scissors, rubbed my poor head with a white cloth, and, without my feeling any pain, entirely removed all trace of the disease and its hideous accompaniments. He then put my hat on again. I thanked him for his charity; he left me, and I am yet to see a better physician or experience a more wretched disease.

“If the least lady had done me this service by her lowest valet, should I not render her all possible thanks? And if, after such a charity, she had offered always to serve me in the same way, how should I not feel bound to honor, obey, and love her all my life! Pardon, Queen of angels and of men! pardon me, that after receiving from thee so many marks convincing me that thou hast adopted me as thy son, I have been so ungrateful as for whole years to act more as a slave of Satan than the child of a Virgin Mother. Oh! how good and charitable art thou, since, in spite of the obstacles my sins have raised to thy graces, thou hast never ceased to draw me towards good; till thou hast caused me to be admitted into the holy Society of Jesus, thy Son.

“My comrade and I resumed the road to Rome, after spending three days at Loretto; but God stopped me at Terni, in Umbria, to change my beggar life for a place as valet. I was begging from door to door as usual, when a venerable old man, a doctor of laws, invited me to stay with him to attend him in the house and accompany him to town. I was so weary of my beggar’s trade that I readily accepted the citizen’s offer to become his lackey; I even did the lowest tasks, for there was nothing that did not seem sweet and honorable compared to the hardships and humiliations which had made me loathe my mendicant life.

“I had been some time at Terni, but as I had not picked up enough Italian to confess in that language, I made my confession in Latin to a father of the Society of Jesus. After my confession, he questioned me as to my studies. I told him that I was in rhetoric when I allowed myself to be led astray. He manifested the regret he felt to see me reduced to so low a condition after starting so well in my education. He urged me to resume my studies; and to facilitate this he proposed, if I chose, to have me received into the college, where I would advance in science and virtue. I took his proposal ill, imagining he wished to make a Jesuit of me; but in the sequel I had every reason to believe that this wise religious merely wished to give me at first the place of a young secular who taught the lowest class in the college. Would to God I had then commenced to do so! How many sins I should have avoided! I did indeed go two days after to see the father and remind him of it, but as I did not know his name, I was stupid enough to ask for ‘the father who heard my confession.’ The scholars in the college yard to whom I put this question roared at my folly, and that was enough to send me back quicker than I came. However, I asked the doctor whom I served what kind of people the Jesuits were. He answered me carelessly that they received only persons of rank and talent, that their order was less austere than others, and that you could leave it even after taking the vows. These last traits with which he described them did not displease me. I would willingly have entered among them for a time. I was not yet fit for the kingdom of God, as I looked behind me before putting my hand to the plough.

“As I began to understand Italian, I read devotional books in that language, and among the rest one, _The Lives of the Fathers of the Desert_, inspired me with the desire of becoming a hermit. Thereupon, without consulting any one, I left my master’s house with the view of going to bury myself in some wilderness in France after I had visited Rome.

“As I left the city I met my doctor’s daughter, and explained my intention to her, so that they should not be alarmed at my sudden disappearance. After I had travelled a few leagues, I thought I would try whether I could live on herbs like the anchorites. I took some growing wheat, put it in my mouth, chewed it, but could not swallow it, so I fell back on my trade of beggar, which did not prevent my suffering considerably from hunger, even in Rome, for I did not know the religious houses where alms were given at stated days and hours. The novitiate of the Jesuits at St. Andrew’s is one of these charitable places, and the only one I knew. Although my would-be vocation to the eremitical life was somewhat shaken, I started from Rome intending to return to France. Retracing the same road I came by, I reached Terni, but not daring to return to my master, I retired to a soap-maker of my acquaintance, where I spent the night. The next morning he told the doctor, who was good enough to invite me back to his service. I at once accepted his offer, renouncing for ever beggary, for which I had now a greater horror than ever.

“My good master had an intimate friend called Il Signore Capitone, who some time after my return to Terni told my doctor that he would like to have me at his house as tutor to his two sons, who were studying at the college of the Society of Jesus. My master consented, and, after speaking to me, sent me to his friend. I was received with open arms, and presented the next day to our fathers, who put me in rhetoric. I was not long studying under them without feeling stimulated to imitate the virtues which I admired in these worthy servants of God. One thing prevented openness with my confessor, and it was that I could not bring myself to acknowledge my low birth, for up to this time I had boasted that my father was a _procureur du roi_ (district attorney), and I was ashamed to unsay it or keep on saying it. Several months rolled on in this combat of nature and grace, the latter pressing me to declare my vocation, the former preventing it. However, God, wishing me to be received into the Society, prepared the occasion.

“A young ecclesiastic paid by the fathers taught one of the lower classes, but, getting tired of it, asked to be relieved. They cast their eyes on me, and promised me the same salary. The gentleman with whom I dwelt consenting, I became regent or teacher. God gave me grace to economize my earnings, and when I had a pretty good sum I divided it between the churches and the poor. I even tried to imitate at least in something the great St. Nicholas, by throwing some money one night into a house where there was a girl in want.

“Our Lord rewarded me well for these liberalities by the great grace he did me by calling me strongly to the religious state. One day among others, while they were celebrating in the church the feast of Blessed Francis Borgia, not then canonized, I was so touched by the sermon of the Jesuit father that, to follow as far as I could the example of the blessed Francis, I made a vow to leave the world and enter religion either among the Jesuits, if they were willing to receive me, or, in case they deemed me unworthy of that favor, among the Capuchins or Recollects.”

We will not follow his account of some interior struggles that followed. When the provincial of the order arrived at Terni, the accounts given were so favorable that Chaumonot was received and sent with good letters to the novitiate of St. Andrew’s at Rome. “I was twenty-one years old,” says he, “when I entered the novitiate May 18, 1632.” But he did not finish it there. A nobleman had founded a novitiate at Florence, and young Chaumonot with others was sent there six months after his entrance. The master of novices here, less austere than his former one, encouraged him to reveal the great deception that troubled his conscience.

“One of the first things I asked this second master of novices was that, to punish my pride, he should question me in public as to the condition of my parents, my coming into Italy, and how I had been employed. I hoped thus to expiate to some extent my faults, and especially the falsehood I had uttered to conceal my low birth. He consented. One day, when all the novitiate was assembled, he questioned me on all these points. God gave me grace to practise the humiliation which he had inspired, and I publicly declared who I was, how and why I had left France, and what had been my adventures in Italy. The holy man added to my avowal as I had proposed making it, another act of mortification that I had not counted on. He told me to sing one of my village songs, and for this purpose made me mount on a trunk as my stage. I tried to obey, but the music was not long. My memory could bring up only a dancing tune. I started it. After the first couplet, the father stopped me, crying: ‘Shame! what a ridiculous song! If you don’t know a better one, never sing again.’”

His joy in the abode of religion was unbounded. To find himself admitted among young men so far superior to him in all that the world esteems, gave him constant occasions for zeal and fervor. Yet his trials were not ended. The health which had stood the hardships of his gipsy life now became so impaired that there was some hesitation whether he should be allowed to take his vows.

But heaven favored his desires. He returned to Rome, and was thence sent to the college at Fermo, to his intense delight; for it was but a short distance from that Holy House which was to his last breath the one beloved spot of earth to his warm heart, throbbing with love for the Holy Family.

He easily won permission to make a pilgrimage to that shrine; and the young French runaway of former days, a spectacle to excite pity and horror, would not now be recognized in the talented young Italian Jesuit, Calmanotti. His mother tongue even was lost, but a French father at Loretto gave him some books in his native language, and urged him to recover it. After a time it came back, and he could read with ease.

As a teacher, he won the favor of his pupils and his superiors, for he seemed to possess the _donum famæ_, that singular gift which constitutes popularity, and wins its way with men of all nations and places.

While pursuing his theology at Rome, he became acquainted with Father Poncet de la Rivière, a Parisian Jesuit just completing his divinity course in the Holy City, destined at a later day to be hurried through Northern New York by savage captors and to reach the Mohawk amid torture and suffering.

One day this father placed in the hands of his young and brilliant countryman one of those Jesuit _Relations_ our bibliomaniacs now prize so highly. Chaumonot read with wonder and excited interest the narrative of the heroic Brébeuf and his call for religious to labor with him in converting the Indians of New France. To him it was a personal call, and he responded. There were obstacles, but he applied for everything, permission to abridge his course of study, permission to be ordained, permission to start as early as possible for France to catch the ships on their annual voyage.

Yet with all his eagerness and haste, he clung to one spot of Italy. He could not leave it without kneeling once more as a pilgrim in the Santa Casa, and bearing it in his heart of hearts to the New World, till he could erect there a Loretto on the model of that he so revered. His devotion to the Holy Family led him to adopt the name of Joseph and Mary, and to choose for saying his first Mass the Loretto Chapel, erected after the model of the Santa Casa by Cardinal Pallotti.

An unfortunate hiatus in his autobiography prevents our following him through France, and witnessing his meeting with his family and his long farewell. The uncle, we can well believe, readily pardoned the escapade of one who was now showing such devotion and self-sacrifice; while the mother must have pressed to her heart the son now more than ever dear to her.

The Canada fleet sailed from Dieppe, and thither Chaumonot and Poncet bent their way. The fleet and its voyage are historical. As the old chronicle remarks, it bore “a College of Jesuits, a House of Hospital Nuns, and an Ursuline Convent,” the last accompanied by Madame de la Peltrie, the foundress and Mother Mary of the Incarnation, as first superior. Of the Hospital Nuns--whose contemplated establishment was endowed by Richelieu’s niece, the Duchess d’Aiguillon, and the great cardinal himself--Mary Guenet of St. Ignatius had in chapter been appointed to assume direction. The passage of the ocean was not without its risks. Richelieu’s attempt to create a French navy, and his motto, so adroitly alluding to the arms of France:

“Florent quoque lilia pronto” (E’en on the waters lilies bloom),

had excited jealousy, and cruisers, privateers of all kinds, were ready to sweep away the cargoes destined for the colonies the far-sighted minister sought to create.

But fearless of this danger the fleet swept out of Dieppe on the 4th of May, 1639, and the convent life, with almost daily Masses, made the flagship vie in its regularity with the time-honored monasteries of the Old World.

But if the danger of hostile cruisers did not alarm them, the feast of the Holy Trinity came with a new peril. Dense fogs hung over the bosom of the ocean while the Masses were offered. Just as they had risen from their adoration, a sailor on the deck shrieked: “Mercy! mercy! we are all lost!” Through the lifting vapors he caught, within two fathoms of the ship’s side, the flash and the glitter of ice. While all sank in prayer, offering vows and Masses, and the Ursuline Sister St. Joseph began to chant the Litany of Loretto, the vanishing mist showed them the fearful extent of their danger. The iceberg towered high above their topmast, its summit still wreathed in a cloud of mist, while far and wide it extended over the sea. “You would have called it a city,” says Mother Mary of the Incarnation, “and there are cities which are far less extensive than this berg,” with turrets and spires, streets and dwellings, as it were of crystal.

The sails were straining, the wind being full in their favor, and the iceberg advancing. All passed in a moment. Captain Bontems’ voice rang out, but providentially the man at the wheel, appalled by terror, gave a wrong movement, the wind suddenly changed, and the vessel was saved, as the ice fairly grazed it, and bore away from the magnificent object that so recently sent a thrill through every heart--even the best pilots averring that it was a miracle, as no human skill could have saved them.

Still storms and fogs delayed the ships, and it was not till the 15th of July that they entered the port of Tadoussac on the lower St. Lawrence. Transferred to a fishing-smack, the whole party were here detained several days, but at last on the 1st of August reached the lower town of Quebec.

The gallant Knight of Malta, Huault de Montmagny, Governor-General of Canada, received them at the wharf, and the city made it a general holiday. As the nuns stepped on the American soil which was to be the scene of their labors for God and the Indians, they knelt to kiss the earth. All then proceeded to the church, where a Te Deum was chanted.

Father Chaumonot was not to linger long at Quebec. A letter of August 7th announces that he with three other fathers was about to start for the Huron country. His stormy sea voyage of three months was followed by a month’s journey over the rivers and lakes and through the vast forests of the New World. On the 10th of September, the six Hurons ran their bark canoe ashore at the end of Lake Tsirorgi, where Father Jerome Lalemant was at the moment in a rude cabin he had recently thrown up.

Chaumonot was on the field of his labor. Strange indeed was all around him. “Our dwellings are of bark, like those of the Indians, with no partitions except for the chapel. For want of table and furniture, we eat on the ground and drink out of bark. Our kitchen and refectory furniture consists of a great wooden dish full of _sagamity_, which I can compare to nothing but the paste used for wall paper. Our bed is bark with a thin blanket; sheets we have none, even in sickness; but the greatest inconvenience is the smoke, which, for want of a chimney, fills the whole cabin.”

“Our manner of announcing the Word of God to the Indians is not to go up into a pulpit and preach in a public place; we must visit each house separately, and by the fire explain the mysteries of our holy faith to those who choose to listen to it.”

The superior soon recognized in the young father--to whom the Hurons gave the name of Oronhiaguehee (the Bearer of Heaven)--a great facility for languages, as well as zeal, courage, and perseverance.

Father Chaumonot began his Huron labors at a critical moment. The mission among the Wyandot tribes, renewed by the great apostle Brébeuf soon after the restoration of Canada to France, had been fruitful in crosses and gave little to encourage the ministers of religion.

Most of these Indians, obdurate in their errors and superstitions, not only turned a deaf ear to the teachings of the missionaries, but, regarding them as powerful sorcerers, attributed to them every misfortune that befel the tribe or any individual. In those wild communities, every one rights his own wrongs, real or imaginary. Hence the fearless Jesuits actually carried their lives in their hands, never free from danger, or without the probability of being tomahawked.

The flotilla that brought up Father Chaumonot and Poncet carried also the deadly small-pox. As it devastated town after town, the missionaries were compelled to bear the responsibility of this new scourge. Their very efforts to reach the sick, to baptize and instruct, were resisted with superstitious terror; they were driven from cabins; and often, on reaching a town, would find every lodge closed against them.

Their crosses were cut down, the crucifix torn from their necks, the tomahawk often menaced their lives while on their errands of mercy or at prayer in their cabins.

It was a position to appall the stoutest heart. Yet Chaumonot entered on his work with alacrity and courage, fit associate for those who had already braved all the risks and perils. None faltered or hesitated.

They took, however, at this time an important step. To enable them to act more independently and give them at all times a place for retreats, as well as a centre of mission work, they established St. Mary’s, the first mission settlement in the West. It was on the river Wye, easy of access from all the towns where they had been laboring. From it the fathers, generally two together, proceeded to the towns assigned as their field of labor.

The large fortified town of Ossossane was entrusted to Father Ragueneau, and Chaumonot was named his assistant. Here the opposition and obduracy were such that they had actually driven out the missionaries. The young Jesuit went forth bravely into this hardened field--Ossossane and twelve neighboring towns.

In St. Teresa, as the missionaries styled one of these villages, a young man solicited instruction and seemed to hear it with pleasure. While Father Ragueneau was speaking, another Indian rushed furiously in and ordered the two missionaries to be gone. As Father Ragueneau rose, the young man whom he had been instructing sprang upon him, tore his crucifix violently from his neck, and, brandishing his tomahawk, bade him prepare to die. “I fear not death,” said Ragueneau; “you should thank me for what I have just taught you. If you wish to kill me I shall not fly, for death will place me in heaven.” His tomahawk was raised, and he dealt the blow. “Father Chaumonot and I thought that we that moment beheld our long-cherished desire gratified,” but the blow was averted--how they knew not. As he raised his hatchet again his arm was caught.

One day the two fathers were passing near a cabin full of sick Hurons, whom they were not permitted to see. A bright little boy ran out and welcomed them with kind words. His danger of taking the epidemic touched them. Father Ragueneau felt impelled not to lose the opportunity which Providence seemed to offer them to baptize him, and he asked our young missionary to baptize him secretly. Father Chaumonot took up a handful of snow, and, melting it in his hand, poured it upon his head. The little fellow smiled, and then, as though he had accomplished his errand, ran back to his death-stricken home. A few days later they heard that he had sunk under the fatal malady.

The next year he was sent to the Arendaenronnon with Father Daniel. As the great object was to learn the language, his experienced companion made him daily visit a certain number of cabins and pick up all the words he could, writing them down. “So great a repugnance had I to making these visits,” he tells us, “that every time I entered a cabin I seemed to be going to the torture, so much did I shrink from the railleries to which I was subjected.”

After this rude apprenticeship he set out with the great Father Brébeuf to attempt to establish a mission among the Attiwandaronk, a tribe lying on both sides of the Niagara, or, as they called it and one of their towns near the Senecas, Onguiaahra. This tribe, fiercer and more brutal than the Hurons, had hitherto observed a neutrality between them and the Iroquois--a fact which led the French to call them the Neutral Nation. A journey of four days and nights through the woods from Teananstayae on the Huron frontier brought them to Kandoucho, the first of the Neuter towns.

In the beginning they were well received, and all awaited the return of the great chief Tsohahissen from war, there being no one in his absence to treat with them; but gradually pagan Hurons came, and represented the missionaries as great magicians who sought their ruin. Then every door was closed against them, and they often nearly perished at night, deprived of all shelter. After visiting eighteen towns, they sadly turned back towards Kandoucho, but the snow came on so rapidly that they could not proceed beyond Teotongniaton. There they found a charitable woman who not only welcomed them to her cabin, but during their twenty-five days’ stay was their patient and intelligent instructor in her language, enabling them to adapt the dictionary and grammar of the Huron language to that of this nation.

Yet even this good woman could not protect her guests from all injury. A crazy fellow in her cabin spat upon Father Chaumonot, tore his cassock, and kept up such a din that they could not sleep, and tore from their persons any object that took his fancy.

After a stay of four months and a half they finally abandoned this field, and the Neuter Nation rejected its last call, for it was soon after destroyed by the Iroquois.

Still greater suffering awaited him. With the early summer he joined Father Daniel once more. They entered the cabin of a dying woman in the town of St. Michael to baptize her; one of her relatives, incensed at this, awaited them without, and as Father Chaumonot issued forth tore off his hat with one hand, and with the other dealt him a terrible blow with a stone. “I was stunned by the blow,” says he, “and the assassin seized his tomahawk to finish me, but Father Daniel wrested it from his hands. I was taken to our host’s cabin, where another Indian was my charitable physician. Seeing the large tumor I had on my head, he took another sharp stone to make some incision, through which he endeavored to press out all the extravasated blood, and then bathed the top of my head with cold water, in which some pounded roots were steeped. He took some of this infusion into his mouth and squirted it into the incisions. This treatment was so successful that I was soon well. God was satisfied with my desire of martyrdom, or rather deemed me unworthy to die a victim to the hatred of the first of our sacraments.”

Amid such men, with all the horrors of war--for the Iroquois from New York were gradually conquering the land--Chaumonot labored on, suffering in health but undaunted and unappalled, even when, in 1648, Father Daniel perished in his village, and in the following March Father Brébeuf and his young associate Gabriel Lalemant underwent the fearful torture which gave them the highest crown among our martyrs.

A general panic seized the Hurons after this last blow. “At the time of this greatest defeat of the Huron nation,” says Father Chaumonot, “I had charge of a town almost entirely Christian. The Iroquois, having attacked the villages about ten miles off, gave our braves a chance to sally out and attack them; but the enemy were in greater force than they supposed, and our men were defeated. Two days after their defeat news came that all our warriors were killed or taken. It was midnight when the intelligence came, and at once every cabin resounded with wailing, sobs, and piteous cries. You could hear nothing but wives bewailing their husbands, mothers mourning for their sons, and relatives lamenting the death or captivity of those nearest to them. Thereupon an old man, justly fearing lest the Iroquois might dash on the town, now deprived of its defenders, began to run through the town crying: ‘Fly! fly! let us escape; the hostile army is coming to take us.’

“At this cry I ran out and hastened from cabin to cabin to baptize the catechumens, confess the neophytes, and, arm all with prayer. As I made my round I saw that they were all abandoning the place, to take refuge with a nation about thirty-three miles distant. I followed these poor fugitives with the view of giving them spiritual aid, and as I did not even think of taking any provisions, I made the whole journey without eating or drinking or ever feeling any fatigue. While marching on, I thought only and busied myself only with administering consolation to my flock, instructing some, confessing others, baptizing those who had not yet received that sacrament. As it was still winter, I was forced to administer baptism with snow-water melted in my hands. What showed me clearly that my strength in flight was given me from on high, is that a Frenchman in the party, a man incomparably stronger in constitution than I, almost perished on the way, spent with weariness and overexertion.”

He was with the surviving missionaries when they committed to the grave at St. Mary’s the bodies of Brébeuf and Lalemant; and when tidings came of Garnier’s heroic death, and of Chabanel’s disappearance, he accompanied the Hurons who fled to St. Joseph’s Island in Lake Huron. There is nothing in the annals of the missions more touching than Father Chaumonot’s letters describing the fearful sufferings of the fugitives there.

When they at last resolved to seek a refuge at Quebec with their allies the French, Father Chaumonot bore them company, bidding adieu to the land which for eleven years had been the constant scene of his labors.

No missionary had more thoroughly entered into the Indian character or identified himself with them in thought. To him, therefore, they gave the name which the illustrious Brébeuf had borne, that of Hechon; and he was naturally the one to whose direction they were committed on Isle Orleans.

His labors on the Huron language were now probably completed. He had thoroughly mastered it, and drew up a grammar and dictionary, which continued for years to be the guide, not only for Huron, but for all the kindred Iroquois languages. “It pleased God,” he says, “to give my work so much benediction, that there is no turn or subtlety in Huron, nor manner of expression, that I am not acquainted with, or have not, so to say, discovered.” This knowledge he attributed as much to prayer as to his natural talent and assiduity.

His grammar was published some years since in the second volume of the _Collections_ of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society, and is one of the most important of those linguistic treasures which American ethnology owes to the early Catholic missionaries.

Father Chaumonot had scarcely organized his Huron church on Isle Orleans when he was summoned to a new field. The Iroquois, their hands reeking with the blood of Goupil, Jogues, Daniel, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, asked for missionaries. They began to respect the faith which gave such heroes, able to read the grandeur of Christianity in the virtues of its apostles.

Father le Moyne had led the way to Onondaga. Dablon and Chaumonot followed. In a general assembly of the cantons, Father Chaumonot proclaimed the faith with such eloquence, and in a style so adapted to reach the Indian mind, that the Indians lost their cold indifference, and applauded loudly, while Father Dablon himself listened in wonder to the language of his fellow-missioner. The mission was established. Huron captives formed a nucleus, around which gathered Iroquois converts, warriors and matrons, sachems and orators.

There was no sparing of vice. Amid all the suspicion that lurked in the Indian mind against the motives of the missionaries, and compelled constant discourses and apologies, the fearless missionaries rebuked them for their evil life.

Once, when accusations were made that the blackgowns came to diminish their numbers and blight their race, Father Chaumonot boldly retorted the charge on the men, and showed them that, by their infidelity and harshness to their wives, their divorces, abandoning them, and overtasking their strength, they caused the death of their children, and were forced to adopt captives to fill their cabins. Christian marriage alone, he showed them, could save the race from extermination.

This advocacy of woman’s real rights closed the mouths of his assailants, and so won the women of Onondaga to the cause of Christianity that they wished to render public thanks to the fearless missionary. They gave him a great banquet, to which they came adorned in all their finest ornaments, to dance to the cadence of two native minstrels, while they sang his praises and thanked him for his advocacy.

Strange that alarmed statisticians in this country point now to the same causes as producing the rapid decline in the birth-rate of the Americans as a people, while the church, echoing Chaumonot’s sermon of two centuries ago, points to the sacrament of matrimony as the only sure hope for the country.

The Onondaga mission of 1655 is full of beautiful details. Its end was strange and romantic. A plot formed for the destruction of all the French was baffled by a secret flight, so adroitly managed that the Indians believed that the French had become invisible.

Montreal was the next field of our missionary. Here, in 1663, with the aid of Madame d’Ailleboust, Margaret Bourgeoys, foundress of the Congregation Sisters, Mother de Brésoles, of the Hôtel Dieu, and other pious persons, he founded a society which has for its model the Holy House of Nazareth, to which he was so devoted, and which has for two hundred years been the instrument of incalculable good in Canada--one of the mighty aids in maintaining the family faith and family piety--the Society of the Holy Family. Amid our great wants is such a society, to sanctify Christian families, by modelling them on that of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

The remnant of his Huron flock had gathered beneath the fort of Quebec, but before he returned permanently to them he was sent as chaplain to Fort Richelieu, at the mouth of the Sorel. Adapting himself to any life, he labored among those committed to him with his habitual zeal. He soon gained the hearts, not only of the private soldiers, but of the officers; and established among them regular practices of piety. One officer, touched by his words and example, hung up his sword at the altar, and, receiving in due time holy orders, was for many years a devoted missionary in Nova Scotia; while a soldier, formed by Father Chaumonot, devoted himself to the service of the missionaries, and became an excellent teacher.

At last he is with his Hurons, never to leave them. He reared for them the Chapel of Notre Dame de Foye, so called after a celebrated shrine of Mary near Dinan. A copy of the miraculous statue there venerated excited the devotion of his flock, and was the instrument of God’s blessings and favors. To commemorate these, the Hurons, through Father Chaumonot, sent to the Old World shrine a wampum belt with the inscription, “_Beata quæ credidisti_,” and this token of Indian homage was laid before the altar of Our Lady with the offerings of kings and princes. Others followed the example, and to this day celebrated shrines in Belgium, France, and Italy preserve the wampum belts sent from the depths of our forests by the converts of our early missionaries.

Six years later, the wants of the Indians compelled them to select a new site, where unbroken land and fuel were abundant. When it was chosen, Father Chaumonot carried out a long-cherished design, and with the alms of the Children of Mary in Europe and America erected a brick chapel of the exact dimensions and arrangement of the Santa Casa of Loretto. It soon became a renowned pilgrimage for the supernatural favors obtained there. And here in this favored sanctuary the servant of Mary spent nearly a quarter of a century, giving his time to God and his neighbor. He rose at two, spent four or five hours in prayer or contemplation, recited his office, said Mass, preaching almost daily, then attended to the affairs of the mission, instructing some of his colleagues in Huron, catechising children; after a slight repast at noon, he again spent some time in prayer, and visited some cabins to give special instructions. At nightfall, his chapel was filled for evening prayer, and with his private devotions he closed his day.

In 1689, he celebrated at the Cathedral of Quebec the fiftieth anniversary of his first Mass, being the first one who had ever there attained such years of ministry. The Governor and Intendant, with many other persons of distinction, sought the privilege of receiving at the hands of the venerable priest on this day.

At the close of the year 1692, he began to sink under a complication of disorders, and was conveyed to Quebec. He rallied for a time, but after suffering intense pains, which he bore with unshaken patience and admirable piety, he died the death of a saint. As such, his austerities, his mortifications, his uninterrupted union with God, his zeal and love for his neighbor, had long caused him to be regarded. All gathered around his venerated remains seeking some relic, and many afflicted in soul or body sought his intercession--as documents show, not without effect. His funeral was the most imposing yet seen in Canada. Such was the repute of his sanctity that even Frontenac, the Governor-General, bitter and fanatical in his hostility to the Jesuits, attended, as well as the Bishop of Quebec, who had long revered the aged missionary.

None who beheld his unpromising start in life could have dreamed of such a career or of such a close.

PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN INDIA.[190]

The contents of this book, put forward with all the apparent sanction possible of the sect that employs Mr. Butler, may be looked upon as the quintessence of all that has been or can be said on the subject of missions in Hindostan, by a writer who feels that he has a claim to challenge our attention and command our belief. That it is orthodox in character, according to the notions of his class, cannot be doubted in view of the official position of the author, and the innumerable extracts from the Old and New Testaments, particularly the former, with which its pages are interspersed; quotations the frequency of which, if not reflecting much credit on the reverend doctor by their charity or appositeness, give to the work an air of ponderous learning and holiness that must be highly relished by his brother Methodists. But in justice to the author, it must be said that he does not altogether confine himself to the sacred writers. When the grandeur of the pagan temples or the horrors of Mohammedanism become too great even for his descriptive powers, he freely draws on that profane child of the muses, Tom Moore, whose merits, however, he is careful, in his clerical capacity, to depreciate by assuring us that the author of _Lalla Rookh_ “was for a good part of his life a _Romanist_”; an objection which he seems to forget might be urged with equal truthfulness against the majority of the gifted minds of the past eighteen centuries, and even against the inspired penmen of the New Testament and the fathers of the church.

However, aside from the attractions of the work in an artistic point of view, we do no injustice in selecting it as a very favorable specimen of this sort of literature, and, recognizing its author as a tried and approved servant of the Methodist Episcopal Church, we shall proceed to gather from its veritable pages a history of his labors, sufferings, and triumphs in the cause of Protestant Christianity.

India, as our readers are aware, is one of the most densely peopled and, in one sense, highly civilized of Asiatic countries. Its population numbers considerably more than two hundred millions, or about one-sixth of the whole human race, speaking many languages and professing various forms of faith. The Hindoos, the original inhabitants, forming the mass of the people, are polytheists, worshipping according to the _Vedas_ and other books considered sacred, their priests being known to the Western world as Brahmins--an hereditary religio-social aristocracy, the most ancient, and at one time considered the most learned, body of men in existence. The Mohammedans, who are said to amount to some twenty-five millions, are the descendants of the conquerors of the eleventh century, and follow more or less strictly the teachings of the Koran. The Brahminical classes or castes, which are numerous, though not enjoying their full immunities since the advent of Europeans on their shores, are still ardently devoted to learning, and indeed, in common with all their countrymen, may be said to develop remarkable mental acuteness and quick perception, though still unfortunately strongly attached to the grossest forms of idolatry. To wean them from these degrading practices, and to introduce in their stead the pure teaching of the Gospel, has been the professed object of the Protestant sects of Europe in sending out crowds of missionaries and innumerable Bibles since the commencement of the century--a work in which some of their brothers in this country have not been behindhand. But American Methodism, until 1856, had no representative in the “land of the Veda,” and the Indians up to that time were ignorant of its peculiar and manifold blessings till Dr. Butler was despatched from Boston to enlighten them. He sailed in April, and arrived at Bareilly in the autumn of that year, where, as he tells us, “his appearance caused a great deal of talk and excitement.” He was accompanied from Allahabad by a native named Joel, wife and child, and, having his own wife and two of his children with him, he commenced his labors. This Joel, who is frequently mentioned in the book, was, it seems, already converted, and when transferred to Dr. Butler by his spiritual guardians they “playfully intimated that Joel had been trained a Presbyterian, knew the Westminster Catechism, and was sound on the five points of Calvinism, and that they would naturally expect him to continue in the faith even though he was going with a Methodist missionary; but,” continues the sly doctor, “I felt assured that these things would regulate themselves hereafter”--and he was right, for, as he tells us in another place, his faithful helper “was destined to become the first native minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church in India.” He became in a manner the corner-stone of the vast edifice that was about to be erected on the ruins of heathenism.

We have often heard the anecdote of lending a congregation, but this is the first instance, within our knowledge, of borrowing, not to use a harsher term, a convert; still, we can sympathize with honest Joel in the confusion of mind he must have experienced in discriminating between the Christianity of John Calvin and that of John Wesley, and his mystification at receiving as the Word of God two different and distinct versions of the same law, not to speak of his trying to expound them to his audience in his capacity of first native pastor. Still, he was a beginning, the nucleus of that great conglomeration of religion and intelligence about to be called into existence by the potent spells of the grand magician. Nor was he long left alone. There was a Christian girl, it seems, named Maria, who had formerly been converted by the Madras Baptists, but whom Dr. Butler speedily reconverted to Methodism. “This precious girl,” says the author, “who, of her race and sex in Bareilly, alone loved us for the Gospel’s sake, seemed raised up to encourage and aid us in our new mission;” and with this encouragement, and two such followers, he forthwith set about the conversion of Rohilcund, having first secured “a furnished house, and began to study the language.”

If there is something absurd in the commencement of a Methodist church with only a Presbyterian and a Baptist, the idea conveyed in the last sentence is excessively ridiculous. Can we imagine a heaven-appointed minister, filled with holy energy, so eager to christianize the heathen and elevate his mind that he leaves his distant home and two of his (four) children in tears, penetrates into the heart of the enemy’s country, and, having made his “comfortable arrangements,” established his wife and family, and procured two ready-made helpers, quietly sits down for the first time to learn the language of the highly astute and observant people to whom he is sent to preach, and consequently ignorant of the prejudices and doctrines against which he would have to combat? We are not surprised therefore to hear that for several months after the establishment of the mission Mr. Butler’s congregation, as he delights to call it, did not increase perceptibly. Says Dr. Russell, a Protestant and the correspondent of England’s leading journal: “So long as a Christian minister can argue with a Moulvie or a pundit with patience and ingenuity, he will be listened to with interest and respect; he will be permitted to expound the Scriptures, and to warn his hearers against the errors of their faith, provided that he refrains from insulting, contemptuous, and irritating language; but if he be a mere ignorant, illiterate zealot, without any qualification (temporally speaking) except a knowledge of Hindostanee and good intentions, he may be exposed to the laughter, scorn, and even abuse of the crowded bazaar in consequence of his manifest inability to meet the subtle objections of his keen and practised opponent. From what I have heard I regret to state my conviction is, that no considerable success, so far as human means are concerned, can be expected from the efforts of those who are like the ancient apostles in all things but their inspiration and heavenly help.”[191]

In May, 1857, the Sepoy rebellion, caused to a great extent by the conduct of just such “illiterate zealots” and the criminal neglect of the East India Company, broke out, and the terror extending to Bareilly, the foreign women and children were ordered to be sent to the mountains for safety, Dr. Butler being advised to accompany them. After “prayerfully considering” this message, he resolved not to go, not to abandon his post in the hour of danger; but, with the inconsistency of poor weak human nature, from which even missionaries, it would appear, are not exempt, he tells us that “before going to bed we arranged our clothes for a hasty flight should any alarm be given.” As the doctor is an advocate of the superiority of married over single missionaries, we give literally his own account of the domestic scene that followed the warning, which, to say the least, is very complimentary to his amiable spouse:

“As soon as the adjutant had gone, I communicated the message to Mrs. Butler. She received it with calmness, and we retired to our room to pray together for divine direction. After I had concluded my prayer, she began, and I may be excused in saying that such a prayer I think I never heard; a martyr might worthily have uttered it, it was so full of trust in God and calm submission to his will. But when she came to plead for the preservation of ‘these innocent little ones,’ she broke down completely. We both felt we could die, if such were the will of God; but it seemed too hard for poor human nature to leave these little ones in such dreadful hands or perhaps to see them butchered before our eyes! We knew that all this had been done on Sunday last at Meerut, and we had no reason to expect more mercy from those in whose power we were should they rise and mutiny. But we tried hard to place them and ourselves, and the mission of our beloved church, in the hands of God, and he did calm our minds and enable us to confide in him. On arising from our knees, I asked her what she thought we ought to do? Her reply was that she could _not_ see our way clear to leave our post; she thought our going would concede too much to Satan and to these wretched men; that it would rather increase the panic; that it might be difficult to collect again our little congregation if we suspended our services; and, in fact, that we ought to remain and trust in God. I immediately concurred, and wrote word to the commanding officer.”

But all flesh is weak. Notwithstanding the result of this combined appeal for “divine direction,” the doctor knew better, and, instead of imitating his wife’s brave determination in that trying hour, he hearkened to the counsel of a _Moonshee_, and Methodism, while it retained its missionary, lost its first and, it may be surmised, its only chance of having a martyr. “Being a Mohammedan,” he says, “with more worldly wisdom than consistency, and having a pecuniary loss in the suspension of my lessons in the language, his warning had much weight with me. I had then to settle the question raised by the commanding officer whether our resistance to going, under those circumstances, was not more a tempting of, rather than a trusting in, Providence? I hated to leave my post, even for a limited time. Yet to remain looked, as he argued, should an insurrection occur and I become a victim, like throwing away my life without being able to do any good by it; and the Missionary Board would probably have blamed me for not taking advice and acting on the prudence which foreseeth the evil and takes refuge ‘till the indignation is overpast.’” Was there ever as prudent an apostle or one so entirely anxious to avoid (after death) the reproach of his superiors by the exhibition of too much courage? Not that he cared for his personal safety, by no means, but the thought of the censure he would have incurred for not having taken more care of his precious life could not be endured. “Still,” continues this intrepid contemner of ‘wifeless priests,’ “had I been _alone_, or could I have induced Mrs. B. to take the children and go without me (a proposition she met by declaring that she would never consent to it, but would cling to her husband and cheerfully share his fate, whatever it might be), I would have remained. But then, to all the preceding reasons, the reflection was added that Mrs. B.’s situation required that if moved at all it must be then, as a little later flight would be impossible, and she and the children and myself must remain and take whatever doom the mutineers chose to give us.” What one of the “wifeless priests” would have done amid similar circumstances, those at all conversant with the history of Catholic missions in every portion of the world--and there is no part of it but has been hallowed by their footsteps--can be at a loss to determine; but then, those short-sighted celibates have never allowed family or other human ties to come between them and their manifest duty to their Master. The result of the lady’s sickness, so indelicately introduced, we think, as a cloak for her husband’s cowardice and hypocrisy, was, we subsequently learn, the increase of the Methodist “congregation” of India by one member known by the sobriquet of the “mutiny baby,” and it is pleasant to consider that, despite the disasters of the times, the conversion of the country was thus progressing, even though slowly.

Moved by all these considerations, the author left Bareilly with his family, and proceeded to the assigned refuge in the mountains, some seventy miles distant, with surprising alacrity, considering that for many days after everything remained quiet in the neighborhood. But what a hegira was that, so full of perils, adventures, and even miracles, performed, of course, by him alone! In his narration of the journey he rises above himself, and becomes almost apocalyptic in style. At one time, when the bearers showed an unwillingness to carry Mrs. B. and the children further, this was his noble device:

“But in spite of urging, there stood my men. It was an awful moment. For a few minutes my agony was unutterable; I thought I had done all I could, but now everything was on the brink of failure. I saw how ‘vain’ was the ‘help of man,’ and I turned aside into the dark jungle, took off my hat, and lifted my heart to God. _If ever I prayed, I prayed then._ I besought God in mercy to influence the hearts of these men, and decide for me in that solemn hour. I reminded him of the mercies that had hitherto followed us, and implored his interference in this emergency. My prayer did not last two minutes, but how much I prayed in that time!”

No wonder that his heart was glad at the result, particularly at the fact that the men not only took up their valuable burden cheerfully, but forgot to ask for their hire when their task was accomplished, which to any one acquainted with that class of men in the East certainly savors of the supernatural. “The divine interposition in the case will appear more manifest,” he modestly continues, “when I add that even the ‘bucksheesh’ for which the bearers were contending they started off without staying to ask for or receive.” The ladies who met the party at the first halting-place were astonished, and one of them, Miss Y., asked: “Why, what could have happened to Mrs. Butler’s bearers that they started so cheerfully, and arrived here so soon without giving her the least trouble?” “Ah! she knew not,” ejaculates the self-contained missionary, “but I knew, there is a God who heareth and answereth prayer!” But let not this remark be misunderstood. That initial lady, if at all in the flesh, was a Christian, and must have believed in the efficacy of prayer. The true meaning is that she did not know what a holy man Dr. Butler really was, and of what special graces he had became the favored recipient. Poor Miss Y., how we commiserate her ignorance!

While the civil war lasted, the refugees remained in the mountains at Nynee Tal, a pleasant summer resort, where, for a rent of $225, our missionary and family had no difficulty in securing the inevitable “furnished house,” and, save an occasional scarcity of milk for the baby, suffered no great inconvenience from want of the necessaries and even luxuries of life. Food was readily and cheaply supplied by the natives, and the Nawab of Rampore, though an infidel, generously furnished them with food and money. Still, in this comfortable shelter, and while his brother missionaries were exposed to all sorts of dangers, our hero was rivalling Nana Sahib in the fierceness of his denunciation and maledictions; for, while the rebellious Peishwa was petitioning his tutelary gods to destroy the English, and send them _en masse_ to the infernal regions, the American Christian was invoking the Deity, in all the forms peculiar to Methodist camp-meeting exhorters, to weed out, root and branch, the very people to whom he had been commissioned, and upon whose hospitality and forbearance so many of his co-religionists depended for safety. The utter want of decency and common humanity exhibited by many of the Protestant ministers during and subsequent to the war cannot better be illustrated than by transcribing the following gratuitous account given in this book of a visit to the deposed Emperor of Delhi while _in prison_:

“A day or two previously, my friend, Rev. J. S. Woodside, missionary of the American Presbyterian Church, was here. He went to see the emperor, and took the opportunity of conversing with him about Christianity. The old man assented to the general excellence of the Gospel, but stoutly declared that it was abrogated by the Koran--as Moses and the law were abolished by Christ and the Gospel--so, he argued, Mohammed and the Koran had superseded Christ and every previous revelation. Brother Woodside calmly but firmly told him that, so far from this being the case, _Mohammed was an impostor and the Koran a lie_, and that, unless he repented and believed in Christ alone, without doubt he must perish in his sins. He then proceeded to enforce upon his bigoted hearer the only Gospel sermon which he had ever heard; and Brother Woodside _was the very man to utter it_!”

Surely this Woodside, who could thus wantonly insult a feeble old man, the fallen monarch of two hundred millions of subjects, heathen though he was, must have been one of the ignorant zealots alluded to by Mr. Russell; and the writer who could mention him with unctuous satisfaction runs the risk of being considered little better.

For nearly a year the missionary toils of Dr. Butler were suspended; but when all danger was passed, he returned to his former scene of action, or rather inaction, this time reinforced by two “brothers” from America, who, having been lately ordained, knew as little of the language, religion, and disposition of the natives as he did on his arrival. The reunion took place at Agra, and the trio, with their respective families, of course, proceeded to Nynee Tal, “as we could there best devote ourselves,” says the author, “to the acquisition of the language, and be ready to descend to Bareilly and our other stations, where God had prepared our way, after the reoccupation of Rohilcund by the English Government”--rather a strange precursor, we should suppose, for the servants of the Prince of Peace; but tastes, particularly Methodist tastes, cannot always be accounted for. The “Church in India” also received at this time another valuable member (number four) in the person of a small boy, the orphan of a deceased sepoy officer, who had been found on the battle-field by Lieutenant Gowan, and “made over”--to use his own expression to the superintendent--by that officer. “No man in the East or in America,” observes the matter-of-fact missionary, “has given half as much money to develop our work in India as Colonel Gowan has contributed.... His liberality to our mission work, up to the present, cannot be much less than $15,000.”

Encouragement also came from other official sources. His next step was taken in the direction of Lucknow, “where he was assured that houses could at once be obtained by the assistance of Sir Robert Montgomery,” Governor of Oude, and thither he bent his steps, “escorted by relays of _sowars_ (cavalry), the general considering the precaution necessary.” Of the subsequent history of the missions established in that city, Meradabad, near Nynee Tal, and the old one at Bareilly, the book before us relates little. War, famine, and pestilence, the three great scourges of mankind, seem to have been more effectual proselytizing agencies than the Bible and preaching. The first child in the orphanage established at the latter place was, as we have seen, a waif from the rebellion, and when, in 1860, a dreadful famine occurred in Northern India, “so decided and quick was the calamity, that before the English Government ascertained its extent, and could originate public works to arrest its severity, large numbers of the people had died of want,” and their children were left an easy prey to whoever cared to snatch them up. This specious excuse for the government brings to our mind the history of another famine which happened some years previously nearer home, and which the same rulers failed to alleviate even to the extent of affording free transport for the food provided for the sufferers by the generous people of this country. Though in the latter-mentioned case the victims were Catholics, not Hindoos, the advantage sought to be taken of the calamity by a similar class of men was the same. “The idea came to us,” says Dr. Butler, “that this emergency might be turned to good account by our missionaries seizing on the opportunity thus presented,” and it was therefore agreed among them to solicit the bodily possession of three hundred boys and girls. “I wrote,” he continues, “to the Government; they were only too glad to consent and have the children off their hands.” Of course they were, and doubtless if he had asked for as many thousands, he would have got them as readily. Nor was money wanting for the support of these new _protégés_. “Responses came pouring in from schools and individuals in America.... Individuals in India also, and government itself,” says the doctor, “came to our help.” Even the Nawab of Rampore, “a Mohammedan sovereign in the vicinity”--who, by the way, owed his position to the English authorities--was put under contribution to the amount of five hundred dollars. Still it was found difficult to introduce Methodism even among these destitute children; for elsewhere he acknowledges that out of nearly one hundred and fifty girls, only about forty have been “soundly converted.” But no effect whatever could be produced on the children not actually starving, even by the free use of money. Here is his own emphatic acknowledgment of the fact, on page 520:

“Every effort was made by our missionary ladies to obtain even day-scholars from among the people, but such was then their bitter prejudice against educating girls that they generally treated the proposal with scorn. The ladies of our Bareilly mission made a vigorous effort in that city to obtain even a few scholars. They went from house to house, hired a suitable place in which to hold a school, bought mats and necessary equipments, offered even to _pay the girls_ some compensation for the time expended, if they would only attend; but at the end of three months they had only succeeded in inducing two children to come, and one of these was unreliable. At length, tired out, they had to abandon the effort as hopeless, until some change would come over the minds of the people in favor of female education.”

The system adopted towards the adult population was more questionable, though equally unsuccessful. Rohilcund and Oude, the scenes of the labors of the American Methodists, were also, it appears, great recruiting depots for the company’s officers, who, as the term of their sepoys expired, formerly allowed them to return home and enjoy liberal pensions, so that a large portion of the male population of those provinces were actually dependent on the company for the necessaries of life. The failure of the rebellion not only caused the breaking up of the sepoy army, but the innocent were made to suffer with the guilty, for the allowance that was paid to the superannuated soldiers for past services ceased and general destitution prevailed. Of this circumstance, the result of base ingratitude, the worthy missionaries were not slow in taking advantage, hoping that, since prayer and exhortation had failed, the more tangible arguments of meat and dollars might at least partially succeed. Previous to the war the “converted” native held, and as we shall presently see for good reasons, a very unenviable position in the community. According to the author, “he was cut off and proscribed by his friends, looked down upon too often by European officials,” and “refused all employment under government.” But this was all changed by Montgomery, the local ruler of Oude, and Governor-General Lawrence, who were favorable to the encouragement of native Christians. “Other officials,” we are told, “did the same. Merchants and traders also sought them, for they saw they could be trusted. _Their value rose at once._” “And,” adds Dr. Butler, “the rapid growth of the Christian church in India since that time, and especially of the native ministry, will be fully exhibited in the statistical tables which follow the next chapter.”

We regret that he has not favored us with the details of this astonishing increase in the number of the faithful which so closely followed the distribution of government patronage and pecuniary rewards; but to our chagrin the indefatigable and sanguine missionary, whom we have followed from Boston to the Himalayas, prayed with, in spirit, in the “dark jungles,” and moaned with in unison over the combined sins of the heathen and the _Romanist_, parts from us abruptly, leaving us the prey of a cruel suspicion that, notwithstanding the generous donations of American friends, the efficient aid of British officials, and, above all, his own sanctified character and wonderful intrepidity, his mission, like so many others undertaken in the same spirit, was, after all, a melancholy failure. In winding up his long history, he tells us:

“The organization of the missions into an annual conference, at the close of 1864, terminated my superintendency, while the toil and care to which body and mind were subject during these scenes, and in such a climate, were so exhausting that release from further service there became indispensable. This release was kindly granted by the bishop and the missionary board.”

Now, what were our reverend friend and his co-laborers doing during the six years that followed the establishment of the three missions which still manage to exist in India? Surely a lively and scriptural account of those toils and cares of which he speaks would, particularly when told in his glowing style, be highly interesting to the public. Chapters of his voluminous book are devoted to descriptions of temples and tombs of the past ages, and some hundreds of pages to a detailed account of the massacres, battles and disasters incident to the civil war, but not a line do we find in which may be traced the efficacy of the gospel as preached by such pious expounders, nor is mention made of a single grown-up convert won to Methodism during the whole time, save through the agency of filthy lucre, the root of all evil. For our further information, it is true, he refers us to certain tables with which he supplements his work, but that is small consolation, for, though we believe in the old saying that figures cannot lie, we are satisfied from an examination of the tables referred to that this veracious character does not strictly apply to those who collated them.

From Table I. we gather that the Methodist Episcopal Church in India, in 1872, had no less than eighteen male and nineteen female missionaries of foreign birth in Rohilcund and Oude, and eighty-six native assistants, with church-members, amounting in the aggregate to five hundred and forty-one, so that every fourteen and a half members had one foreign missionary, or, counting the local preachers and exhorters, every _four_ converts may now enjoy the sole solicitude of one spiritual guide at least! But in Table II., on the next page, the foreign missionaries are increased to forty-six, or one to every dozen actual Christians, and, taking the entire force of foreign missionaries, native pastors, local preachers, exhorters, and teachers, the whole number of “laborers,” more or less dependent on the missionary fund for a livelihood, are reported at the handsome figure of _three hundred and sixty-six_, two laborers for every three members! But if we deduct the number of teachers returned at two hundred and thirty-four in Table II. from the whole number of members, we find that for every _thirty_ members who are not laborers, and consequently derive no official benefit from the church connection, there are _twenty-three_ who do. Should matters go on as prosperously as they seem to have done for a few years more, we hope to hear that every native convert who is not a pastor, exhorter, or teacher himself will be able to have the sole and separate use of a missionary or an assistant for his own benefit. We expect, also, to find that the exhausting duties of the foreign missionaries in taking charge each of at least one dozen of converts, including the native preachers, exhorters, and teachers aforesaid, will be duly considered by the board, and that reinforcements will be sent to them forthwith. What the eighty-six native pastors and catechists, as returned in Table II., find to do except to preach to each other, we are at a loss to surmise. Perhaps, however, they look after certain individuals classified as probationers and non-communicant adherents, and by the help of which, and the children of the schools, the compiler endeavors to make out a show of figures. The former class he counts at five hundred and twenty, and the latter at seven hundred and thirty-five, which, with nearly twelve hundred children and the helpers, make the sum-total of the officers and rank and file of the church three thousand and sixty-five, “all won for Christ since the rebellion closed.” Now, taking these figures as correct in every particular, we arrive at the following curious calculation, to which we respectfully call the attention of the admirers of Protestant, and particularly Methodist, missions. According to their own showing, there is in India one missionary for every _seventy-seven_ men, women, and children in the remotest degree connected with the Methodist Church; leaving out the children, there is a foreign missionary for every forty native adults, and taking the _bona-fide_ church-members there is one duly commissioned American missionary for every _twelve_ converts! Taking the whole number of Christians at three thousand, we find the annual conversions to have averaged two hundred and thirty, which amount being divided by forty-six makes the exact number of _five_ persons converted every year by each of our countrymen in India. If we leave out the children who as we have already seen, are simply given away by the authorities,[192] we reduce the whole number of yearly gains to one hundred and forty-five, or an average of _three_ annual converts for each foreign missionary; but when we only count the actual church-members, we discover that forty-two native persons are actually converted every year by forty-six American missionaries, and this calculation agrees very nearly with the statement of Dr. Butler, who says in a note to the very table to which he calls our attention, “Conversions during last year, 56.” How many years, missionaries, native pastors, and catechists would be required at this rate to christianize the two hundred millions of heathens in Hindostan is a problem too difficult for our solution.

So much for the wonderful progress of Methodism in India. Let us now glance for a moment at the _personelle_ of the brands thus snatched from the burning.

The ingenious attempt to make the public believe that any form of Protestantism has at length gained a foothold in Asia is more common than honest, and has been repeatedly exposed and censured by sectarian writers of all classes and degrees, many of whom have lived as missionaries in India, and know the truth by painful experience. A few extracts from their works and speeches will suffice to show at once the deficiencies of the would-be apostles, the character of their neophytes, and the absolute falsity of such statistics as we find in Butler’s tables:

“Missionaries have gone out from this country (England) who have dishonored their great cause, and rather confirmed than shaken the superstitions of the people they visited.”--Cunningham’s _Christianity in India_, p. 147.

“From the want of superintendence, it is painful to observe that the characters of too many of the clergy are by no means creditable to the doctrines they profess, which, together with the unedifying contests that prevail among them even in the pulpit, tend to lower the religion and its followers in the eyes of the natives of every description.”--Lord Valentia’s _Travels_, vol. i. p. 199.

“A large portion of the sterility of our missions may be attributed to that discord which Christianity (Protestantism) exhibits in the very sight of the unbeliever.”--Rev. Dr. Grant’s _Brompton Lectures_.

“The numerous missionaries, although they waste years and words, and even money, have converted very few; yet when they have induced one or two apparently to adopt their particular tenets, it is their fashion to make a clamor in the newspapers and by pamphlets, although too frequently they are not sure of their new converts for any length of time.”--Mackenna’s _Ancient and Modern India_, p. 516.

“Missionaries announcing the conversion of a solitary Hindoo among thousands of unbelievers are themselves frequently members of some straggling sect, and too often the instruments of fanatical bigotry.”--_Travels in India and Kashmir_, p. 195.

It is needless to multiply further such sketches of the unfitness of the shepherds, for the reader will easily find them, and generally much more strongly drawn, in any impartial work on British India. Let us, however, take a glance at the moral and social status of the spiritual flocks, whose members, before the arrival of Montgomery and Lawrence, found it so difficult to obtain situations. Captain Hervey, in his _Ten Years in India_, tells us that, whenever a native convert wishes employment as a servant, “he is not taken, because all Christians, with but few exceptions, are looked upon as great vagabonds, drunkards, thieves, and reprobates.” A writer in the _Edinburgh Review_, vol. xii., assures us that “whoever has seen much of Christian Hindoos must perceive that the man who bears that name is very commonly nothing more than a drunken reprobate who conceives himself at liberty to eat or drink anything he pleases.” The Baptist “converts,” we are assured by Rev. John Bowen, in his _Missionary Incitement_, etc., are accused of wallowing in every crime that “degrades human nature,” and deserve the accusation. The Rev. Mr. Schneider, writing from Agra, in Dr. Butler’s neighborhood, assures us that the “motives of the Hindoos for embracing Christianity were chiefly the desire of employment and to have their bodily wants provided for.” “It is a fact,” he adds, “that many new converts have, after their baptism, not adorned their Christian profession, and so have ever proved great offences and stumbling-blocks to the cause of Christ.” Of the Baptist converts in the same place, we learn from their _seventieth report_ (1862), that “what with members who have left the station, and others (including paid catechists) who have been cut off for immoral conduct, our loss has been heavy; while in the city of Delhi in the same year sixty-six persons were baptized and _seventy-five_ excluded from the churches.” The author of _India and the Gospel_, a Protestant missionary of Central India, candidly says: “I have met with native Christians who have been baptized, some on the eastern, some on the western coast, and others at some southern stations--lamentable to say, they were not to be known from the heathen but in name.” Mr. Marsh declared some years ago in the English House of Commons, speaking of Indian converts generally: “They are drawn from the Chandalahs, or Pariahs, or outcasts--a portion of the population who are shut out from the Hindoo religion, and who, being condemned to the lowest poverty and most sordid occupations, are glad to procure by what the missionaries call conversion whatever pittance they are enabled to dole out for their subsistence.” But it appears that the bad character of the Protestant converts has even a more disastrous effect than that produced on the reputation of their sponsors. Mr. David Hopkins, of the Bengal Medical Establishment, in his work on India, asserts, in reply to some overzealous advocate of Protestantism, “the outcasts have indeed joined the missionaries, and have appeared as of their faith; but the conduct of these outcasts has generally proved that they professed what they did not feel, and has considerably influenced the higher orders in their prejudices against Christianity.”

If we proceed still further, we will find from these reiterated complaints of the influence of Protestantism in the East, how much it perverts whatever sense of natural justice may remain in the heathen, and, by appealing to his basest passions, renders him an object of contempt and mistrust even to his less enlightened fellows--for there are few of the Indian population so mentally obtuse as not to recognize the rankest hypocrisy and mendacity, though they be covered with the garb of religion. How far such men as Dr. Butler is justified in claiming three hundred and fifty thousand native _Christians_ (Protestants) as the result of sectarian teaching and zeal in India is not easily determined. In 1850, General Briggs noticed that the missionaries reckoned but one in every six nominal converts as church members; the Rev. Mr. Ward, a missionary, states that of the number of converts of every sort reported to the home societies not one in ten is actually converted.[193] A writer in the _United Service Gazette_, who had served as an officer in India in 1856, declared that, though the missionaries reported their disciples by thousands, an omnibus would hold all the sincere native Protestants then in the peninsula, while a later authority, Rev. E. Storrow, in his book on _Indian Missions, etc._, is not willing to claim more than one-fifth of all the so-called converts as Christians even in his indefinite sense of that term. Following the Storrow method of computation, therefore, and applying it to the doctor’s tables, we arrive at the following results: There are at the present day three hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children in India claimed to belong to the various denominations, seventy thousand of whom Mr. Minturn, in his _From New York to Delhi_, emphatically says “are mostly of the most degraded classes,” and no less than two hundred and eighty thousand who disgrace the name of Christianity by debauchery, theft, hypocrisy, and immorality of every sort in its most degrading shapes. Of the former we freely accord to Methodism six hundred, and of the latter four times the number.

But Dr. Butler has many arrows in his quiver to be discharged against that target of sectarian animosity, _Romanism_, and other claims to public sympathy and patronage broadly set forth in his manifold tables. It is the question of education, and on this his figures assume a prodigious magnitude. The Methodist day-schools in India, he tells us, number one hundred and sixteen, the teachers two hundred and thirty-four, and the pupils four thousand four hundred and sixty-two. If these children were all Protestants, it might indeed be a source of some congratulation to his friends, but unfortunately only a little over a thousand of them attend Sunday-school, and the balance, considerably over three thousand, are being “educated” to stigmatize the Methodists themselves as infidels, and to deny the first principles upon which all religion is founded. That this, though a startling view to some persons, is nevertheless a correct one, we have the most indisputable Protestant evidence, and what applies to the Methodists in particular, is general to all the sects in Hindostan; who, collectively, are said in Table II. to be educating one hundred and thirty-seven thousand children, of whom more than _one hundred thousand_ are not brought up in any form of faith known to Christianity. “The colleges of India,” says Major H. Bevan, “receive fanatical idolaters, they disgorge only hypocrites.”[194] The author of _Tropical Sketches_ avers, in allusion to the same institutions, “the results have been great intellectual acuteness and total want of moral principle; utter infidelity in religion, etc.” According to the Parliamentary reports, out of over seventeen thousand pupils educated at the public expense, only three hundred even professed the religion of the state. At Benares, where there are fourteen missionary schools, not one conversion is reported; and the Rev. Mr. Percival, in his _Land of the Veda_, goes the length of saying that “in almost every part of India the spread of the English language and literature is rapidly altering the phases of the Hindoo mind, giving it a sceptical, infidel cast,” while the Rev. Mr. Clarkson goes further, and adds: “Some have argued that the Indians, by receiving an education which undermines their superstitions, are being prepared for the reception of Christianity. We believe that they are being prepared for occupying a position directly antagonistic to it. Several documents from missionaries at Bombay, Poonah, Surat, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras, and Benares _corroborate all that I have stated_.... None can doubt that infidelity in its most absolute sense is on the increase. There is no connection between the natives ceasing to be Hindoos and becoming Christians.”[195] Dr. Grant also gives his testimony of the effects of missionary schools: “It is the universal confession,” he says, speaking for his brother missionaries, “that but very few of the children so educated embrace the Christian faith”; and even the orphans, we are told by Count Warren, “when they grow up, all return to the religion of their ancestors.” Lastly, the Indian correspondent of the leading organ of public opinion in England thus sums up the whole question:

“Missionary schools do not make more converts to Christianity than Government schools. A most zealous missionary in India assured me, with tears in his eyes, that, after twenty-five years’ experience, he looked upon the conversion of the Hindoos under present circumstances to be hopeless, without the interposition of a miracle.”[196]

We pause here, for the subject becomes too deeply painful for contemplation, even at a distance. To think that, in this age of boasted civilization and religious progress, one of the fairest portions of the habitable globe, filled with millions and millions of our fellow-men, in many respects at least our equals in natural gifts, should still not only be ignorant of the worship of the true God, but that, through the instrumentality of the ministers of the discordant, jarring Protestant sects, and from their desire to forward their own selfish ends, the natives, instead of being taught the beauties of Christianity, are actually led to deny even the existence of a superior power, and by the miserable examples set before them, are forced to despise and hate the very name of Christ’s followers. We arraign Protestantism of this great crime, and we ask the serious attention of every candid man, no matter what may be his religious opinions, to the authorities above cited in support of our indictment. The British Government, through its armed mercenaries and no less corrupt civil officials, have doubtless inflicted dire and manifold cruelties on the Indians, but the evils perpetrated by the sectarian missionaries of this country and Europe on those unfortunate people are beyond all comparison greater, for they are more far-searching and permanent. Human laws and agencies may strip a conquered nation of its wealth and liberties, but it requires the aid of the missionary and _colporteur_ to rob it of even the semblance of religion and morality, and by the means of what is so falsely called “education,” to plunge it into the depths of unbelief and complete spiritual degradation. This is what Protestant England is endeavoring, and, as we have seen, with some success, to do in Hindostan, and in what the generous but easily-duped people of America are endeavoring to rival it. To christianize, in any sense, the Hindoos has been found an impossibility by the well-paid and well-fed sectarian missionaries, so they are now trying to earn their salaries by utterly demoralizing the people they have failed to convert.

They are aided in this by the active countenance of the dominant power, by no less than twenty-seven distinct societies, and have at their disposal unlimited funds; a great portion of which is made up of the annual contributions of the people of the United States. Of the five and a quarter millions subscribed by the various Protestant societies of the world in 1871, considerably over a million and a half of dollars came out of the pockets of Americans, as we learn from Table IV., and doubtless money will continue to flow into the coffers of these organizations as long as they can continue to delude the charitable by false hopes and bombastic reports of missionary successes. We are not of those who are disposed to consider the conversion of souls from a commercial point of view; on the contrary, we are rather in favor even of the lavish expenditure of money, if by that means we can win men to Christ and to the inheritance of his kingdom; but when it becomes an instrument to rob the parent of his child, to convert the heathen not through his mind but his stomach, to bring Christianity into disrepute by sustaining the dissolute and degraded, to pervert the mental gifts of Providence by teaching the heathen that all religion is imposture,[197] and by supporting and sustaining thousands of lay and clerical officials who are as destitute of real sympathy for the pagan as they are ignorant of the first principles of Christian charity and responsibility--all of which it has done and is doing in India--we consider that it may justly be asserted that what was meant for a blessing becomes a curse to the donor as well as the recipient.

Dr. Butler in one of his tables shows that the Catholic Church missions, embracing nearly nine millions of Christians, expend less than a million dollars annually, while those of the Protestant sects, ostensibly counting about a third of that number, cost five and a half times that amount, and would have us believe from this that Protestantism exhibits more vitality and zeal in the cause of religion than does the church. But the contrary is the fact. Unlike the sectarian, whose inducement arises out of and is in proportion to the amount of his salary, the Catholic missionary goes forth into the pagan world, without money, friends, or family encumbrances; he forsakes all comforts and material pleasures to preach Christ crucified; his energy is not of the earth, earthy, his inspiration is from a power higher than that of man, and as his life is one long-continued sermon on temperance, forgiveness, and self-abnegation, his success is always in proportion, not to the money employed, but to the sanctity of the preacher. He does not distribute badly translated and often unreadable copies of the Word of God, “in thirty-seven languages” as claimed for the Protestants by Dr. Butler, to persons who can neither read nor appreciate them; but, living sparingly, dressing humbly, and conforming in all respects his daily practice to his clerical professions, he wins to the standard of Christ the rich as well as the poor, the ignorant _pariah_ as well as the learned and disputatious pundit. Even Protestants, missionaries at that, have seen through their prejudices, the uniform success of the Catholic teachers, and while their system does not allow them to imitate their example, they have nevertheless borne unwilling testimony, and therefore more valuable, to the superiority in point of morality and ability of the servants of the church. In India to-day, even Dr. Butler is forced to admit there are close on a million actual practical Catholics, with hundreds of churches, and a ministry of foreign and native priests amounting to seven hundred and seventy-nine, who are supported at an expense to the Society _de Propaganda Fide_ of twenty-eight thousand dollars, while their schools, numbering according to the _Catholic Register_ of 1869 one thousand, contain over thirty thousand native pupils. Dr. Butler has called our attention to his tables, we have given them serious attention, and have even taken his own figures as thoroughly exact, and we have come to the conclusion that he must either have had a very limited appreciation of the perspicacity of his readers, or recklessness of character in thus exposing the hollowness of Protestant professions of progress, superinduced by the complete failure of himself and his co-laborers to vitalize in the far East the decaying body of Protestantism, which is so fast degenerating into materialism and scepticism in the West.

There are one or two points more, overlooked in passing, of which we wish to take note. Dr. Butler has included that part of Farther India in his tables, which will help him to swell the number of his converts, and excluded that part of it in which the Catholic religion flourishes. Include the whole, and you add 500,000 to the number of native Catholics in India. Again, he repeats the unmeaning, silly twaddle which we hear without ceasing from writers of the same sort, that Protestant missionaries make real Christians, Catholic missionaries only nominal ones. Methodist religion consists in emotion and excitement, the most unreal of all things. So far as it is worth anything, there is far more sensible devotion, although of a more quiet and sober kind, among Catholics than among any class of Protestants. But this is not the essence of religion. To be a Christian is to believe the revelation and keep the commandments of God. Whoever says that Catholic missionaries do not carefully instruct their converts in the doctrines of the faith and in sound morals, and endeavor to make them both pious and virtuous, is either a slanderer or the dupe of some slanderer. Let every one who wishes to know the truth read the work of Dr. Marshall, and ponder the evidence he has collected. Dr. Butler’s effort to weaken its influence, like every other attempt of the same sort, has proved abortive.

FOOTNOTES:

[190] _The Land of the Veda._ Being Personal Reminiscences of India, etc. By Rev. William Butler, D.D. New York: Carlton & Lanahan. 1872.

[191] _The_ (London) _Times_, March 17, 1859.

[192] Alluding to the famine season, Baron von Schonberg says: “Six hundred children were purchased for eighteen hundred rupees, which certainly was not an exorbitant price.”--_Travels in India and Kashmir_, vol. i. p. 193. This was at the rate of a dollar and a half a head.

[193] _India and the Hindoos_, p. 337.

[194] _Thirty Years in India_, p. 239.

[195] _India and the Gospel_, p. 279.

[196] _The_ (London) _Times_, 1858.

[197] “They [the pupils of the secular and missionary schools] have no more faith in Jesus Christ than in their own religion. They believe the Jesus of the English and the Krishna of the Hindoos to be alike impostors.”--_Six Years in India_, vol. iii. p. 277.

ON THE MISTY MOUNTAIN.

ROUTE I.

It was in the by-gone days of the Misty Mountain Stage and Express Company--only a few years ago by actual chronological computation, it is true; but at least a half a century by the change effected in the less than demi-decade which has passed.

Do you know that at times, when I contemplate this change, I can scarcely realize that I have lived long enough to have lived through it? I often feel as if the memory of the things that were is the reflection of experiences in a former state of existence, so different is the _what is_ from the _what was_. I feel burdened by great personal antiquity, and cannot help considering myself a sort of Methusalem le Petit. I have seen the great plains spanned by the rail and the wire. The smoking, shrieking steed of steam drinks the waters of the fork of the Misty Mountain, sacred but a year or two ago to the pony of the red man. The journey which occupied weeks to accomplish ten years past is now made in a few hours, and lightning whispers are interchanged between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

My good old Uncle Joe, an old-time leather-dealer in the “Swamp” in New York City--who, a bachelor, had adopted me, an orphan, and, having educated me, had assigned me a desk in the dingy old office with the leathery smell--told me one day, without any previous warning, that he wished me to start without delay for the Stony Sierra to look after some of his business interests in that region. That was my Uncle Joe’s way of doing things. His engagements did not permit his leaving New York at the time. Besides, he had crossed the great plains more than twice or thrice, and had had enough of them. But as I had not had any of them, a little, he thought, would do me good, and he proposed to give it me.

My journey to the (then) end of railroad communication was remarkable only for the general railway decadence which, commencing at Chicago, increased “in inverse ratio to the square of the distance from our objective point,” as the elegant English of the telegraph would phrase it. The conductor grew familiar with the passengers, who grew fewer. The various characters of the “newspaper boy,” the vegetable-ivory notion vender, the “ice-cold lemonade” boy, the candy-seller, the cigar boy, the bookseller, the apple and orange boy, were all performed by one and the same protean youngster. The passengers had dwindled so that it would not pay to invest two boys in that dramatic business. At length, the Thespian youth, tired of playing a dozen different characters to empty cars, threw off all his disguises at once, and subsided into a mere passenger like the rest of us.

A sudden shock brought a slight nap in which I was indulging to a timely end. The train had stopped. The pitiful account of passengers were on their feet, some leaving the car, others looking about them with an expression of interrogative imbecility, when the brakeman shouted out:

“Devil’s Landing--end o’ track!”

No danger of taking a wrong train now. So we passengers, four in number, left the car. We concluded a hasty agreement to stick to each other as fellow-men and fellow-passengers, we four waifs washed on the shore of barbarism by the advancing tide of civilization. A fellow-feeling of lost-sheepiness made us wondrous kind to each other.

I accosted a small, dried-up, hard-featured old fellow of eighteen or nineteen:

“Any hotels here?”

Answer (in an intensely contemptuous manner): “No!”

“Any restaurants--eating-houses?”

“Yes, four on ’em: the ’Merik’n House, the Mansh’n House, the Pacific S’loon, and Jack Langford’s dug-out.”

Finding the old juvenile so communicative, and having more questions to propound, we propitiate him by offering a cigar in recognition of his social and chronological equality, and in proof that we are not “stuck-up snobs from the East.” He takes the cigar brusquely without oral signification of acceptance or expression of thanks. He bites the end off wolfishly, and places the cigar as near his ear as possible. We offer him a match. He takes it, puts it into his vest-pocket, saying:

“Guess I’ll take a dry smoke.”

“Which is the best of the hotels or eating-houses?”

“All doggoned bad.”

“Which is the cleanest?”

“All doggoned dirty.”

“Which is the cheapest?”

“All doggoned dear.”

“Which is the quietest?”

“Doggoned row goin’ on in all of ’em most o’ the time. Man killed at some one on ’em ’most every night, and a brace or more on dance-nights.”

We requested him to direct us to the “American” or the “Mansion House.”

“Don’t need to go far. That,” said he, indicating by a movement of his cigar and his lower jaw a partially finished “balloon-frame” house about thirty yards to the right, “is the ’Merik’n; and that,” indicating in like manner a canvas shed to the left, “is the Mansh’n House.”

Devil’s Landing consisted of about a dozen mushroom edifices and about as many “dug-outs.” On reflection, we concluded to try the “American House.”

A small space cut off by an unpainted counter served for an office, but no “register” was displayed. The establishment had only very recently been moved up, the official behind the counter informed us, from the last resting-place by the way of runners with the rails.

A look at the “sleeping apartments” was sufficient for me. I determined not to sleep in any of them if I could possibly help it.

I went back to the functionary at the counter, and asked the time of departure of the Misty Mountain coach, and learned that a coach left the same afternoon, and that there was one place vacant. I engaged the seat at once, glad to escape the horrors of a night in the American House and Devil’s Landing. My fellow-passengers wished me to wait for the next day’s coach, but I declined. When we agreed to stick together, I knew nothing of the American House.

We had dinner. It consisted of very fat and very rusty bacon, putty biscuits, and mud coffee without milk.

“The cows have not come in,” said one of the greasy waiters, when I asked for milk.

“The cows never do come home here,” whispered a neighbor, evidently an _habitué_.

It was toward the close of August, and the heat was excessive. The sun shone mercilessly on us through the partially glazed and wholly uncurtained windows. Yet we ate and perspired, and perspired and drank mud coffee, with a persistency which astonished me when after thinking on these matters.

The flies were terrible. They swept around the room in buzzing clouds. Some of them were nearly large enough to offer a fair mark for a shot-gun; the smaller ones insinuated themselves everywhere--into your nose, ears, eyes--aye, even into your mouth. They immolated themselves in the frowzy, oily butter; and their remains studded the reeking mass like currants in a pudding.

Such a wonderful effect has the pure prairie air--it doth so whet the edge of appetite--that, though our eyes were shocked, we ate and ate, and our sense of taste was not offended. The meal only cost us two dollars apiece.

After dinner, I lit a fifty-cent Devil’s Landing cigar, and walked (literally) around town--a perambulation which did not quite occupy five minutes. As I finished my walk, a shot was fired at the other end of town--that is, within fifteen or twenty rods. Other shots followed. A long-haired, slouched-hatted, and red-legginged individual dashed past on a pretty good horse. Evidently he was the mark at which the firing was directed. As he passed, an armed man or two rushed out of every house and shot at him. The proprietor of the Oriental Saloon came forth, armed with a Henry rifle, and deliberately blazed away at the long-haired fugitive. The latter, finding bullets in front of him, bullets to left of him, bullets behind him, after several miraculous escapes from close shots, had no course open but to turn to right of him, around the corner of the American House, which would afford him some cover. But just as he turned, his horse was hit in the off fore-leg and brought to in a moment. Immediately he was hemmed in by the muzzles of twenty repeating-rifles. He had emptied his six-shooter. Flight was impossible. There was no course but surrender--not even suicide--left. He jumped from his horse, and sat down cross-legged on the ground. He was quickly seized and pinioned. His horse was taken in charge by a citizen. No words were wasted on either side. His lariat of horse-hair furnished a deadly loop, which was placed around his neck. He was marched about a mile to the only tree in sight--an old cottonwood.

While the crowd was going to the tree, the clerk of the American House told me in a few words the history of the long-haired victim. He was a half-breed Choctaw, frequently employed as a scout by the government. There were several of these scouts in the region. They called themselves “wolves,” and prided themselves on their destruction of human life. When any of them came into town citizens were sure to be shot at. Their favorite way of leaving town was, having first filled themselves with “fighting whiskey,” to dash through at full speed, discharging their revolvers at anything human that chanced to appear in their path. The citizens had determined not to stand this sort of thing any longer. “Johnny Henshaw”--so our “wolf” was called--had been drinking rather freely of late. He had declared his intention of shooting three prominent men of the town, mentioning them by name. Hence the measures about to be taken.

Johnny Henshaw seemed to be about twenty years old--indeed rather under than over that age. There was nothing in his features to show a trace of Indian blood. His hair was light brown, his eyes a soft, light blue, his skin fair, and his cheeks rosy. The expression of his face was gentle and pleasing. It made me heart-sick to look at the young fellow, even though he was a wolf and deserved a wolf’s fate, and to think that in the midst of health and strength and youth he was marching to a speedy death. As we came near the fatal tree, I tried to imagine what thoughts were passing in the outlaw’s mind by mentally putting myself in his place. The effort made me dizzy and sick. I felt as if I were about to fall senseless.

When we had reached the cottonwood tree, the cortége halted. A wagon was hauled up to the tree, and Johnny caused to mount it. One end of his lariat was made fast to a branch of the tree. Three or four men jumped on the wagon. Some confusion occurred in properly adjusting the noose about the victim’s neck. Johnny pushed the men from him, saying:

“Get out o’ here! I’ll show ye how a man can die!” And, fixing with his own hands the noose about his neck, he jumped into eternity!

ROUTE II.

Poor wolf! His time to howl was over.

I felt sick and faint from witnessing the scene, and had to take some of the “fighting whiskey” of Devil’s Landing to keep me from fainting. It did so. It was as good--or as bad--as a galvanic shock. I was glad, therefore, when the Misty Mountain coach drove in front of the American Hotel to take up its passengers. The stage had seven inside: a congressman, a divine, an Indian agent, three ladies, and a small boy. The gentlemen looked at me in such a dog-in-the-mangerish fashion when I popped my head in at the door to see what prospect there was of an inside seat, that I immediately withdrew it and took my seat on the box between the driver and the conductor.

“Passengers for the Stony Sierra! All aboard!” And off we go behind six good mules.

The country we travelled through was flat and uninteresting. Not a tree or shrub within the circular boundary of the horizon. Little of life, animal or vegetable, to be seen; only a stray hare--vulgo, jackass rabbit--a prairie-dog, with its sentinel owl, a prairie wolf or coyote, and an occasional hawk.

After a run of nine or ten miles, we stopped at a “dug-out” to change animals. While the change was being effected, a man in a red buggy with a white horse arrived from the west. He was evidently excited, and his horse was covered with foam.

“How d’e do, general? You seem kinder flurried. Anything happened?” asked the stage-driver.

“Well,” said the person addressed as “general” (by the way, you could have bought generals there as they buy hobnails) “I have had a pretty sharp run. Ten or fifteen Indians began running me after crossing the Blue Fork. They fired three or four shots at me. Here’s the mark of one,” he continued, pointing to a bullet-hole in the body of the red buggy. “They came mighty near getting me. And they would have got me were it not for Old Whity here.” And he patted the white horse affectionately.

Thus the INDIAN QUESTION, at the very outset, was brought home to the bosoms of the passengers by the Misty Mountain coach. They asked many questions of the “general.” The Indian agent--who had never seen an Indian of the wild tribes in his life--made a pretence of experience, and offered a few suggestions. But a few remarks from the stock-tenders at the dug-out stable raised a laugh at his expense, and he “was squelched for the rest of the trip,” as the conductor expressed it.

The conductor and the driver looked to their Henry rifles, and hurriedly inventoried the arms in the party. The Indian agent had a double-barrelled shot-gun--both barrels unloaded--no ammunition; the congressman had a diminutive five-shooter which would scarcely have tickled a papoose--five barrels unloaded, one round of cartridges on hand, no reserve ammunition; the divine, the ladies, and the small boy were unarmed; the reader’s humble servant had one six-shooter--Colt’s navy pattern--with half-a-dozen rounds of ammunition for the same. This weapon he had never yet used. He was not fully enlightened as to the _modus_ of loading it. It was in the reader’s humble servant’s trunk at the bottom of the pile of baggage which towered behind the coach. Of course, he didn’t wish to give the conductor or the driver the trouble of changing the luggage. With remarkable good nature, he preferred going out defenceless to troubling these gentlemen. Like most human feelings, however, this one was perhaps not quite pure. It must be owned the idea crossed his mind that it was as well not to introduce the factor of premature explosion into the quantity of danger to which he was about to be exposed.

We changed mules and started. Everybody saw Indians for the first few miles. But the objects appearing as Indians to our excited vision had been so often pronounced by the conductor to be “soap-weeds,” “old buffalo carcasses,” etc., that the number seen began greatly to diminish. Once we thought there was no doubt about it. They came dashing along in “Indian file,” fifteen or twenty in number, directly toward us. I felt “very queer.” Here were Indians now, not a doubt about it. I was seized by a sudden desire to have something to shoot with. I mentally resolved, if I got out of this scrape alive, never again to travel unarmed in an Indian country.

“Antelope,” remarked the conductor.

Antelope it was; a herd of fifteen or twenty. They crossed the road a few hundred yards in front of us.

We had travelled about five miles without an incident or a sight to break the monotony of the waste around us, when above a rising ground before us the Stars and Stripes, relieved against the sky, gladdened our eyes. How that sight revived us! We remembered that “the home of the brave” was our home; and I think that, if Indians had appeared at that moment, or within five minutes thereafter, we would have received them in heroic attitudes. But they did not appear.

As we ascended the ridge between us and Fort Jones, that post came gradually into view. It looked to us like a collection of very miserable “shanties” dropped down haphazard on the prairie.

A large stone building--the hospital, the conductor informed me--was in course of erection. It seemed larger than all the rest of the post put together. The officers’ quarters were such constructions as we have seen inhabited by the squatters on the vacant lots up-town in New York or in “Jackson’s Hollow” in Brooklyn.

The “Fort” disappointed me very much. I expected to enter the guarded precincts over a drawbridge and under an arched portcullis. But Fort Jones was destitute of ditch, rampart, or parapet, and uninclosed by stockade, palisade, or even by a common board fence. The coach drove up to the sutler’s store--there the post-office was established--without let or hindrance from warder or sentinel.

Some half-dozen officers were in the store awaiting the distribution of the mail. The congressman, the Indian agent, and the divine soon discovered who was the officer in command of the fort. They immediately approached him on the subject of an escort.

The officer said he had comparatively few men; his small force was scattered along the stage-road for two hundred miles; he had only twenty men present for duty; but he would try to furnish three or four men. “An officer and a sergeant,” he said, “were going up on the coach to see to the defences of the station-guards along the road.” The conductor here put in his oar, and said it would be impossible for him to take four men more. This settled the question of an escort. The congressman, the divine, and the Indian agent, having ascertained that they could be accommodated with bed and board at the sutler’s, concluded “to stay over for the present.”

The conductor and the driver did not seem to regret this determination. The former remarked that this lightening of our load helped us much, and we should now be able “to pull through” in good time.

While we were waiting to have the mail made up, a mounted man came in at full speed with news that a government wagon train had been attacked by Indians on one of the roads leading to the post--that the teams were very much scattered--that some of the mules were already in the hands of the Indians. This caused a flutter among the officers. A company of infantry was ordered at once to the relief of the train.

As we left the fort we could see the infantry going over the rise at a double-quick and in skirmish order.

We stopped for a moment, in rear of the officers’ quarters, to take up the officer and the sergeant. The officer’s wife and little child came out to see him off. He kissed them both affectionately, and took his seat with us on top of the coach. The sergeant, also, rode on the roof. Both were well armed. Much to my delight, the officer, finding me unarmed, furnished me with a spare musket he had brought with him.

At first, I was rather disappointed in this officer. He was very plainly dressed. He had just enough gold lace about him to indicate his rank, and no more. I had supposed that regular officers always wore epaulets and white kid gloves. However, the lieutenant--for such was our new passenger’s rank--was evidently a gentleman. He had a certain quiet, unobtrusive affability which charmed me very much. I was glad he had come. His easy self-possession inspired me with confidence.

“If we meet any Indians, lieutenant,” said the conductor, an old hand who had driven stage for ten years along the Great Sandy, “we’ll have to do the work from out here; there’s nobody below (pointing downwards) to help us.”

“Do you think we may be attacked by Indians?” I ventured to ask.

“Think it most probable we shall see some, at the least,” answered the officer. “They have shown themselves at several points along the line. The Great Alamos, which we have to pass, is a favorite crossing-place, when they go south in the spring or north in the fall.”

“It is about as bad a place for Injuns as there is in the whole route,” said the conductor.

“Yes,” said George, the driver; “and though I’m a white man, an’ agin an Injun all the time, I must say that we owe the badness of that there place to a white man.”

“How?” I asked.

“The Great Alamos,” answered the driver, “was a great buryin’-place of the Flat Noses. It was quite a large grove once--considerable of a rarity on these here plains. You know,” he continued, “that the Flat Noses bury their dead high up in the trees, or, where there are no trees, stick ’em up on trestles made with long poles.”

“They bury them in the air instead of in the ground,” I said, intending the remark as a sort of semi-joke, at which I designed smiling if any one else smiled, and, if not, to let it go for a serious observation. It was probably not new in either phase to my companions, who took no notice of it. So to break silence, I asked why the Indians of the plains sought these elevated resting-places for their dead.

“To keep ’em from being eaten up by the ki-o-tees.”

“Do the ki-o-tees devour the dead of other tribes?” I asked, horrified at the thought.

“The ki-o-tees is the wolves,” the conductor explained.

The lieutenant informed me of the orthography of the word--coyote.

About sunset we reached a house built of loose stones, and therefore known as “The Stone Ranch.” There were fifteen or twenty men about the ranch--all of them armed.

George pulled up before the door--there was only one, by the bye, and no windows--and exchanged a friendly greeting with Jake, Ike, Ed, _et hoc genus omne_.

“What’s the word?” asked George. “How is hay-cutting comin’ on?”

“We ain’t cut a blade of hay to-day,” said one of the men. “Them cussed Injuns kep’ us corralled here all day.”

“Whew!” whistled George.

“How many were they?” the lieutenant inquired.

“Somewhere’s about thirty or forty.”

“Many guns among ’em?” asked the conductor.

“Some of ’em had rifles; all of ’em as I seen had six-shooters.”

“How long did they remain about?”

“Pretty nigh all day. They kep’ shootin’ at us at long range, and we returnin’ their fire, until about ten minnits before the coach kem.”

“Did yer git any on ’em?”

“Jake thinks as he hit one, and Mac says he saw another fall sure.”

“Well! we must be goin’. Git-e-p!”

“Keep yer eye skinned, George.”

“Hold on to that old skelp o’ yourn!”

“You bet! I’ll freeze to it.”

A mile further on we reached the Great Alamos. Darkness was overcoming the twilight as we struck a deep sandy hollow which extended for five or six miles. A slow walk was the only gait possible here. The road for miles ran close under a ridge about twenty feet in perpendicular height. It seemed to me about as bad an “Indian place” as it was possible to find. My Indian weakness came on again as in the morning. The snail-like pace at which we were compelled to move was almost intolerable. There is some sensation of security, or, rather, some suggestion of escape, in a fast gait when danger is impending. Its source is probably the initial instinct of the human breast when danger first threatens--to run from it.

I consulted my companion, the lieutenant, on the possibilities or probabilities of an attack.

“An attack,” he answered, “is possible. It is very probable that there are Indians watching us now. They may fire into us at any moment, as in our position they have the chance of hurting us without being exposed to hurt themselves; for your Indian always runs from a fair fight. He is only ‘brave’ when he has his enemy at a disadvantage, and sees, or thinks he sees, what is called out here ‘a sure thing.’ It is only their very recent presence, however, that causes me to apprehend trouble, as ordinarily they do not attack at night, and they rarely attack a stage-coach: for the reason that they are sure to get a pretty tough fight. Even if successful, their gain is very small; three or four mules at most, perhaps a gun or two. They do not consider the investment a paying one, as a general thing. In any event,” he concluded, “if I were you, I should take off that white duster. It offers quite a shining mark for them, if they feel like shooting.”

The rapidity with which I followed this friend’s advice must have given him a pleasing proof of my confidence in his counsels.

We had now entered the bed of the Great Alamos. It was quite dark. Silence fell upon us. Every man held his loaded rifle, full-cocked, and finger on trigger--peering into the darkness, and seeking in every sage-bush an Indian contour. Every now and then the conductor’s rifle went up and down with a nervous twitch.

The evening had become quite cold. I had felt it keenly before we reached the Stone Ranch; but as we crept along in the heavy sand, through the darkness, looking every moment for the flash of an Indian rifle, I felt all in a glow. I did not think of cold. No doubt, the reason was that I could think only of Indians, and felt that I was in a pretty warm place.

At last! We are out of the sand. The mules strike a good trot. It is only four miles now to Artesian Wells, and then we shall have supper, I am informed. I feel quite light-hearted over the recent past and the close future. Strange to say, with the decrease of my fear of Indians, the glow subsides and I feel cold again. The strain is over; we begin to talk once more. George, the driver, has won my admiration by his cool and calm attention to his team while we passed through the “bad Injun place.”

“If we’re attacked,” George had said, “you others must do the shootin’. I’ll have all I can do to manage this team.”

George was the beau ideal of a good stage-driver in an Indian country--so the lieutenant told me.

“It is a driver’s duty to attend to his team under fire, as George very properly says, as much as it is a surgeon’s to cure the wounded, when necessary, under like circumstances. It requires a good deal more coolness, and it is much harder for him to watch and control his team while bullets are grazing him, than it would be to throw down the reins and begin firing. It takes all his strength and coolness to manage the excited and terrified animals. Shooting gives needed excitement at such a time, but then the mules run off, the stage is upset, and broken legs or necks and certain capture are the result. George is a good driver, and, had he not one great defect, would be a very good man.”

“What is the defect?” I asked.

“Drinking,” whispered the lieutenant.

“He does not look in the least like a drinking man.”

“True; yet he is as drunk as he can be now. He has not been sober for years. George is one of your white-faced drinkers. He is always as you see him now. I have been two years on this line, and I have not seen George sober yet. Look at his eyes when we get to supper, and you will see they are not the eyes of a man in his normal condition.”

“I heard him refuse a pull at the Indian agent’s flask, between Devil’s Landing and Fort Jones.”

“No doubt. That is George’s gnat. He makes it a point never to drink while driving. But he had swallowed his camel before he took the ribbons at Devil’s Landing, and he will swallow another when he reaches Artesian Wells, where his route ends. Aye! and keep swallowing camels every time he wakes up during the night, and until he mounts the box for his return trip to-morrow.”

“What a fearful life for a man to lead!” I said.

“Yes, indeed,” said the lieutenant, “and the ending is still more fearful. George’s team will bring him in some fine morning stone-dead on the box, with the ribbons still in his stiffened fingers.”

“I can imagine,” I answered, “how a man who is excited by strong drink may find pleasure in it, though it may tempt him to break things and get him into many a fight. But I cannot for the life of me imagine why those dead-alive drinkers continue the habit.”

“I suppose they can’t stop it,” said the lieutenant. “They have gone too far to turn back. Death is behind them as well as before.”

Our conversation was interrupted by a series of prolonged howls from George:

“Hi-hi-hi-hi,” etc., _ad libitum_.

I was very much startled by these vocal efforts. I thought “it was Indians.” Next it struck me that George’s last fit of _delirium tremens_ had commenced, and he was about to become dangerous. My military companion, noticing my astonishment, kindly explained that this was the usual signal to the station-keeper. The drivers commence their howls of warning when they arrive within a mile or so of the station. Their peculiar cry can be heard quite a long way off.

When we were quite near the station, we overtook an ox-wagon with its solitary driver walking by the side of his animals, and giving the talismanic “whoa haws!” and “gees” by which the movements of these clumsy beasts of draught are directed.

“Hallo! Tommy John!” said the driver, bringing his team down to a walk.

“That you, George?”

“What is left of me, my son. Where are you bound for, Tommy?”

“The old Sandy, as usual.”

“How far did you come to-day, Tommy?”

“From the Stone Ranch.”

“You must have left there mighty early.”

“Yes! I started afore daylight. I nooned at the Wala Hole, and watered my stock and cooked my supper at the Great Alamos.”

The conductor then informed “Tommy John,” whose real name was John Thompson, as I learned, of the state of things at the Stone Ranch when the coach passed there.

“So, friend Tommy,” he concluded, “you have got through by a scratch.”

“Oh! pshaw!” said Tommy John, laughing; “Injuns won’t hurt me. I’ve been through the mill too often to be scared.”

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “as you have been fortunate enough to get thus far safely, you had better remain at the Wells until some government train with an escort comes up.”

“That you, lieutenant? How d’e do? Much obliged. But I’m agoin’ to Snake Spring before my next stoppage. I want to get on home as soon as I can. It’s some time since I’ve seen the old lady and my half-dozen babies over on the Sandy.”

“I tell you, Tommy,” said the lieutenant, “you are very foolish to go on from the Wells alone.”

“Oh! no Injuns will trouble me, lieutenant. There’s nothing to take. The investment wouldn’t pay.”

“There’s your scalp to take,” said George, “and I shouldn’t wonder if you lost it.”

“Don’t be afeard about my scalp, George,” said Tommy John, good-humoredly. “I have a notion to go after some ha’r myself this trip.”

“Good-night!”

“Good-night, my son!”

“Gee!”

“Get aup! ye critters.” And off we go, leaving poor Tommy John to pursue his lonely route.

“That thar Tommy,” said George, “is one of the kind-heartedest, good-naturedest fellows as travels this road. An’ he’s churful, too; always in for a joke and a laugh. He’s drove team--ox and mule--on this line for nigh on to four year. He never carries no arms, and always travels alone. He’s had some mighty close shaves has Tommy, but I shouldn’t wonder if they got him yet. He takes too big risks.”

“Does it often happen that you have no passengers, George?” I asked.

“Once in a while,” said George.

“It seems to me that on those occasions you take as big a risk as your friend Tommy.”

“Not by a durned sight,” replied George. “I have a good team, and can give a party of Indians a lively run at any time. I have generally a conductor or express-messenger with me, and a good rifle well handled will keep off a power of Indians for awhile. While he amuses them, I keep lightin’ out for the next station. Before the company got stingy--when there was a swing-station every dozen miles where you got a fresh team--I could have got away from Injuns all the time, either by runnin’ back to the station I had left or pushin’ out for the one ahead of me, accordin’ to whichever was the nearest. I takes no risk that I ain’t obliged to.”

“What do you call a ‘swing-station’?” I asked.

George looked at me with an expression of mixed pity and contempt, and replied:

“A swing-station is where you changes teams; a home-station is the end of a route, where you gits meals.”

It was after midnight when we reached the Artesian Wells. I had found the Sandy Hollow of the Great Alamos a pretty warm place, but after I got out of it I felt cold again, and when I reached the wells I was chilled through. Notwithstanding George’s warning cry, everybody was asleep at the station. It took some time to wake the people up, to get a fire kindled, and a meal prepared. I took advantage of the delay to get at my trunk, whence I took my revolver and some woollen clothing. The latter, with the consent of the cook (a male specimen of the culinary tribe), I put on in the kitchen.

The station was out of fire-wood, and was now endeavoring to effect its cooking with the remaining chips of departed logs and the chips of the passing buffalo. It took a long time to get biscuits baked and meat stewed, thus I had a good nap by the not very bright, though very aromatic, fire. The lieutenant, as soon as the door was opened, had thrown his blankets on the floor and himself upon the blankets; and slept the sleep of the brave until he was waked for supper, or breakfast, as you please.

It was about half-past three o’clock in the morning when we started again. The poor ladies and the child had remained in the coach all this time, notwithstanding our efforts to induce them to alight. Nor could they be induced to accept even a cup of tea or coffee. With what a power of endurance these weak, gentle creatures--our sisters--are endowed!

TO BE CONTINUED.

DECISION AGAINST THE ST. JAMES’ MISSION CLAIM AT VANCOUVER--ITS APPRECIATION.

We reprint, at the request of Bishop Blanchet, the following article on this subject, taken from the _Catholic Sentinel_ of May 25. For a further exposition of the attitude assumed by the government towards our struggling missionary church in that region, we refer the reader to the February (1872) number of this magazine:

_Editor Catholic Sentinel_:

The case of the St. James’ Mission Claim, which for the last twelve years has been pending in the office of the General Land Department, and that of the Secretary of the Interior, has at last been taken into consideration, and decided, as reported a few weeks since. To Hon. W. H. Smith, Assistant Attorney-General, was given the commission to examine the case and give his opinion. He did so in a document dated January 29 last.

In his report, transmitted to the Department of the Interior, we see that he had to solve these two questions:

1. Who are included within the proviso of the first section of the act of Congress of the 14th of August, 1848, which proviso is in the following language: “That the title to land, not exceeding 640 acres, now occupied as missionary stations among the Indian tribes in said Territory (Oregon Ty.), together with the improvements thereon, be confirmed and established in the several religious societies to which such missionary stations respectively belong”?

2. What is confirmed by said proviso to missionary stations?

The hon. gentleman, after an attentive examination of the first question, says: “I am of opinion that the proviso of the first section of the act of 1848 conferred an immediate title right upon all the societies then within its provisions. Here is a confirmation of title immediately operating _proprio vigore_ for the benefit of all who should at that date be within its provisions.”

For the construction of the law he refers to the opinion of Attorney-General Bates, May 27, 1864, of Secretary Harlan, and the Commissioner of the General Land Office in his instructions to the Surveyor-General, which opinion has never been anywhere seriously questioned. His final conclusion is: “I am satisfied that on the 14th of August, 1848, there was existing a missionary station of St. James.”

This opinion is so well established by the documentary evidence and the opinion of the gentlemen above quoted that there cannot reasonably be the least doubt in the mind of any candid man as to the existence of the St. James’ Mission on the 14th of August, 1848--a fact acknowledged by all, irrespective of party or creed.

Let us now come to the second question, about what is confirmed by the proviso.

Here the hon. gentleman experiences some uneasiness in regard to the words _land now occupied_ of the proviso. He knows not exactly what they mean. He is not ready to say whether in _every case_ “all the land claimed ought to have been enclosed, cultivated, built upon, or the like.” Then he speaks of “stakes or other marks,” and says that “for the liberal purposes of the proviso (?) he would give the language the most liberal construction, but knows of no rule so liberal as to hold _land occupied_ which has never been included in any inclosure, etc.” (He had a little before said he was not ready to require in every case enclosure of the land; it is only a trifling contradiction!) Why should he be so troubled about “enclosure, stakes, etc.”? Had he not before his eyes the following rules, given by the Commissioner of the General Land Office to the Surveyor-General in 1853, to direct him?

“1. Such provision is understood to grant 640 acres to each separate and distinct missionary station referred to.

“2. In order to comply with the terms of the grants, ... it will become necessary to cause to be made a special survey of a square mile, which _shall include the land occupied_ with the buildings, and improvements in the centre, as nearly as may be.”

These rules are undoubtedly plain and clear, and no candid man can deny that the intentions of Congress in granting 640 acres to each missionary station were as well, if not better, known to the commissioner in 1853, as they can now be known after twenty years. He knew that it was not as an alms, but in consideration of the services rendered by the missionaries in laboring to civilize and christianize the Indians, that the grant was made by Congress. The same view has been invariably taken by all his successors in office, by all the occupants of the Department of the Interior, and all the Attorney-Generals from 1853 to 1872. Accordingly, all cases of missionary stations have been settled whether they were fenced or not. The Methodist Mission at the Dalles in Oregon, received from the government $20,000 for a portion of its claim, which was not fenced in 1849, and had never been before. The title of the Presbyterian Mission at Walla Walla, and many others which were in the same condition, were readily acknowledged and granted. Should not all these incontrovertible facts have convinced the Hon. Assistant Attorney of the true meaning of the words “the land now occupied”? But they did not.

Yet notwithstanding his apparent disposition “for the charitable purpose of the proviso to give the language the most liberal construction,” he cannot go so far as went all the secretaries, the attorney-generals, and the commissioners in office during the course of the twenty previous years. He seems to have been sent to teach them that they all have erred in the interpretation they have given to the proviso, and accordingly he sets himself up as a reformer. Therefore, grounded on his far superior legal acquirements, he hesitates not to say: “I am unable to see how Commissioner Wilson reached the conclusion in his instructions to the Surveyor-General. It is in my opinion an erroneous construction of the proviso.” The Hon. Mr. Wilson, as well as all the other hon. gentlemen who approved his construction, will no doubt be much flattered by the compliment.

The Hon. Assistant Attorney-General continues: “On the 14th day of August, 1848, the mission of St. James was _in actual possession_ of a small piece of land upon which had been erected a church, in which the priests there stationed held religious worship. The mission at that date had never asserted any claim whatever” (would the Hudson Bay Company, wrongfully claiming possessory rights to the land, have allowed it?) “had no enclosure, and was therefore only in occupancy of the land covered by the church edifice, and such land as was appendant to it. This it occupied in my opinion as a missionary station among the Indians. The society to which said mission belongs has therefore a vested title in the land upon which the church edifice extends, and as much appurtenant thereto as at the passage of the act was within the enclosure or used for church purposes.”

Such, therefore, has been the generosity of the Congress of the United States, in his opinion!

As an acknowledgment of the previous efforts of the missionaries to civilize and christianize the Indians, Congress grants the land covered by the church, and a few feet more. What wonderful liberality! _Obstupescite coeli super hoc!_

This opinion has been submitted to the Hon. Attorney-General Williams, although he has an interest in a portion of the claim. He has written a letter on the subject which may be considered as approving it, from the fact that the Hon. Mr. Cowen, acting Secretary, has declared that he himself concurs in the opinion of the Hon. Mr. Smith. The legists will here please remember that the old axiom, _favores sunt ampliandi_, is no longer in fashion! Hereafter they must say: _Favores sunt restringendi_; and, _odiosa amplianda_, as in the present case.

By such a decision, if it could stand, the first Catholic mission established among the Indians in Washington Territory, the mission which before 1848 incontestably labored more than any other for the civilization of the Indians, would have only a few feet of land, while all other similar missions have received 640 acres, and one $20,000 for the land occupied by the government for a military post. Why such glaring partiality in the administration? There cannot be any other reason for such a decision but that the land claimed is considered as of too great a value, and that some military officers but already too well known here covet the land in whole or in part. There is no doubt that by their influence they have been in a great measure the cause of this long procrastination on the part of the government in the past, and have in the present contributed their share in the rendering of the foregoing adverse decision.

We have now, Mr. Editor, given a true report of the decision and the ground upon which it is founded. We therefore present it to an enlightened public in order that it may form its opinion upon the merits and demerits of the case, and that it may know that all the religious societies do not stand on the same footing of equality in the eyes of the liberal government of the United States in the year of grace 1872.

A CATHOLIC.

VANCOUVER, W. T., May 23,

Papers whose motto is “equal justice to all” are requested to reproduce the above.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. By Ward H. Lamon. Illustrated. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1872. Pp. 547.

This newest biography of the late President, in which are related all the incidents of his career “from his birth to his inauguration,” is simply one of the multitudinous dull books of the period, the design or necessity of which is far from obvious to any person other than the author and bookseller. Compiled by “an admirer” mainly from materials supplied by a quondam partner of the deceased, it sadly realizes the truthfulness of the old saying that an indiscreet friend is more dangerous than an avowed enemy. We defy any one, no matter how charitable, who may have the patience to wade through its exaggerated accounts of the family, friends, boyhood, and manhood of Mr. Lincoln, not to feel, on closing the book, a tinge of that self-abasement which usually follows association with vulgar and commonplace characters. What has the world got to do with the private history of the “Hanks” family or the disgraceful bar-room and “lick” fights of a semi-barbarous settlement, in which the young man was no doubt but an involuntary and disgusted participant? Then, as to his religious views, though important as an index to his mental and moral qualities, we consider it bad taste and worse judgment to expatiate on his unbelief with all the minuteness and unction which distinguish the long chapter devoted to their discussion. A cloud of witnesses and documents are brought up to prove what?--that he did not frequent churches or meeting-houses, and that the expressions of devotion and reverence in his speeches and public correspondence were used only to gratify his supporters. This may be true or it may not be, but we “hold it not well to be so set down,” particularly by a friend. It is generally acknowledged that Lincoln was a temperate and merciful man, a warm friend, patient, if not affectionate, in his family relations, and devotedly attached to his children; but having strong intuitive powers and a keen sense of the ridiculous, he could not help despising and laughing at the narrow-minded and ignorant “hard-shell” Baptist and Methodist preachers of his day and neighborhood. Though by no means of a very profound mind, he was too good a lawyer not to know that there was no logical medium between implicit obedience to an infallible authority and a denial of all revelation. Had he enjoyed in early life the advantages of a proper religious training, there can be little doubt but that, humanly speaking, he would have added to his domestic virtues those cardinal ones which the church inculcates. We are sorry for his own sake that he did not; and we regret, for the honor of the republic whose chief magistrate he once was, that his memory should thus be held up to the reprobation of his and our countrymen, without, so far as we can see, any adequate resulting good.

* * * * *

THE RUSSIAN CLERGY. Translated from the French of F. Gagarin, S.J. By C. D. Makepeace, M.A. London: Burns & Oates. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

F. Gagarin is a Russian prince, and, of course, knows what he is writing about. This book is a very curious one, and will make some people open their eyes if they read it.

* * * * *

THE CHRISTIAN ÆSOP. Ancient Fables teaching Eternal Truths. By W. H. Anderdon, D.D. London: Burns, Oates & Co. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Dr. Anderdon in this little book teaches us spiritual truths by means of the old and familiar fables that for years have been used to teach the world natural truths; and it is a beautiful thought, for truth cannot be presented in too many ways, and this mingling of the homely lessons of the fables with spiritual instruction gives a peculiar charm to the book that will not be found in other spiritual writings. The many quotations from the Holy Scriptures, too, give it a special interest.

The fables are all beautifully illustrated.

* * * * *

LIFE OF THE CURE D’ARS. From the French of the Abbé Monnin. New York: P. O’Shea. 1872.

We welcome most kindly a new edition of the charming life of this most wonderful man, and take occasion to recommend it again to all our readers. Mr. O’Shea has purchased the plates from the former publishers, and, we trust, will find a ready sale for his edition.

* * * * *

LEGENDS OF ST. JOSEPH. Translated by Mrs. Sadlier. D. & J. Sadlier. 1872.

This collection of historical narratives and pious legends makes a pleasing volume, and is published in a pretty style. It is a book likely to be especially interesting to young people, for whom the accomplished authoress has a particular gift of making her instructive and pious writings entertaining.

* * * * *

SAUNTERINGS. By Charles D. Warner, author of _My Summer in a Garden_. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

Time was, in the United States, and within the memory of man too, that to have travelled in Europe entitled the American tourist to set up for a lion in his native town. It was once something to have seen London and Paris, which are now mere American starting-points for the grand tour of to-day. England, France, Germany, and Italy no longer count. Every one has seen them, and even little New York and Boston boys and girls yet at school, or who ought to be there, have their own discussions as to the relative merits of London and Paris, Berlin and Vienna. In short, the old ordinary European tour no longer counts. Its tracks are all beaten until they are dusty, and one must now do Spain, Russia, Palestine, and Egypt, at least, to obtain the smallest capital wherewith to set up as a tourist.

Mr. Warner’s _Saunterings_ take us among the well-known paths, chatting and gossiping at random concerning what strikes him, and, as the subject-matter is already an old story to every one, it is merely a pleasant way of reviving pleasant reminiscences.

Saving and excepting a few of the usual Protestant misconceptions repeated by the author, most probably without malice, the book makes very agreeable summer reading.

* * * * *

NOTES ON ENGLAND. By H. Taine. Translated with an Introductory Chapter by W. F. Rae. New York: Holt & Williams.

Mr. Rae’s introduction is a well-written chapter. Mr. Taine’s notes are the recorded impressions of a traveller in England. They are characteristically vivacious, picturesque, and frequently amusing, with a tendency to be as often wrong as right in the judgments he pronounces. The author discusses all the subjects that usually fall under the observation of an intelligent visitor in a strange country--government, religion, amusements, schools, universities, homes, hospitals, manners, morals, the clubs, the family, etc., etc. Here is a passage which we can commend as being as applicable to the latitude of Washington as that of Greenwich: “In Hyde Park, on Sunday, the exaggeration of the dresses of the ladies or young girls belonging to the wealthy middle class is offensive; bonnets resembling piled-up bunches of rhododendrons, or as white as snow, of extraordinary smallness, with baskets of red flowers or of enormous ribbons; gowns of shiny violet silk with dazzling reflections, or of starched tulle upon an expanse of petticoats stiff with embroidery; immense shawls of black lace, reaching down to the heels; gloves of immaculate whiteness or bright violet; gold chains; golden zones with golden clasps; hair falling over the neck in shining masses. The glare is terrible. They seem to have stepped out of a wardrobe, and to march past to advertise a magazine of novelties--not that even; for they do not know how to show off their dresses.”

* * * * *

INDULGENCES, ABSOLUTIONS, TAX TABLES, ETC. By Rev. T. L. Green, D.D. London: Longmans. 1872.

Some low, dirty fellow in London, named Collette, has been serving up the disgusting mess of lies about the topics designated in the title of Dr. Green’s book, of which even the most unscrupulous enemies of the church in this country, who have any regard for their reputation, are ashamed to avail themselves. Dr. Green has exposed him and brought him to deep and inconsolable grief without difficulty, and in an able and lively manner.

* * * * *

DIVINE LIFE OF THE MOST HOLY VIRGIN MARY. Being an Abridgment of the Mystical City of God. By Mary of Jesus of Agreda. By F. B. A. De Cæsare, N.M.C., Cons. Sac. Cong. Index. Translated from the French of the Abbé J. A. Boullan, D.D. Philadelphia: Cunningham. 1872. With the imprimatur of the Bishop of Philadelphia.

At length we have this celebrated and remarkable book in English. The abridgment is even preferable to the original, which is tediously prolix in style. Among many Catholic books recently published in very attractive style, this one is among the most tasteful and beautiful. The work itself is both edifying and delightful to those who have the spirit of Catholic devotion.

* * * * *

THE MERCHANT OF ANTWERP. A Tale from the Flemish of Hendrick Conscience. Translated by Revin Lyle. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1872.

The merits of Hendrick Conscience as a natural, graceful, and original writer of fiction are so generally recognized, that it is almost needless to say we welcome the appearance of this book with great satisfaction. In design it is artistic, in moral unexceptionable, and its characters have the rare merit of being few, distinctly drawn, and lifelike. The book itself is well and neatly bound, and the paper is excellent, but here its mechanical attractions, we regret to be obliged to say, end. The type, the printing, and the ink are simply execrable; and the presswork seems to have been done on one of those old-fashioned cylinder presses now generally devoted to “striking off” street ballads and play-bills.

* * * * *

THE WITCH OF ROSENBURG. A drama in three acts. By His Eminence Cardinal Wiseman. New York: P. O’Shea.

Long and favorably known, this charming drama requires no eulogy from our pen. We merely note the appearance of this new edition to chronicle the change of proprietorship from Kelly, Piet & Co. to the present publisher.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XV., No. 90.--SEPTEMBER, 1872.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Rev. I. T. HECKER, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

INTELLECTUAL CENTRES.

A thought struck us the other day--a thought that was half a memory--of the interest we should feel in Geneva at the present moment were we to be there as long as the Treaty arbitration lasts. This led us to reflect upon Geneva as we knew it--one of the most delightful, intellectual, and interesting places we ever came across. Thought, like art, has its centres, its headquarters, and, like politics, its changes of dynasties and capitals. In these centres, a person might live undisturbedly a whole generation, and, never stirring ten miles beyond the city gates, not miss any one novelty, person, discovery, or theory worth hearing or seeing. All great personages, whether of royal birth or, what is more important, of intellectual fame, will sooner or later pass through this favored place; all new modes of thought, from theology to unbelief, from Spiritism to Darwinism, will find there a ready field of battle.

Of these centres of thought in modern times, Geneva is not the least. We can speak from experience of the quiet, unpretending old town, standing, in the pride of its antiquity and of its superior taste, aloof from the more frivolous Parisian suburb that commercial enterprise has caused to grow up beside it on the opposite side of the Rhone. It has a population of _savants_ and _dilettanti_; its _salons_ are “blue-stocking,” and its young men not mere butterflies, but men with a work to do or perchance already begun. Music has a home there, too--grave, classical, instrumental music, such as you can fancy the _délassement_ of a nation of sages should be. Conversation is hardly brilliant among the Genevese (though the use of the French language renders it far from heavy), but it is solid, and words are put for ideas, not strung together to hide nonsense. Theatres are feebly patronized, and are left to the summer visitors of foreign countries, whose exclusive society creates another Geneva by the side of the old historical town--a Geneva that has nothing Genevese about it but the name. Lectures are very prominent, almost as much so as in America, and they are generally upon scientific subjects. Men of fortune give a course of them free, for the enlightenment of the humbler classes, and young men of good family and position spend their time in literary trials, hunting up references and studying abstruse systems of forgotten philosophy. To be uneducated in Geneva brands a man with a worse mark than to be poor among mercantile communities. Frivolity in man or woman is equivalent to dishonor. There is little display in Genevese society--a simplicity far more republican than anything America can point to reigns in domestic affairs; and the people do not court nor take any pains to allure the _pot-pourri_ of foreign princes, merchants, gentlemen, and gamblers that fill the gay quays on the modern side of the river. It is told of one of the highest civil dignitaries of Geneva in the last century--a man of good descent and comfortable means--that he received the envoy of the King of France (it was before the French Revolution), on some diplomatic mission, with one maid-servant holding a lantern. The guest having alighted from his state-coach, and groped his way into the modest house, inquired in surprise: “_Mais, monsieur, où sont vos gens?_” (“But, sir, where is your household?”) “_Mes gens!_” repeated the Genevese, with undismayed good-nature; “_c’est Jeanne!_” (“My household consists of Jane!”) The French magnifico, whose only idea of power lay in profuse display, and who counted his lackeys by the score, was dumfounded at these Spartan barbarians, whose chief unblushingly declared that a kitchen-maid was all his retinue! Yet the chief was probably a _savant_, while the Frenchman at best was most likely nothing more than a wit. The writer of this article, eager to see something of the home-life of the Genevese, succeeded in making a few acquaintances among these most exclusive of literati. On one occasion we were dining at the primitive hour of five with a charming family, the De la Rives, people of the most polished manners, quick perceptions, and inexhaustible fund of interesting conversation. The meal was plain and frugal, well cooked, yet without a trace of art--what one might have expected at a farmer’s or tradesman’s table; but what in the most modest of gentlemen’s houses in France, England, or Germany would have been an impossibility. The governess and the little children dined with us, the former joining heartily and cleverly in the conversation, which never by any chance fell upon trivialities. The knives and forks were not changed throughout dinner, to our great perplexity; and for the purpose of keeping them from soiling the table during the change of plates, there were provided little glass rests, like thick, short bars. These quaint details seemed quite matters of course, and, strange to say, there was nothing vulgar or repulsive about them, the _personnel_ of the hosts being enough to stamp all belonging to them with the hall-mark of true and unostentatious refinement. There was no dressing for this family dinner, as there would have been in England, nor, indeed, is there much dressing at all among the Genevese women. To tell the truth, they are rather what our fastidious taste would call dowdy in their toilette and appearance; but then, what a solid background of true and deep education lies behind their exterior carelessness! It is the same with their parties, which are rather like family gatherings, and where the old-fashioned habit is still kept up of having the tea served on a large table, round which the guests unceremoniously seat themselves. Men of mark in the literary world are there; inventors of machines that have changed the destiny of commerce, and originated or obliterated this or that trade; botanists who have inherited their talent with their fathers’ name and experience; women who have written treatises that men of science read with approval--and all of them so unaffectedly enjoying themselves, all of them so truly refined and so childlike in their simple manners. Looking at this kind of assemblage, is it wonderful that it should have made its native city a capital of the world of thought? Bad men as well as good pass through it; Mazzinist and International fraternize and plot; Legitimist and Catholic meet, and hold congresses; outsiders from another continent, as at this moment, agree to settle their disputes on its neutral soil. All philosophies, from De Maistre and Cousin down to Darwin and Renan, find their exponents there; their upholders lecture there; their theories are more closely looked into if they start from there. The church is more active at Geneva than almost anywhere in Europe; unbelief is more rampant and more unblushing; dissent more earnest, and, if blinded, yet more sincere. Thirty or forty years ago, a body of Genevese ministers of the “National Church” did what no other Protestant body corresponding in numbers and influence has ever done in modern times--they voluntarily gave up their benefices, and threw themselves with their families, utterly destitute, on the generosity of such among their flocks as would follow their conscience. And why? Because the National Church was becoming more and more Socinian, and dechristianizing the population of Geneva. These dissenters, headed by the Malan family, persevered in their sacrifice, and succeeded in founding a “Free Church,” which is now very prosperous, and counts among its members all the best people of the town. Outside the Catholic Church, it would be difficult to find a parallel to this act of renunciation for the sake of principle. Speaking of Geneva from a religious point of view, we do not know but what we might most decidedly call it a centre of active religion, since its bishop, Mgr. Mermillod, is one of its best known and most distinguished native citizens, and the church under his guidance is making rapid conquests in the former stronghold of Calvinism; but this is beside our subject, which is simply to reckon Geneva as first and foremost in the present tournament of restless intellect.

Rome naturally suggests itself as another of these centres. We put it second in the intellectual scale and in the wide sense in which we are speaking, although in religion it stands more than first, that is, perfectly unequalled. Still, when Byron called it “city of the soul,” he made that delicate shade of a distinction that marked it as a spiritual capital more than an intellectual centre. For the spirit of Rome is too calm for agitation, too conservative for creation. Yet in a secondary sense to volcanic Geneva, and in a contrasting sense too, Rome is a wonderful rendezvous of the talent and thought of Europe. A life spent in Rome would include a sight of almost all the distinguished men and women of both hemispheres. Unbelievers go to Rome to scoff, and often remain to pray; curious idlers go to see the old man of the Vatican, and often stay to ask his blessing; antiquarians find enough work for a lifetime in digging up a few square feet of ground; artists have a range of subjects before them so vast that, if they had a thousand lives to live, they could not exhaust it; men of science go to meet their kin and discuss things in quiet congresses, which it is impossible to end otherwise than peaceably, for the curious and unique charm of Rome is its subtle power of harmonizing the minds of its guests with the traditions of its own mysterious existence. It has a faculty of spiritual alchemy, and changes the visitor for the time being into a different creature. All its lessons seem to be taught in silence, and for argument it has but little sympathy. Intrinsically, it is a centre of love; accidentally, a centre of thought. Men with wearied hearts are its “chosen few,” for its power is rather recuperative than creative. It is most difficult to say what we mean, and yet not to seem to speak in disparagement of this wonderful “city of the soul”; and perhaps a description of its society, though that would be the easiest way to make our meaning clear, would be tedious, because so familiar. We all of us seem to know Rome as if each one had been there; and so perhaps after all we may trust to be better understood than we had hoped to be at first. A short walk on the “Pincio” will show us the utmost cosmopolitanism possible; the Polish exile secure while within a few paces of the Russian official; the Anglican minister, with his trained Oxford refinement, calmly discussing with the energetic, passionate, and voluble Italian ecclesiastic; the Mazzinist bowing involuntarily to the cardinal whose generosity raised him from the poor-house; the French philosopher and the German artist; the American sculptor, with his prejudiced yet not unkindly view of Rome; the English convert, enthusiastic and interested; and the languid Italian, taking everything as a matter of course--such are a few of the common types one jostles against every minute. These things, however, are too well known; and from this strange, perplexing city, so dearly loved and so well hated, so prominent in the world’s annals that no dark future can obscure her ever-real and ever the same present--this city whose Christian fame overrides even her glorious heathen past of unlimited power and unchecked Cæsarism--we will go forward to the land of those “barbarians” who regenerated Europe and materially helped to build the church. But how changed is the brightest city of that land, Munich, the undoubted centre of the highest intellect, but now also the unhappy cradle of a new perversion of that very intellect!

Though we are less conversant with Munich than with the two foregoing places, we shall yet attempt to say a few words on its influence in modern times.

It is perhaps a more recent focus of thought than any other of the present day, yet it is none the less powerful for that. The Bavarian royal family has preserved for two or three generations the traditions of a modern Medici dynasty; they are the declared champions of talent, the protectors of innovations of any kind. As long as there is genius, originality, vitality, in a thing or idea, no matter what its tendency, good or bad, it is sure of patronage and help. Intensely national in its leanings, Munich aspires to make Germany paramount, to impose her ways of thought upon the world, to mould Europe according to a German standard, and set up in a new Rome of the north a new ideal that might be expressed in these words, _Le génie c’est moi_. If Christianity had not yet appeared, the plan would have been magnificent, and this Roman Empire of absolute intellect a far grander conception than Plato’s Republic, but now God has reserved universality as a mark of his church alone; and the power that would tear this badge from her to crown itself therewith, in opposition to her, cannot hope to succeed any better than the great angel of light succeeded in his gigantic rebellion. Still, notwithstanding this blot upon the otherwise fair system of intellectual supremacy of which Munich is the headquarters, the fact of this practical supremacy remains, and is the more felt and the better tested now since Prussia has attempted to establish herself in opposition to it. The story of ancient Greece and Rome is being enacted anew--matter and mind are face to face; and the military machine which is called the North German Empire, and which has proved itself so politically resistless, stands baffled before the more Attic and refined organization of the capital of thought and art. Impossible to transplant to the alien atmosphere of iron-bound Berlin the delicate grace and play of intellect that distinguishes Munich; impossible to make philosophy accept the trammels of officialism, or persuade artists to wait the nod of bureaucrats. The intangible charm of cosmopolitan life belongs to the Bavarian city, the freemasonry of intellectual activity vivifies it. Napoleon carried half the marbles of Rome to his palace of the Louvre, and yet he could not make the Louvre a Vatican, and Belshazzar, though he robbed the temple of its golden cups and drank from them at his banquets, could not make himself high-priest of the Hebrew faith.

The world goes to Munich for art, instruction, and artistic models; Germany goes there for philosophical and scientific theories. Foreigners would rather leave Berlin and Vienna unvisited than miss a week at Munich; and a stay among its galleries, libraries, and museums, is part of the education of every travelled man. It has its literary, its fashionable, and its diplomatic circles, and, strangely enough, each of these pronounces it an equally agreeable resort. The cultivated world filters through it all the year round, and, like Geneva and Rome, though perhaps in a lesser degree than either, one might stay there a lifetime and yet see the whole panorama of intellectual Europe unrolled at intervals before one’s eyes. Although Munich possesses a learned and important university, it is not to that alone she owes her supremacy, for it is a fact worthy of notice that in our days the sovereignty of thought is more the attribute of an aggregate of independent thinkers, than the exclusive privilege of certain bodies trained in the same traditions, and cast in much the same mould. Whether or no this is an advantage, is a question we need not enter into here; it is beside our subject. We hope subsequently to be able to draw a companion picture of that ancient state of things which made the intellectual centres of the past, both in their growth and in their influence, so widely different from our own. Certain it is, however, that that influence was less ephemeral formerly than now.

From Munich we have not far to go to another of the world’s volcanoes, Paris, the modern enigma. Like a witch’s cauldron, always seething, never safe, Paris is playing an uninterrupted game of political conjuring. Unlike other cities whose intellect is distinct from their politics, Paris cannot help giving a political tinge to its literary and philosophical creations. Social questions are violently joined to intellectual problems; and _savants_ or _beaux-esprits_ will eschew a brother philosopher or wit who wears alien colors and belongs to another camp. The talent that rides uppermost in Paris is identified with socialism, and from literary Bohemianism soon lapses into political outlawry. Victor Hugo is its apostle, Alfred de Musset its poet. On the one hand, a frantic, destructive vigor urges it to assert its self-assumed and imperious sovereignty; on the other, a maudlin, opium-like languor soothes its sensuality and bids it revel in momentary luxury. Sybarites are always tyrants; Nero crowned with roses and singing to his lute while Rome was helplessly burning by his orders, is a fit image of modern Paris displaying her world-alluring softness while Europe is in flames through her baneful principles. We speak of Paris in her zenith; but it is to be feared that the spirit which made her the rose-entwined firebrand of the world, will not long be quelled even by her own unparalleled misfortunes. In her deepest humiliation, when the sympathy of the universe was hers, did she not find strength enough to turn on her true friends, and, by her fiendish attempts on law and order, to alienate the shocked and insulted instincts of a world that had been ready to take up arms in her defence? It may be said that _that_ Paris was not the real one; yet it is the one that rules--rules _sourdement_, as the French so expressively say, when she is herself ruled by an iron hand, rules through her infidel press, her immoral literature, her unwholesome poetry, her rotten philosophy, her frivolous and heedless society. True it is that in Paris, which proudly calls itself “the capital of the world and the heart of humanity,” there are circles of quiet literary men--_coteries_ of harmless exiles from other lands; men whose lives are bounded by the Bibliothèque Impériale and the Théâtre Français; and men, too, whose one aim is charity and one ambition, heaven. True, France can boast as many missionaries as communists, as many martyrs as soldiers, almost as many religious as unhung miscreants. But how many Montalemberts, how many Dupanloups, how many Lacordaires, beside the innumerable spawn of Dumases, George Sands, Balzacs, Michelets, Taines, and Renans? No doubt in the records of the Almighty there are to be found in this modern Sodom the ten just men that will save it from spiritual destruction, but we are speaking of it principally in the intellectual sense, and surely, from this point of view, where are its saviors? A centre of intellect it is most undoubtedly and most unfortunately, but a centre such as a powder magazine might be. The streams it pours over Europe’s world of thought are lava-streams, scorching the purer air of principle to make way for the poisonous gases of self-indulgence. If Paris were sovereign, peace would be no more, and truth would leave the earth, dismayed. The very opposite, of Rome, its spirit is one of fever, catching even to the calmest pulse of a law-abiding and metaphysical northerner--a spirit that broods over one like the blast of a furnace, and bewilders like the breath of a coming simoom. We have experienced it ourselves in days long before the last great judgment that has crushed the unhappy city; we have marvelled at its obtrusive activity, so fatiguing to the eye, because, unlike that of London or New York, it denotes only the frivolous search after empty pleasure, not the calm plodding after necessary business; we have wondered at its frothy show, where the greatest display is a sure sign of the worst depravity; we have longed to be out of its unwholesome, oppresive spell, that seemed to paralyze the mind and darken the understanding. To think that this possessed city should be the pioneer of the nineteenth century, and have more influence over the moral destinies of the world than Napoleon ever had over the kingdoms of Europe, or than Bismarck can ever have over the future of Paris itself! What have we done to deserve it? What has brought this Egyptian plague upon us, the Nile of the intellect turned into blood, the fertilizer become poison?

There is a wider difference than the mere width of the Channel between Paris and Oxford. What calm, scholarly, refined associations come to our mind when we name the Alma Mater of so many of England’s greatest men! It is like a refreshing ocean breeze after the scorching blast of a volcano. We feel at home here. Gladstone, Pusey, Keble, Newman, were sons of this English centre of thought--Stanley for a long time was identified with it, all the intellectual movements of this century sprang from it, and to represent it in Parliament is accounted the highest political honor. All schools of thought have started from it; “High Church,” “Low Church,” and “Broad Church” have all found their headquarters there, and recruits from these several camps have left it to bring their various gifts to that other and wider university over which the Holy Ghost presides everlastingly. If one might use words that must seem a paradox, Oxford, once made and fashioned by the church, has in our days herself influenced the church. We mean that the university has given to the Catholics of England that unrivalled body of priests who stand alone in Europe for their indomitable energy, their self-sacrificing earnestness, and their gentle and truly Christian refinement. Among Protestants, it is only the strict truth to say that Oxford has created the Church of England, and vivifies her now even more than state protection, or the universal adoption extended to her by usage and courtesy among the educated classes. Most truly has Oxford been called the Rome of English Protestantism. It is sad for us to think of the perverted influence of a system essentially Catholic, of traditions and customs that have lost their meaning while they have kept their form, and yet it is also a proud thought to dwell upon, that such as this matchless seat of intellect is, and such as its absolute identification with English national thought and national character makes it certain ever to be, it owes it to the church of Alfred, of Langton, of Scotus--the church of Peter--alone.

We have said that, in modern times, universities as such have less influence than the aggregate of independent thinkers. This, however, hardly applies to England, for the mass of enlightened men in that country forms, practically, the true university. Cambridge, as a seat of equal learning, yet scarcely of equal brilliancy or influence, is of course included. The social and intellectual training of both is the same, the traditions practically so. The whole body of able men in England belongs to either one or the other of these universities, and, never unlearning their modes of thought and unconsciously stamping their impress deeper on each succeeding work undertaken or effort accomplished, therefore never cease to belong to them. England is thus one university, and Oxford is the epitome of educated England. Very national and jealous of foreign irruption is this vast and compact body; its members will taste and examine very closely before an alien theory be admitted among them, but, once admitted, it is adopted with eagerness, nationalized, and so embodied in a thoroughly English shape that its origin becomes undistinguishable. The spirit of Oxford, unlike that of Paris, is the very reverse of cosmopolitan; there is no versatility in its essence, no straining after effect, novelty, nor even domination; it does not care to impose itself on others, and thus it differs ever from the national-minded spirit of Munich, but it vigorously resents anything being imposed upon it. Ideas grow slowly, and systems ripen there before they are tried; a school of thought goes out whole and calm, not upon tentative excursions, but to certain conquest. Foreigners are more curious to see Oxford than they are to examine any other English institution; foreign _savants_ look with pride or longing on the rare gift of its honorary degrees. Its buildings are the only palaces known in England, and excel in nobility of architecture every modern public erection and almost every private residence. It keeps up customs of hospitality, of generosity, of courtesy, that seem lost amid the dwarfishness of modern politeness; its grand solemnity of demeanor and stateliness of etiquette shame our puny and impudent code of manners; the freedom of later behavior seems by its side a stunted pollard when compared to the magnificent oak of bygone centuries. Oxford keeps up the ideal among Englishmen, or rather it is the ideal personified. It is a standing protest against the levity of modern and _fast_ life--a city of sanctuary for learning, art, ecclesiasticism, æsthetics, philosophy, and taste. Those who have lived all their lives in it as fellow-tutors or professors, love it to idolatry; those who have gone forth to their several professions and been knocked about by the vicissitudes of the world, love it as the Garden of Eden of their lost peace; those who have left it for the Catholic Church, love it with the most mournful and deepest of loves, even as Gregory loved the fair-haired heathen boys that were Angles, but whom he longed to see angels. The greatest mind in England--John Henry Newman--loves it with this sorrowful love, which has prevented him from ever seeing it again since he severed himself from it, and suffered more in this severing than the loss of friends or the wilful misconception of enemies; and in his room at Edgbaston, where his retired life is now entirely spent, there hangs a view of the beautiful English university town, with this significant motto in illuminated characters beneath: “Son of man, dost thou think these dry bones shall live?” (Ez. xxxvii. 3).

From Oxford we must cross the Atlantic to find our last intellectual centre in this age. It is the youngest, though not the least vigorous, and it stands alone on the Western continent, where it has not inaptly been called--as Edinburgh once was--the Modern Athens. Boston is also more or less the product of a university, but here, as elsewhere, the taint is on the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Infidelity and cynicism make their home there in the midst of the luxuriant growth of intellect. Pride of mind has ended in riot of soul, and amid the intoxicating creations of its own strong vitality, the genius of New England has spiritually lost its way. But humanly speaking, what a fair field of intellect is here displayed! It is through Boston that America is best known to Europe. Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, are household words wherever the English language is spoken; and the dignified history of New England, no less than her weird and fascinating literature, is as interestingly familiar to English as to American minds. Boston is New England crystallized, the representative city of America, the channel of communication between the Old and the New World, the crucible of every new theory and the test the successful passing of which is, as it were, a “degree” in itself. Boston stands forth as the champion of science against commerce, and the breakwater which strives to save America from the imputation--thrown on England by the French--of being “a nation of shopkeepers.” The West, with its gigantic future roughly mapped out, and its raw material inconveniently spread over the whole land, looks with uneasy and half-dismayed contempt at the scholarly capital of New England; the North, with its sleek prosperity and organized system of elegant life, steals a look askance, in which envy is but thinly concealed behind an affectation of patronage. Of the South we cannot speak, since its naturally true instincts of appreciation and intellectual discernment have been cruelly and rudely shaken by the great convulsion whose effects will long remain but too prominent; but if ever there rises a rival, friendly yet altogether dissimilar, to the New England Athens, it will be in the gifted South, among the descendants of the cavaliers, that we shall turn to look for it. Such a one there should be, for this vast continent, in whose bosom the whole of Europe would lie like an island, must have more than one species of intellectual life, and ought to have more than one acknowledged exponent of it. In the South we should find the ardor of Paris, the ambition of Munich, and the refinement of Oxford, mingled and harmonized; and let us trust that in the lands discovered by Catholic missionaries, and colonized by Catholic gentlemen, we might at least escape the ban that clings to the older centres of intellectual life in Europe, the revolutionary and antichristian tendencies of France, and the unhappy heresies of England and Germany.

OLD BOOKS.

For out of old fields, as men sayth, Cometh all this new corn from yere to yere, And out of old books, in good faith Cometh all this new lore that men lere. --_Chaucer._

DANTE’S PURGATORIO.

CANTO THIRD.

(For Cantos I. and II. of this Translation, see CATHOLIC WORLD for November, 1870, and January, 1872.)

Though round the plain their quick flight scattered them, Bent for that Hill where reason turns our tread,[198] My faithful mate close at my garment’s hem I kept: how _could_ I without him have sped? Who else had o’er that mountain marshalled me? He seemed, methought, as inly touched with shame: O noble conscience, void of stain, to thee How sharp a morsel is the smallest blame! Soon as his feet the hurried movement checked Which every action’s dignity destroys, My mind, till now restrained and circumspect, Expanded with new strength, as ’twere of joy’s. My face I fixed upon that Hill to gaze Towards highest heaven which springeth from the wave.

The sun behind me redly flamed; its rays Broke by the shadow which my figure gave. When I perceived before me that the ground Was darkened only by myself, in dread Of being there deserted, I looked round And fronting me in full, my Comfort said: “Why this distrust? believ’st thou not that I Am with thee still, thy leader to the last? ’Tis evening now already where on high My body lies, which once a shadow cast, Buried at Naples, from Brundusium brought. Now, if no shade before me meet thy sight It need wake no more wonder in thy thought Than why one heaven checks not another’s light. Omnipotence to such forms hath assigned The power of suffering torments--cold and heat-- But _how_, reveals not to created kind. He is but mad who hopes this incomplete Reason of ours may track the Infinite way Which of three persons holds the substance one.

Rest, human race! contented when you say Simply because: could ye the whole have known No need had been for Mary to have borne; And ye have seen in hopeless longing those Who now to all eternity must mourn Desire for which they vainly sought repose. Of Aristotle and of Plato now I speak, and many others”: he remained Silent at this, and stood with bended brow And troubled look: meantime the Hill we gained. We found the cliff here sloping so steep down That nimblest legs had there been useless quite. The wildest way betwixt Turbìa’s town And Lèrici, the roughest, were a flight Compared with this, of open, easy stairs. “Who knows,” my Master said--and stayed his pace-- “Where this Hill slopeth, so that one who wears No wings may climb it?” Then his earnest face Directed closely to the ground as if Making in mind a study of the way. Meantime I gazed up round about the cliff, And on the left hand came to my survey A band of spirits, moving on towards us, That seemed not moving for they came so slow. “Lift up thine eyes”--I to the Master thus-- “If of thyself thou art not certain, lo! Yon souls our footsteps may direct perchance.” Thereat he looked, then frankly made reply: “Go we tow’rds _them_--so gently they advance-- And thou, my sweet son! keep thy hope up high.”

That people seemed as far, when we had gone A thousand steps, I say, or thereabout, As a good flinger might have cast a stone; When all at once, like one who goes in doubt And stops to look, their moderate march they checked And close to that high bank’s hard masses drew. “O ye peace-parted! O ye spirits elect! Ev’n by that peace which waits for each of you As I believe”--thus Virgil them bespake: “Inform us where this mountain slopeth so That its ascent we may essay to make; _For they mourn Time’s loss most, the most who know_.”

Like lambs that issue from their fold--one--two-- Then three at once (the rest all standing shy, With eye and nostril to the ground)--then do Just what the foremost doth, unknowing why, And crowd upon her back if she but stand, Quiet and simple creatures, thus the head I saw move towards us of that happy band, Modest in face, and of a comely tread.

Soon as their leaders noticed that the light On my right side lay broken at my feet, So that my shadow reached the rocky height, They stopped and drew a little in retreat. And all the others following, though they knew Not why they did so, did the very same. “Without your question I confess to you That here you see a living human frame: Hence on the ground the sunlight thus is riven: Marvel not at it, but believe ye all Not without virtue by the Most High given This man hath come to scale your Mountain’s wall.” My Master thus, and thus that gracious band: “Turn then and join us, and before us go”: And while some beckoned us with bended hand One called--“Whoe’er thou art there journeying so, Turn! Think--hast ever looked on me before?” I turned and gazed upon the one who spoke. Handsome and blond, he looked high-born, but o’er One brow appeared the severance of a stroke. When I had humbly answered him that ne’er Had I beheld him--“Look!” he said, and high Up on his breast showed me a wound he bare; Then added smilingly, “Manfred am I, The Empress Constance’ grandson: in such name Do I entreat, when back thou shalt have gone, To my fair daughter hie, of whose womb came Sicily’s boast and Aragon’s renown, And tell her this--if aught but truth be said That after two stabs--each of power to kill-- I gave my soul back weeping ere it fled To Him who pardoneth of His own free will My sins were horrible: but large embrace Infinite Goodness hath whose arms will ope For every child who turneth back to Grace; And if Cosenza’s bishop, by the Pope Clement set on to hound me to the last, That page of Holy Writ had better read, My bones had still been sheltered from the blast Near Benevento, by the bridge’s head, Under their load of stones: but now without The realm they lie, by Verde’s river--bare-- For winds and rains to beat and blow about, Dragged with quench’d candles and with curses there.

Yet not by their poor malediction can Souls be so lost but that Eternal Love May be brought back while hope hath life in man. ’Tis true that one who sets himself above The Holy Church, and dies beneath its ban (Even though he had repented at the last), Outside this Mount must unadmitted rove Thirty times longer than the term had been Of his presumptuous contumacy past, Unless good prayers a shorter penance win. See now what power thou hast to make me glad: Report of me to my good Constance bear, How thou saw’st me, and what I’ve told thee add; For much it profits us what they do there.”

FOOTNOTE:

[198] _Dante_ means the Hill of Purgatory, to the ascent of which we are turned no less by the right reason that is in us than by our contrition for an erroneous course, from which we are happily passing.

ON MUSIC.

Harmony and melody--which have an equal share in the effects produced by sound--find their original type, it may be, in the double nature of the universe, and of human destiny considered socially and individually. Harmony, like the external world and its moving masses, presents us with various parts, linked together and arranged so as to subserve one and the same end. Regular and measured in its movement as the celestial orbs, no deviation is allowable even in its boldest flight. An almighty will seems to have bound it to magnificence and grandeur, restricting its freedom to the latitude of the laws whose expression it is. But melody is thoroughly moral, and consequently free. It is the heart’s utterance, and follows and renders its emotions faithfully. When brilliant, it recalls our joys; when sweet and lingering, it portrays our rare and delicious intervals of repose. It sighs for our disquietudes and sways beneath our sorrows, like a friend who shares them. Would it reproduce the sad and vague yearnings which by turns agitate and soothe the soul of man?--its songs are as dreamy as his chimeras. Melody is but one thought at a time, but--mobile and rapid--it renders all thoughts in succession and tells the tale of a complete destiny. Harmony, with its grand effects, seems made to appeal to assembled men; melody, to transport the memory in solitude. Words may of course be adapted to a piece of pure harmony; but they are only accessory. When melody is associated with human speech, they rival one another in charm and in power. Speech is, indeed, the heart’s expression; but melody remains its accent.--_Madame Swetchine._

FLEURANGE.

BY MRS. CRAVEN, AUTHOR OF “A SISTER’S STORY.”

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, WITH PERMISSION.

PART SECOND

THE TRIAL.

XXVIII.

More than twenty-four hours had elapsed. Fleurange was already far away, and the incidents of the preceding days only seemed like a succession of troubled dreams. The conversation she heard on the terrace between the count and his mother, that which she herself had with the latter, her interview with George at San Miniato, the mysterious bouquet in the evening, and the sudden reappearance of Felix the next day--all these remembrances came back, one by one, but were all effaced by that of the farewell which succeeded them.

Yes, she had bidden him adieu for ever; whereas he smilingly said, “A rivederla!” and his mother, giving her hand graciously to her young _protégée_, continued to the last to play her part in this drama of two characters, which she and Fleurange alone understood.

The young girl also sustained hers without exhibiting any weakness; but in kissing the princess’ hand she gave to the words “Addio, principéssa!” an accent the latter fully comprehended the meaning of. She embraced her in return with involuntary tenderness, and even with an emotion that might have been considered surprising for so short an absence. George observed it, and felt more reassured than ever. Therefore, after Fleurange’s departure, what he felt was not so much sadness, as the need of some distraction powerful enough to relieve the insupportable _ennui_ caused by her absence.

As to her, alone with Julian in the coupé of the vetturino, while Clara, her child, and a young Italian waiting-maid occupied the interior, she could not give herself up to the thoughts that were suffocating her. She must still continue the effort of concealment, and assume a cheerfulness she was far from feeling, which was more antipathic to her nature than anything else. She was to turn off to Santa Maria at the small village of Passignano, where they expected to arrive on the morning of the third day, and she did not intend announcing to the Steinbergs her intention of accompanying them to Germany till they stopped at the monastery on their way back from Perugia. By that time all her plans for the future would be more definitely arranged. There were some vague intentions floating in her mind as well as some irresolution, which she scarcely comprehended herself. She wished for the penetrating eye of her maternal friend to aid her in deciphering the confused condition of her mind and soul. Until then she was resolved to remain silent.

Her conversation with Julian dwelt principally on their unexpected meeting with their unhappy cousin.

“After serious reflection,” said Steinberg, “it seems to me impossible to do anything without running the risk of injuring the unfortunate man.”

“It appears he is now leading a respectable life,” said Fleurange.

“Yes; and for that very reason it is important to him that the past should not be made public. As Count George avails himself of his services, he must, I suppose, have had good recommendations.”

Fleurange made no reply. She did not venture to say she had often heard George reproached for his indifference to the position or reputation of many he employed in his collections, or the researches in which he was interested. “What have I to do with their private lives,” he would sometimes say, “in the kind of work I require of them? If they are intelligent and capable, that is sufficient. When I have an inscription to be copied, or a passage in a manuscript to be transcribed, I rather employ a capable rogue than an honest blockhead.”

Without knowing precisely why, this connection between Felix and George inspired Fleurange with involuntary terror, and, much as she wished it, she could not put the latter on his guard without betraying Felix’s real name and position. In short, the fatal remembrances connected with the cousin were now changed into a painful presentiment which added a darker shade to the sadness she sought to conceal.

After a long silence she resumed: “The Marquis Adelardi seemed to know the person who was with Felix the evening we met him?”

“Yes; and to have a poor opinion of him.”

“Did you question him afterwards on the subject?”

“I was desirous of doing so, and in the course of that evening at the princess’ I tried to introduce the subject. But he appeared to answer with repugnance. I was also cautious in my questions, so I was able to obtain very little information.”

Julian stopped, but after a moment’s reflection continued:

“The Marquis Adelardi, from what I learned at Bologna, was once connected with a conspiracy.”

“Conspiracy!”--exclaimed Fleurange with alarm. “The excellent and agreeable marquis? What are you saying, Julian?”

Julian smiled. “Come, Gabrielle, you need not be so frightened. I do not mean to imply he is a criminal, but I think that during one period of his life he was connected with some revolutionary agitation in Italy, and was brought in contact with more than one suspicious character, and Felix’s companion was probably one of them.”

The conversation was not prolonged, and Fleurange remained silent for a time. Julian’s last words added a new fear to all the painful impressions--some definite and others vague--which already weighed on her mind and heart. She pitied Felix, but she was more afraid of him. She now regarded his strange billet as a bold attempt to frighten her or excite her interest--an irresistible temptation to aim at effect, which he yielded to at the risk of being discovered. George’s connection with this bold and restless spirit filled her with greater anxiety than ever. It seemed at last as if so many things at once had never weighed upon her young heart, and that clouds were gathering on all sides around her.

At Passignano she left her travelling companions, and took a small vehicle for the monastery. All the dresses and ornaments the princess had added to her modest wardrobe were left in Barbara’s care during her supposed short absence, and the only luggage she brought with her from Florence was a small valise. This was at once deposited beside the driver, and, as soon as the young girl was seated, the calèche immediately started off.

The road gradually ascended, but this was only perceptible from the increasing beauty of the prospect which became more and more extensive. Afar off lay Lake Thrasimene, gleaming in the sun like a brilliant sheet of silver; nearer, a small stream, whose name, after twenty-two centuries, still recalls the memorable battle that ensanguined its waters, wound through the plain where it was fought.[199] It is stated in history that, during that famous day, neither the Romans nor Hannibal’s soldiers noticed the earthquake which rocked the ground beneath their feet. It might have trembled anew, and our poor Fleurange would perhaps have been equally insensible, so greatly absorbed was she in a struggle of another kind--between her will to do right and the violent inclinations of her heart.

She was now completely alone for the first time for a long period, and seemed to have regained her liberty of thought. Freed from the necessity of struggling against the softening emotions that would have enfeebled her courage, she could now yield without restraint to the pleasure of living over the past six months of her life. She leaned her weary head back, closed her eyes, and allowed her memory to recall all those dear but vain remembrances. She saw him once more whom she never expected to behold again; she listened anew to the voice she would hear no more; she allowed herself to tell him all she had so often repressed. It was a prolonged and dangerous dream, followed by a sorrowful awakening. And it profoundly troubled the peace of her soul, which, with her firmness, she had preserved only by a constant effort during the period of trial her youth had just passed through. “And it is ended!--ended!” she exclaimed, with a cry almost of despair, hiding her face in her hands. “I shall never behold him again!”

Suddenly she heard the mellow sound of a distant bell which revived a whole world of past impressions. She hastily raised her head and looked around. She was passing through a grove of acacias that shaded the winding road. Beyond were some large pines and a few rustic dwellings. Passing by one of them, she heard a voice exclaim, “Evviva la Signorina!”--and further on: “La Madonna vi accompagna!” Shortly after she passed under a half-ruined arcade which looked like a vestige of antiquity. The bell was still ringing, but its sound was more distinct, for they were approaching the chapel.

“What, so soon!” she cried, clasping her hands. “Have we arrived?”

At the end of the avenue the carriage turned to the left, passed by the chapel, and at length stopped before a small gate-way of sculptured stone, surmounted by a statue of our Saviour, at whose feet the following words in relief were distinctly legible: VENITE AD ME OMNES QUI LABORATIS ET ONERATI ESTIS, ET EGO REFICIAM VOS.

Fleurange sprang from the carriage and eagerly rang. The gate opened: a soft expression of surprise and welcome greeted her. She replied with a smile, but did not stop, for at the farther end of the cloister she perceived her whom she sought.

It was noon: the children were just being dismissed from school, and Madre Maddalena stood looking at them as they went out, now and then saying some kind word. Fleurange, suddenly appearing in their midst, threw the little procession into disorder. Mother Maddalena, astonished, looked reprovingly towards the person who had unexpectedly disturbed the order of the time and place. She looked again--again hesitated--then at length her arms opened with an exclamation of joy:

“Fior angela mia!--Dear lamb returned to the fold!”

And the returned wanderer, falling into the arms of her mother, forgot in a moment all the fatigue, the dangers, the sufferings she had endured on the way, and all the thorns that had left their traces on her wounded feet.

XXIX.

The chapel was dim, cool, and filled with the odor of the fresh flowers on the altar and the incense used at the morning service. The nun and the young girl knelt for a few moments to offer up thanks to God as the preliminary obligation of their reunion, and invoke the Friend above all others who is not only the great _I am_, but LOVE itself. Fleurange soon rose up at a sign from the mother, and followed her into a well-known apartment on the ground floor called the garden parlor.

Like all convent parlors, it had no other furniture but a square table in the middle of the room, some straw-bottomed chairs ranged around, a book-case with a large crucifix on the top, and a statue of the holy Madonna on the other side, at the foot of which stood a vase full of flowers. What distinguished this parlor from all others of the kind was the view through the broad arched window on one side, and on the other through the open garden door. The beautiful landscape we have already described, bounded on the distant horizon by the sublime but graceful outline of the mountains, had in the foreground an abundance of flowers more carefully cultivated than is usually the case in convent gardens. At the right, the eye caught a glimpse of the arches of the cloister, and on the left the dense shade of a small grove of orange-trees now in bloom, beyond which was an orchard with vines interlacing the fruit-trees, and a carefully cultivated vegetable garden--the principal resource of the convent larder. Some doves were flying between the cloister and the garden, and during the hours of conventual silence there was no other sound within the peaceful enclosure but the noise of their cooing. But at recreation time the cloister, as well as the garden, resounded with the voices and laughter of the children, and Mother Maddalena’s parlor was not always as quiet as when she ushered Fleurange into it.

The door was scarcely closed when the nun took the young girl’s face between her hands, and attentively examined it, as if she would read the depths of her soul.

Mother Maddalena was about fifty years of age at this time. She had been uncommonly beautiful in her youth, and there was still a regularity and nobleness in her time-worn features which were set off by the white bandeau and guimpe that encircled her face like a frame to a picture. A long black veil fell in deep folds nearly to the ground. Her black eyes were uncommonly large and mild, and had an extraordinary expression sometimes seen in eyes devoid of any other beauty, and is exclusively peculiar to those which reflect that mysterious and ineffable joy which Bossuet calls “_incompatible_,” and says, to be tasted, “il faut qu’elle soit goûté _seule_.” Such was the look, full of divine joy and superhuman peace, now fastened on Fleurange, whose limpid eyes did not avoid the scrutiny, but remained fastened on those of the Madre. Only her pale face flushed and then grew paler than before.

“Poor child! poor child!” said Mother Maddalena at length after a long and silent examination. “Alas! how much she has suffered.--But no evil has tarnished her heart.” With her right hand she made the sign of the cross on Fleurange’s pure brow, and then pressed her lips to the same spot, adding, with a smile of satisfaction: “The Angel Gabriel, to whom I confided her at parting, has restored her to me, like a faithful guardian whose inspirations have been obeyed.”

Whether Fleurange now lost her customary self-control, or did not try to conceal her feelings in Mother Maddalena’s presence, while the latter stood looking at her silently, she burst into tears.

“Yes, I understand,” said the mother--“a great effort was required to overcome the natural tendencies of the heart, to act and to speak without the relief of weeping!--But my poor child succeeded, and is weary from the exertion--” She continued in a softer tone: “But it is the weary and heavy laden that have the promise of finding rest, and it is in this house especially that this rest awaits those who ask it of him who has promised it, and who alone can give it!--Come,” continued she in a firmer tone, after allowing Fleurange to weep some time in silence--“come, my dear Gabrielle, lift up your heart--the heart so susceptible of pain! Try to rise a little above your sufferings--sufferings which enfold the germ of so great a joy!” murmured she to herself, “whereas the joys of the world contain the germ of so much suffering!--Come, my child, come with me.”

The last words were uttered in a tone of mild authority. Fleurange unhesitatingly rose, and followed her across the garden, now exposed to the ardor of the sun’s says, into the small grove where the foliage was so dense that it was cool at mid-day. A flight of steps led to a little oratory in this peaceful solitude, where the pupils assembled towards sunset for prayers; but now it was entirely empty.

Mother Maddalena seated herself on a bench in front of the oratory, and Fleurange took a place near her.

“Now tell me, not only what I already know, but what I am still ignorant of.”

It was hardly necessary to articulate these words, for Fleurange had not come with the intention of concealing a single thought. She therefore began her account, and, at the mother’s request, went back to the very day she left the monastery with her father. She gave an account of her travels in Italy, with all her first impressions: her residence at Paris, and all her sufferings there; her life in Germany, with all its pleasures: then the ruin of her family and their separation; and, finally, of Florence--Florence with all its emotions, its joys, its dangers, its acute pains, and its fearful temptations.

For the first time in her life she uttered Count George’s name without hesitating, and related without any reticence or circumlocution all his name revived--everything! from the wild dreams that preceded their first interview to the reverie of the present day from which the convent bell roused her. She related everything simply, clearly, firmly, and in a tone which, as she proceeded, revealed more and more clearly to the ear attentively listening that her rectitude of soul was not changed or its vigor enfeebled.

Clearness of perception and energy of action were the two germs, as we have already said, that induced Madre Maddalena to believe, if sown in the heart and watered by the dews of divine grace, without which all our perceptions become dim and all strength fails, would enable this child, in spite of her youth, her beauty, and all the tendencies of a tender heart and an ardent temperament, to walk with a firm and sure step in the path of life.

She now saw her hopes realized, and thanked God for it. But she looked, nevertheless, with inexpressible compassion at Fleurange’s youthful face. Life was still so long before her, and from the very beginning the combat had been so arduous! It is true, her courage had thereby been tempered, but the day of rest was yet so far off! so many storms might yet rise, so many perils gather around her! From the safe port that sheltered her own life, she looked off over the sea of the world, on which floated this frail bark, praying in her heart to Him who commandeth the ocean and ruleth the storm to snatch her from the threatening waves and land her safely on the shore.

“I was not deceived,” said she, when the account was ended. “No, my child, you have not mistaken the path of duty, but have courageously followed its leadings. I could not be otherwise than satisfied with you. Fleurange, I give you my blessing, and God will bless you also.”

Saying these simple words, she softly laid her hand on the young girl’s head. This act, and the words accompanying it, increased the sensation of inexpressible comfort and solace, which was the natural effect of the complete unburdening of her mind. A divine peace, as it were, descended upon her, and enveloped her as a garment.

“Oh! madre mia!” she exclaimed, “let me abide here with you--never leave you again, nor this peaceful asylum!”

Mother Maddalena smiled, and was about to reply when the bell gave four strokes.

“We will talk about this another time,” said she. “The bell calls me away now, and I must leave you. We shall see each other again at the evening hour of recreation. I suppose you have not forgotten the way to your room. And you still remember the rule, I hope, and how the day here is divided. The bell rings at the same hours as before. Nothing is changed here.”

XXX.

It would not be easy for those who have never had this sweet experience, to realize the effect of being suddenly transported from the affairs and pleasures of the world, with all its cares and sorrows, to such an atmosphere as now surrounded Fleurange.

But if every one does not feel the need of pausing thus on the way through life, we cannot understand the astonishment and ironical disdain with which some, unwilling to make the trial, speak of these temporary retreats from the world, so customary in former times, and somewhat so in ours. Do they find life, then, always so pleasant and easy to bear? Does joy succeed so surely to joy in the happy succession of their days? and have these days so assured a duration that it would be useless to regulate their course or reflect on their end? Or have these persons such perfect control over their thoughts that no distraction ever disturbs their equilibrium, and the need of pausing for reflection and rest is never felt? We do not know. But what seems indubitable to us is that, for a great number, this rest is as refreshing as pure water and a shady spot of repose to the weary and thirsty traveller. And there is no doubt that our poor heroine belonged to this number. And this is why, in leaving Madre Maddalena, she returned to the chapel instead of going up to her room, and there, in the profound silence of the sanctuary, passed a whole hour in tasting the sweetness of an unburdened heart, and the sense of divine security which does not depend solely on the temporary shelter of the body, but on that deeper feeling of a permanent shelter of the soul which nothing earthly can affect.

If we consider all the sufferings this young girl had so recently passed through--if we remember that the enthralling influences of love had surrounded without tarnishing her, but still not without lending a disenchantment to every other but the object of her love, we shall not find it very surprising that in this spot, at this hour, she should have thought of cutting short her worldly life, and, without going any further in search of happiness, henceforth impossible, or a destiny that must ever remain imperfect, of devoting herself to the highest of all aims--that whose object is God alone, and the welfare of those whom he loved most while on earth--children and the poor.

Even at Florence, during the period of so much anguish, the cloister of Santa Maria appeared like a refuge, and more than once the idea of never leaving it had occurred to her then, as well as while listening to Madre Maddalena. But now the idea became more decided, and took possession of her imagination with an intensity stronger than ever before. She welcomed it, and gave herself up to it with a kind of pious intoxication. She tasted beforehand the bitter pleasure of sacrifice; she accepted with interior transport the perspective of absolute renunciation of all the joys of life; and when at length she brought her long meditation to an end, and prepared to leave the chapel, it seemed to her as if she had just received a supernatural inspiration.

She would have sought an interview with Mother Maddalena at once, but she knew it was a time when she was occupied in the school-room, after which she devoted a whole hour, towards the close of the day, to the poor who from far and near came to consult her about their affairs or relate their sorrows. The morning was given to the distribution of food, medicine, and assistance of all kinds of material wants, and the evening was consecrated to the exercise of charity under another form, the recipients of which were often more numerous than the others.

Fleurange was not unaware of this, and she decided to remain quietly in her room without attempting to see the superior again till after supper. But when, at the close of school, she saw two nuns taking the children to the oratory in the grove of orange-trees, she went down to join in the prayers that ended their day. The vine blossoms in the orchard united their sweet and delicate odor to that of the orange-trees, and, when this little perfumed grove resounded with the hymns of the children, it seemed as if all nature united with them in offering heaven the incense of praise. Prayers over, Fleurange joined the nuns and their pupils, and for awhile it seemed as if the peaceful days of her childhood had returned. Then came the silence of the refectory. But when supper at length was ended, she went in pursuit of Madre Maddalena. She knew she should not find her in her parlor, but on the terrace over the cloister which commanded a view of the country around. It was there she loved to remain in fine weather till the very close of day.

What Fleurange was so eager to say we know already. To think aloud was natural to her, and required no effort with Madre Maddalena especially. Besides, she only wished to resume the conversation interrupted in the morning, and make known all she had thought, and felt, and resolved upon during the time she passed in the chapel.

Mother Maddalena stood with her arms folded, and listened this time without interrupting her. Standing thus motionless in this place, at this evening hour, the noble outlines of her countenance and the long folds of her robe clearly defined against the blue mountains in the distance, and the violet heavens above, she might easily have been taken for one of the visions of that country which have been depicted for us and all generations. The illusion would not have been dispelled by the aspect of her who, seated on the low wall of the terrace, was talking with her eyes raised, and with an expression and attitude perfectly adapted to one of those young saints often represented by the inspired artist before the divine and majestic form of the Mother of God.

“Well, my dear mother, what do you say?” asked Fleurange, after waiting a long time, and seeing the Madre looking at her and gently shaking her head without any other reply.

“Before answering you,” replied she at last, “let me ask this question: Do you think it allowable to consecrate one’s self to God in the religious life without a vocation?”

“Assuredly not.”

“And do you know what a vocation is?” said she very slowly.

Fleurange hesitated. “I thought I knew, but you ask in such a way as to make me feel now I do not.”

“I am going to tell you: a vocation,” said the Madre, as her eyes lit up with an expression Fleurange had never seen before--“a vocation to the religious life is to love God more than we love any creature in the world, however dear; it is to be unable to give anything or any person on earth a love comparable to that; to feel the tendency of all our faculties incline us towards him alone; finally,” pursued she, while her eyes seemed looking beyond the visible heavens on which they were fastened, “it is the full persuasion, even in this life, that he is _all_--our all--in the past, the present, and the future; in this world and in another, for ever, and to the exclusion of everything besides!--”

Fleurange, accustomed to Madre Maddalena’s habitual simplicity of language, looked at her with surprise, and was speechless for a moment, struck by her tone and her unusual expression, no less than the words she had just uttered. A deep blush suffused the young girl’s cheeks and mounted to her forehead.

“My dear mother,” said she at length, casting down her eyes, “doubtless it is not given to all to feel such love for God; especially to love him thus to the utter exclusion of all else here below; but,” she continued with emotion, “is not the voluntary sacrifice of all the affections and joys of the world a holocaust likewise worthy of being offered him?”

Mother Maddalena’s eyes resumed their usual expression of mildness: “Yes, assuredly, my poor child. I did not wish to insinuate a doubt as to that. How could I, in this house, open to all who suffer, and where among our sisters--and not the least holy--are several who have brought hearts crushed by the sorrows of life? But still, that is not the irresistible call of God which we consider a genuine vocation. And what I wish you to understand, my dear Gabrielle, is this: if I know you--and who knows you as well?--you are one of those whom God would have called thus, had it been his will your life should be consecrated to him in the cloister. It is not for one like you to vow yourself to him through discouragement or disgust of the world, or because its happiness has lost its enchantment. The struggle has been severe, I know, but on that account would you have it ended? No. Gabrielle, on the contrary, you must resume your strength to continue the contest.”

Tears came into Fleurange’s eyes, and she bent down her head with an expression of sadness.

“Oh! my poor child,” resumed the mother, “it would be much easier for me to tell you to remain and never leave us again! It would be sweeter for me to preserve you thus from all the sufferings that yet await you. But believe me, the day will come when you will rejoice you were not spared these sufferings; and you will acknowledge that she who is now speaking to you knew you better than you knew yourself.”

The stars were now beginning to appear in the dim azure of the heavens, and the last gleams of daylight were fading away. It was the hour of the Ave Maria. The bell soon announced it, and they said the familiar prayer together before going down to the cloister.

XXXI.

After this conversation, Fleurange resolved not to reconsider the subject, but to renounce for ever the thought she had clung to for a moment with so much ardor. This submission, the effect of her simplicity and decision of character, did not prevent her from feeling it would require a great effort to begin a new life once more. And life would seem new to her, even in the Old Mansion, for she was no longer the same. An abyss separated her from the peaceful, happy days she passed there. But the Old Mansion was now like a dream that had vanished, and it was to an unknown place she was to direct her steps. The friends who would welcome her were certainly dear, and sometimes the thought of seeing them again made her heart beat with joy; but this feeling was frequently overpowered by stronger and more recent remembrances, and, in spite of all her efforts, regret--a continual, poignant regret--made her indifferent to everything except this great sacrifice, which would have been a sublime consolation, but which henceforth she was forbidden to think of.

The days did not pass, however, one by one, without infusing into her soul the benefit of retirement. It seemed to her as if the past and the future were suspended.

Recollections and anticipations ceased to preoccupy her, and, as if in a bark equally remote from these two shores--too far off to hear a sound from either side--she allowed herself to be rocked on the waves as on the ocean in serene weather, giving herself up to the calmness and silence of her present life, with no other feeling but the infinite peace that surrounded her, and seeing nothing above her but the ever smiling heavens! Such days cannot last, but they do not pass away without leaving some trace, were it only a remembrance full, not of regret, but of encouragement. The momentary sense of exquisite sweetness soon evaporates; but its strengthening influences remain, and develop in the soul that has tasted it once--even for an instant in life!

It was necessary, however, to begin to think of her departure, and of some pretext to offer the princess which would not appear like an arrangement. For this she awaited the return of the Steinbergs. Though it would be painful to reveal to them the real motive of her decision, she preferred to do it rather than give them also an imaginary reason.

But a sad, unforeseen event occurred which spared her any concealment or such an act of frankness. She had been at the convent about ten days when she was informed that the travellers had arrived an hour before at a neighboring inn, and her cousin was waiting in the garden parlor to see her. The sight of Clara’s charming face always afforded her pleasure, and it was now increased by the satisfaction of presenting to Madre Maddalena one of the daughters of Ludwig Dornthal, whose opportune appearance in her life was regarded by the mother as a striking proof of the intervention of the glorious archangel whom she had given her as a protector, and Clara Steinberg’s arrival at the convent had been anticipated as a _festa_.

But this festival was destined to be saddened. Fleurange was to learn sad news from the letters awaiting her cousin at Santa Maria. The young girl’s friend--so faithful and ready to aid her--the excellent Dr. Leblanc, was no more! He had sunk under the effects of an accident met with while taking a drive with Professor Dornthal in the environs of Heidelberg.

When Madre Maddalena appeared, she found the two cousins in tears, and her sweet smile of welcome was changed into anxious inquiries. Some moments were necessary for the explanations she asked for, and it was only after her soothing words and the peace that emanated from her presence had somewhat calmed Fleurange’s agitation that she had courage enough to open a letter from Clement containing the details of the cruel accident that had cost her old friend his life--the friend to whom her thoughts had so often turned during her recent perplexities, and who was taken from her in the very hour of her life when his aid and advice seemed most essential.

Clement wrote: “In returning from a drive to Stift-Neuburg, the carriage was upset and broken, and they were thrown violently to the ground. At first my father seemed the more injured of the two. He was entirely unconscious, and did not recover his senses for some hours. We are now, however, relieved from nearly all anxiety concerning him. His friend, whose senses never left him for a moment, declared from the first he had received some grave, internal injury from which he could not recover. Nevertheless, he prescribed all the necessary remedies himself, but at the same time made all his arrangements with admirable firmness: wrote to his sister, sent for a priest, and this at a time when we did not think him in danger. But on the third day his anticipations were verified--his case grew more serious. His poor sister had just arrived the day before yesterday, when he died in her arms.--

“Dear cousin,” Clement continued, “I have one request to make before I close, and this not in my own name, but on the part of my mother: Return, Gabrielle; if possible, return at once; at all events come soon. The sacrifice you imposed on yourself is no longer necessary, and your presence here is indispensable. My poor father is continually asking for you, and cannot be made to understand your absence. No wish to convince you, my dear cousin, would make me think deception excusable. You may believe me, then, when I repeat that the aid you so generously afforded us is now superfluous. You can without any scruple return home--your home, unless, which God forbid! your own choice leads you to prefer another. Poor Mademoiselle Josephine has but one wish--to see you again. She says it is the only consolation she looks forward to. Hilda is now with us; it is unnecessary to say she desires your return, and equally so to tell you _your brothers_ beg and expect it.--”

Fleurange no longer needed a pretext. She would neither be obliged to reveal nor conceal anything--everything was arranged for her by the overruling force of circumstances, and her letter to the Princess Catherine became all at once easy to write. It was despatched that very day, and as soon as the sun began to gild the mountain-tops the next day but one, Madre Maddalena for the second time saw the child she so truly loved cross the threshold of her convent home to encounter once more the dangers of the world.

Would she again return?--return like the dove, beaten by the tempest, who has found no rest for the sole of her foot, to take refuge once more in this asylum of peace? Or was she gone to return no more? and would she now find the world smiling, and its freshness renewed, and her pathway smoothed before her and strewn with flowers? She did not seek to know. Mother Maddalena, as we are aware, did not consider such anticipations very important. She only hoped her feet might be guided by light from on high, and her courage in pursuing life’s journey unfaltering. She asked no more.

Besides, the ardor of the sun has its dangers as well as the storm, and the clearness of the soul’s heaven may be obscured in pleasant as well as in tempestuous weather. Let us, therefore, leave to God the appointment of every incident of our lives, and be solely solicitous of fulfilling our course well, without being anxious as to the way.

“And then--the way is short, however long it may seem, and it leads to that true life where we shall for ever live together, dear Gabrielle--where all your poor heart has vainly wished, sought, and hoped for here below will be given in full measure, pressed down, and running over; where all it has suffered here will bear no comparison with the radiant joys of eternal life! God is faithful. Let us wait. And what is it to wait--to wait thus, with sure faith in his promises for eternal reunion with God?”

Such were the last words of Mother Maddalena. She gave her blessing to Fleurange, who knelt to receive it, closed the convent gate behind her, and ascended to the terrace to follow her as long as she could with her eyes. Then she went down to the chapel, and there on her knees tenderly wept and prayed for her. For there is no affection equal to that of such large hearts expanded and filled with the love of God. And we shall be convinced of this if we recall the excessive devotedness of which they are capable--and they alone--through love for the most unknown of their brethren. Then we shall see what such hearts are to the objects of their affection, that they are kindled with a flame which purifies and tempers all that is noble and worthy of being developed, but prompt to extinguish and consume all that is frail, frivolous, impure, and of no permanent value.

XXXIII.

The Princess Catherine, in an elegant morning négligé, was alone with the Marquis Adelardi in her small salon when a letter was brought her on a silver salver. She glanced at the address.

“Ah! from Gabrielle,” she exclaimed. “The very letter I was expecting to-day.”

She opened it and hastily ran over its contents. “Very well done, very,” she said. “Nothing could be more natural. She hit upon the very best thing to say. It would be impossible for me to refuse without cruelty, as George himself would acknowledge. Here, Adelardi,” continued she, throwing him the letter, “read it. It must be owned that this Gabrielle is reliable and true to her word. Moreover, she has a good deal of wit.”

Adelardi attentively read the letter.

“What you have just remarked, princess, is very true, but this time circumstances have favored you. This letter was not written for the occasion; it is sincere from beginning to end. This young girl can keep a secret, but is incapable of prevarication. This is not the kind of a letter she would have written, if the contents were not absolutely true.”

“Do you think so?” said the princess. “It is of no consequence, however, as to that, though it would simplify everything still more. But in that case--Ah! _ciel!_ let me look at the letter again.”

She now read it entirely through, instead of merely glancing at the contents.

“But in that case I have lost my physician--and the only one who ever understood my case. This, _par exemple!_ is a real misfortune. If he had had time, at least, to answer my last letter, and tell me what springs I should go to this year! Whom shall I consult now? May is nearly gone, and next month I ought to be there. Really, I am unlucky!”

“What do you expect, princess?” said the marquis in a tone imperceptibly ironical. “One cannot always have good luck. On the other hand, you have just had your very wish!”

“I acknowledge it, and, to come back to Gabrielle, I must confess I have no reason to be otherwise than satisfied with her. Yes, we have had a lucky escape, Adelardi. But I can hardly forgive her for the fears she caused me, and the anxiety I still have.--What of George since yesterday? What humor will he be in for the news I have for him?--But what are you brooding over, Adelardi? You make me uneasy with your look of anxiety. I hope you do not think he is in danger of any new folly?”

“What kind of folly?”

“You know very well--the only one to be dreaded at present. Are we to have another of the scenes we have already witnessed?--Will he elude us, and follow her?--Or--how shall I express it?--will he, by way of diversion, do worse, and go from Scylla into Charybdis? One never knows what to expect from him.”

“Well, princess, I acknowledge I wish I were sure this young girl, in sacrificing herself--for you do not imagine, I suppose, that she is indifferent to George’s attractions--”

“It does not seem very probable,” said the princess; “but I hope you do not imagine I take into consideration the effect George would naturally produce when he takes pains to captivate a young girl of twenty, and especially one in Gabrielle’s position.”

Adelardi made no reply, but his face, already grave, grew still darker.

“Once more, Adelardi, what is the matter? One would really think you in love with her yourself.”

“By no means, though I fancy she might, in her turn, easily captivate anybody. Nevertheless, I have used all my efforts to withdraw George from the charm I fully saw the danger of before you. But to return to what I was saying: I wish I felt sure of never regretting the time when this noble girl’s influence seemed so formidable.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, princess, I assure you I wish she were here to-day, that the charm of her presence might retain him every evening in this salon, from which, without speaking to her, or scarcely looking at her, he could not tear himself away when she was present. You see how different it is already, now she is gone; and why? Because these days, that seem so long, and the evenings so dreary and vacant, have revived a passion as dangerous to him as play or love. Pardon me, princess, I know his affection for you and his friendship for me; but we are both aware he cannot endure _ennui_, and should not be astonished that Gabrielle’s absence has left a void in his existence whose effect produces the greatest, the most intolerable _ennui_ in the world. I feel it myself, and, were it not for the absorbing interests that preoccupy you, you yourself would endure with ill grace the sudden disappearance of this ravishing creature, the very sight of whom--”

“Come, come, Adelardi, be calm, or I shall again say--”

“No, princess, I am not in love with her, you may rest assured; but as for George, I doubt this moment if it were not better for him to be, and remain so, whatever might be the result, rather than--”

“Well, do finish; you terrify me to death.”

“Rather than be again seized with this mania for politics--a passion fatal to him, you know, and which may lead to the greatest imprudence.”

The princess became thoughtful.

“Yes, I am indeed aware of it. I know it but too well; but since his return I have found him so much calmer on this subject that it has not worried me.”

“It was because he was taken up with something else; but, owing to an encounter which unfortunately coincided with Gabrielle’s departure, and diverted his attention at the very moment he had absolute need of distraction, he is now so absorbed and led away that I truly regret, instead of her indefinite absence, we cannot announce the immediate return of her who, better than any one else--perhaps the only one in the world--could really save him from this new danger.”

“Thank you, my dear friend. That, _par exemple_, is a regret I can hardly sympathize in.”

“I venture to say, moreover,” said Adelardi, “that, sure of the future as he believes himself to be, thanks to your admirable diplomacy, we shall find him much more resigned to this news than might have been supposed.”

“I really hope so,” replied the princess, smiling, “especially as another fancy has taken possession of his mind, as to which, I must confess, I do not feel very anxious at present. ‘_Un’ alla volta per Carità!_’--We had to rally to the weakest point first; the enemy was at hand, and that enemy--love! Every means had to be used to rout him. Now the subject of politics is threatening to engross him. We will take that in hand later. The only thing that seems to me of real importance at present is to efface as fully as possible the remembrance of this beautiful Fleurange, for, among other discoveries, I find that to be Gabrielle’s real name. To this end I even welcome politics as an ally to be accepted for a time for certain reasons, but to be turned upon as an enemy the moment its services are no longer required.”

At this moment a servant appeared to ask the princess’ wishes respecting a picture just brought. She left the room a moment, and returned laughing.

“Guess what picture it was?” said she.

“Probably some new acquisition; some wonderful discovery you have made in your rounds, like that picture by Cigoli you got thrown into the bargain the other day when you bought the frame it was in.”

“By no means; this is a modern picture representing Cordelia at the feet of her father, and the original--”

“Come, princess, are you in earnest? Has George really given you that picture?”

“Given?” said the princess, her eyes twinkling as she played with her long necklace of pearls. “No; at least that was not his intention. But could he refuse to lend a picture that affords me so much pleasure during the absence of--_Cordelia_? It was the whim of an invalid suddenly deprived of her nurse! which, with some persistence on my part, could not be refused! and after giving, moreover, such a proof of indulgence to him and of condescension towards her!--”

“Ah! princess, what a consummate diplomatist you are!”

“To be serious,” said she, “do you know I had never noticed this resemblance at all, having seen the picture only once, then I did not examine it particularly, and I had never seen Gabrielle? You know George’s cabinet is a sanctuary I rarely invade, and, besides, the picture has had a curtain over it the past year.”

“And what inspired you with the idea of looking at it now?”

“He himself by the delightful tale he related to me the other evening.”

“And where have you hung it now?”

“In my dressing-room, where he never steps his foot,” replied the princess with a peal of laughter.

Marquis Adelardi, as we are aware, had deplored George’s infatuation as much as the princess herself, but he now felt dissatisfied with her and himself, and he soon left her to go in search of his friend. He felt anxious about him, for he knew he was tempted by a dangerous curiosity and was unwilling to lose sight of him. They had made arrangements to meet and dine together at a kind of casino then popular, and he hoped to retain him the remainder of the evening. But arriving at the place of rendezvous he did not find him as he expected. George was gone, but had left a note which drew from Adelardi an energetic exclamation of disappointment. The note ran thus: “Once is not a habit. I have accepted Lasko’s invitation for this evening. Dini will accompany me. But be easy, I am not going under my own name, and shall not be known by any one.”

“Lasko!” muttered the marquis, stamping his foot. “That is his name now! Confound him! why is he not still in the dungeons of Spielberg--the only place fit for him!”

TO BE CONTINUED.

FOOTNOTE:

[199] This stream is called the Sanguinetto.

“But a brook hath ta’en-- --A name of blood from that day’s sanguine rain, And Sanguinetto tells ye where the dead Made the earth wet, and turned the unwilling waters red.”

THE PAPACY.

That such a power should live and breathe, doth seem A thought from which men fain would be relieved, A grandeur not to be endured, a dream Darkening the soul, though it be unbelieved. August conception! far above king, law, Or popular right; how calmly dost thou draw Under thine awful shadow mortal pain, And joy not mortal! Witness of a need Deep laid in man, and therefore pierced in vain, As though thou wert no form that thou shouldst bleed! While such a power there lives in old man’s shape, Such and so dread, should not his mighty will And supernatural presence, Godlike, fill The air we breathe, and leave us no escape? --_Faber_

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES:

A RETROSPECT--CONCLUDED.

The inveterate hostility of the Florida Indians to the whites was further illustrated a few years later, when a vessel bound from Vera Cruz to Spain struck upon their shores, and the survivors, three hundred in number, including five Dominican religious, endeavored to escape through that territory to Mexico. They were so unrelentingly pursued by the natives, and suffered so many hardships on the route besides, that only one reached Tampico alive to tell the story of their fate. Father John Ferrer, however, one of the Dominicans, and a most holy man, who had predicted this fate of himself before he had even set sail from Vera Cruz, was captured by the Indians west of the Rio del Norte. If the remainder of his prediction held equally good, he must have survived among them in good health for several years; but nothing was ever heard of him afterwards. The bearer of these tidings, and the sole representative of the thousand souls who had set forth from Vera Cruz a few months before, was the Dominican lay-brother, Mark de Mena, whose escape, though he had been terribly wounded, and left to die on the road, was truly marvellous.

Such persistent barbarity needed a check, and Don Tristan de Luna was sent in 1559 to subdue the country. The expedition under his command numbered fifteen hundred men in thirteen vessels: missionaries, as usual, accompanied him. Again they were Dominicans, six in number. Again, also, storms and shipwrecks on those difficult shores played their part, and many lives were lost, among them one of the Dominicans. The aggressive character of the expedition was doubtless seriously affected by this early mishap, for but one portion of the survivors settled down at Pensacola Bay, calling their colony the mission of Santa Cruz, while the remainder, attended by two of the fathers, accompanied Don Tristan into “Coosa,” the territory of the Creeks. Don Tristan was kindly received by these Indians, formed an alliance with them, marched with them against their enemies, the Natchez tribe, and remained with them about two years. In this interval, however, the zeal of the two missionaries was rewarded only by the baptism of a few dying infants and adults. Don Tristan returned to Pensacola Bay, where the new governor arrived from Mexico shortly after, with eight more Dominicans. When the governor beheld how little had been accomplished, and heard the discouraging accounts of the missionaries besides, he resolved to abandon Florida, and to take the whole party back with him to Mexico. Don Tristan, however, persisted in remaining, and Father Dominic de Salazar, one of those who had been with him among the Creeks, together with Matthew, a lay-brother, and a few men besides, shared his solitude. But this courageous persistence was not destined to be crowned with any permanent result, for the Viceroy of Mexico despatched a vessel to the little colony with peremptory orders for all its members to return. Thus Florida was again left without the succors of a Christian mission. Father Dominic ended his life of zeal and labor as Bishop of Manila, in the Philippines.

At last, Pedro Melendez de Aviles, the first naval commander of his day, received from Philip II., together with the title of Adelantado of Florida, the command of a fleet of 34 vessels, conveying 2,646 men. Melendez had also a personal interest in this expedition, inasmuch as he hoped to recover a son, who, having been shipwrecked on the Florida coast, might still be alive and in the hands of the Indians, or have been captured by French cruisers, France and Spain being then at enmity with one another. He carried missionaries with him, chiefly Franciscans and Jesuits. The usual storms and shipwrecks intervened, and one vessel was captured by French cruisers, so that only a small force came to anchor off the mouth of the St. John’s River. Here a French fleet was found already riding, and a fort had been erected on shore. Melendez pursued the French vessel to sea, was in turn pursued by them, entered St. Augustine’s River while the French were wrecked outside, attacked their fort, and put all to the sword--a proceeding which the usages of war at that time might have palliated, but could never justify.

St. Augustine, the oldest of our American cities, was now (1565) founded by Melendez, and detachments were sent out to throw up forts along the coast. At his solicitation, St. Francis Borgia, then General of the Society of Jesus, sent three other Jesuits, one of whom, F. Peter Martinez, the superior, was killed by the natives, into whose hands he fell in consequence of having been shipwrecked. Others of the Society were afterwards sent, and the mission was erected into a vice-province, with F. John Baptist Segura as superior. It is impossible, in reading Mr. Shea’s _History of the Missions_, to follow the exact order of events. Suffice it to say--not to linger upon details at this point--that many Indian youths were taken to Havana and instructed by Father John Roger and Brother Villareal, the two companions of Father Martinez; that the vice-provincial and the other Jesuits sent with him were stationed at various points within the thus extensive limits comprehended as Florida; that missions were established among the Creeks and among another tribe superior to them (and supposed to have been the Cherokees), all of which were most meagre in result; that the Pope St. Pius V. addressed a letter (1569) to the governor of Florida, urging the repression of scandals among the whites, so that no obstruction should be offered to the work of conversion among the Indians; and that, finally, the working force of the Society was most seriously reduced, first, by the loss of Father Martinez, already mentioned, next by that of Brother Baez, who died from the effects of the climate, at his station on Amelia Island, and subsequently by the massacre in Virginia (or possibly Maryland) of Fathers Segura and Quiros, with four lay-brothers, at the instigation of a pretended Indian convert who had inveigled them thither. Father Segura’s party on this occasion included also several Indian youths who had been educated in Havana, and of these only one escaped with his life. From him the details of the martyrdom of his companions were gathered. Thus as early as 1570 was the region bordering on the Chesapeake, which was then called St. Mary’s Bay, sanctified by the blood of its martyrs.

The loss of so many valuable members in a field so sterile of fruit forced the Jesuits, in a manner, to abandon it, “to abandon it as they had abandoned no other, without being driven from it,” remarks Shea, and in the following year the survivors were recalled to the more inviting field of Mexico. In 1572, Melendez, who had visited Spain meanwhile, set out thence to make pursuit for the murderers of Father Segura and his companions. He captured eight of them, and these, under the instructions of Father Roger, who accompanied Melendez, embraced Christianity before their execution and died in the best dispositions. The apostate “chief of Axican,” who had promoted the massacre, had escaped to the woods and could not be taken. Melendez, on his return to Spain, was appointed to command the great Armada, which Philip was then preparing for the invasion of England, but he died before its completion. After his death, the northern limits of Spanish colonization in Florida were gradually pushed south to the line of St. Mary’s River.

The missions of Florida were now left entirely to the Franciscans, whose headquarters were at the convent of St. Helena, at St. Augustine, the venerable walls of which are still standing. Besides some who arrived in 1573, twelve Franciscans were sent thither in 1592. The accession of so considerable a number enabled the father guardian of St. Helena’s to station missionaries at various points where, from information received, there was a prospect of some success; and indeed, for the first time in the history of the missions of Florida, villages of Christian neophytes began to be formed. For the Yemassees, Father Francis de Pareja, a native of Mexico, drew up in their language his abridgment of Christian doctrine, the first work in any of our Indian languages that was ever issued from the press. The missions made peaceful progress for two years, when, in 1597, a sudden outbreak of Indian fickleness and perfidy occurred which spread havoc far and wide among them. Father Peter de Corpa, whose mission of Tolemato occupied the present site of the cemetery at St. Augustine, had found himself obliged to administer a public rebuke to the cacique’s son, who, from having been a fervent convert, fell at last into most vicious courses. The latter, filled with resentment, appealed to the national and religious prejudices of his followers, and, assembling a body of them, rushed to the chapel of Father Corpa, and slew him while he was on his knees before the altar.

Thence they repaired to the mission of Father Blas Rodriguez at Topoqui, and, warning him of his fate, bade him prepare for death. He entreated that he might be allowed first to say Mass, and by a strange condescension his murderers quietly awaited the termination of the holy sacrifice, and then despatched him as he knelt to make his thanksgiving. Fathers Badajoz and Aunon at Guale or Amelia Island were the next victims; but the latter, made aware of their approach and of their designs, had time to say Mass and communicate his companion. Then followed the massacre of Father Francis de Velascola, the most distinguished of the missionaries, at Asao. The assailants met with a repulse at St. Peter’s Isle, the seat of another mission, against which they had advanced with a flotilla of forty war-canoes; but before attacking this point they had fallen upon the mission of Father Francis de Avila at Ospa. He fled, was captured, grievously wounded, and was condemned to die. They finally concluded to sell him into a heathen village as a slave, and here for a whole year he was compelled to perform the most menial offices. At the end of this time his task-masters, growing weary of him, resolved to put him to death. He was fastened to a stake, the fagots were piled around him, and he was offered his life on condition that he should renounce his God and marry into their tribe. Spurning the proposal, he looked to receive the martyr’s crown, but on the demand of an old woman he was released, and given to her that she might exchange him against her son who was held a prisoner at St. Augustine. The exchange was effected, and the father was restored, but so changed in appearance from the effects of his hardships that he was not recognized by his friends.

The missions were now reduced to a feeble state indeed, and the governor of Florida applied himself to their restoration, in conjunction with the Bishop of Cuba, who visited the colony for the purpose. They began to revive from the year 1601, and in a few years the increase was very rapid, no less than forty-three Franciscans being sent thither in the three years 1612, 1613, and 1615, who aided in establishing on the coast and in the interior as many as twenty convents or residences. During the hundred years of peace that followed the revival of the missions under the Franciscans, towns of converts grew up along the Appalachicola, Flint, and other rivers; and the Appalaches, Creeks, Cherokees, Atimucas, and Yemassees responded to the cares bestowed upon them. Pensacola was founded in 1693.

At last, however, the encroachments of the colonists of Carolina began to grow serious. Under the auspices of the English government, a body of colonists heterogeneous in character, but of one mind in their hatred of the Spaniards and their religion, had been drawn to the shores claimed by the latter as belonging to Florida. They were composed of immigrants from Old and New England and the Low Countries, of French Huguenots, Scotch, and others. Charleston was founded by them in 1680, and they penetrated the country in various directions. They gained over the Yemassees from the Spanish; and in conjunction with them plundered and destroyed the mission of St. Catharine’s, as early as 1684. All the stations between the Altamaha and Savannah rivers, now a portion of Georgia, were broken up, and the Indians were killed, or captured and carried off by hundreds, the survivors taking refuge in the peninsula.

In 1702, the animosities of the European war of the Spanish succession extended hither, and war aggravated the hostility of the English colonists. In that year they made an attack on St. Augustine, but without capturing its fort, and fell upon the “Indian converts of the Spanish priests,” on Flint River, killing or capturing six hundred of them; and all captives of the English at this time suffered the hard fate of being sold as slaves in Charleston and other ports. The principal mission of the Appalaches at St. Mark’s was destroyed, and three Franciscans taken there were put to a cruel death. This tribe, in fact, was reduced within four years from seven thousand to four hundred. The Atimucas on the Appalachicola were invaded, and driven east of the St. John’s River. In short, ruin and desolation were spread on every side.

In 1730, the Yemassees turned upon their recent allies, the English, and were joined by the Creeks, Cherokees, and other tribes. They were defeated, as the Tuscaroras had been the year before; but while the latter were driven north and united themselves with the Five Nations, the former were compelled to take refuge in the peninsula. The treaty of Utrecht, the same year, at the close of the war of the Spanish succession, while it contracted the limits of the Spanish possessions in Florida, had also its effect in lessening the acts of hostility from which they had suffered. But the missions remained a mere shadow of what they had formerly been, and Spain was too feeble to guarantee the complete protection even of those that subsisted. Finally, the cession of Florida to England by the treaty of Paris in 1763 proved the death-blow of all of them. Most of the Spanish settlers left, and the Franciscans departed with them. England restored the country to Spain twenty years after; but, meanwhile, the Christian Indians had been expelled from the two towns they occupied under the walls of St. Augustine, and deprived of the soil they had cultivated and the church they had erected. They became Seminoles, which in their language signifies “wanderers.” Under Catholic influence, they had become a quiet, orderly, industrious race, living side by side with the Spaniards in peace and comfort. The English drove them back into barbarism and paganism. Even in their everglades they were not left in peace, for the government of the United States, which acquired Florida by purchase in 1821, expelled them from their wretched patrimony, but at a cost to the country of a thousand lives and fifteen millions of dollars. Its troops have, ever since the acquisition of Florida, made use of the ancient convent of St. Helena, at St. Augustine, as barracks. A remnant of the Indians is still left, and measures have been recently taken by the Bishop of St. Augustine, whose see was erected only in 1870, to revive the faith among them.

As in Florida, so in New Mexico, the missionaries were chiefly if not entirely Franciscans. We have already referred to the expedition of Coronado, and to the two missionaries, F. Padillo, and the lay-brother, his companion, who were left behind at their own request, and who became the first martyrs of the missions of New Mexico (1541). Little inducement presented itself for sending new missionaries in the field, but in 1581 the solicitations of a pious lay-brother, Augustin Rodriguez, engaged in the Mexican missions, caused the formation of a party consisting of Fathers Francis Lopez and John de Santa Maria, and himself, attended by ten soldiers and six Mexican Indians. After proceeding seven hundred miles, they found themselves among the tribe of Tehuas, who, unlike the Indians of the plains, lived in houses and dressed in cotton mantles. The soldiers now persisted in returning, but their departure seemed a less serious misfortune since the mission gave promise of success. So much so, indeed, that F. de Santa Maria was despatched to Mexico for auxiliaries, but on the third day out was surprised and killed by roving Indians. In an attack made on the Tehuas by their enemies not long after, F. Lopez fell by the hand of the assailants. Brother Rodriguez, left alone, subsequently fell a victim to his zeal in inveighing against the vices of those for whose conversion he was laboring; growing weary of his reproaches, they put him to death. Two other Franciscans in attendance on a subsequent expedition suffered the fate of martyrs, and thus the foundations of the New Mexican missions were laid in blood.

In 1597, Juan de Oñate led a colony to the Northern Rio Grande. Several Franciscans accompanied him, and the first Spanish post in this region, that of San Gabriel, was established. After a year, the commander sent a favorable report by the hands of two fathers and a lay-brother, who were returning to Mexico to solicit additional missionaries. One of the three, F. Christopher Salazar, died on the way, and was buried in the wilderness. The missionaries asked for were sent, five or six at one time, and six at another. So great was the success subsequently achieved that by the year 1608 eight thousand of the Indians of New Mexico had been baptized, and many of them were taught to read and write, before the Puritans set foot in New England (1620).

A report made to the crown in 1626 enumerates twenty-seven missions that had been established up to that time, six convents or residences, and four sumptuous churches built. Many of of these missions and residences, and three of the churches (those at Santa Fé, Pecos, and Jemez), are recognizable in the account of the diocese furnished in _Sadliers’ Catholic Almanac_ for 1872. One of the missions was among the Zuñi, over against whose town of Cibola Friar Mark had planted his prophetic cross in 1539. The missionary at this post, F. John Letrado, lost his life in endeavoring to evangelize a neighboring tribe. F. Martin de Arbide perished in a like attempt.

Heaven itself seemed to come to the assistance of the missionaries by a miraculous intervention,[200] for a tribe which none of the fathers had previously met or visited was found fully instructed in Christian doctrine.

Some reverses occurred, owing to causes not clearly stated by Mr. Shea. They were probably due to the persistent hostility of the pagan portion of the population. In 1680, great devastations were committed by them, many missionaries were killed, and some churches destroyed which were never after rebuilt; but a period of comparative peace succeeded, which was disturbed finally only by the incursions of the Apaches. A mission was established among the latter in 1733, but without fruit. Nine years afterwards, some converts were made among the Moquis and Navojoes. A report among the United States Executive documents of 1854--and which corresponds with the statements published by Villaseñor, so long ago as 1748--bears testimony to the happy moral and industrial condition of the Christian Indians of New Mexico. The Puebla Indians, as they are now called, number in the diocese of Santa Fé 12,000.

The history of the missions of Texas need not greatly prolong our narrative. Shortly after the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi by La Salle in 1691, who made no permanent settlement in Texas, the Spanish authorities sent thither a number of Franciscans. By them, eight missions were established, which prospered until a failure occurred in the crops which the Indians had been taught to raise. The cattle with which the missions had been stocked died at the same time, and moreover the soldiers, of whom there was a small guard at each post, had rendered themselves obnoxious to the natives. In consequence, the missions fell into decay. Their restoration began in 1717, and by 1746 they embraced posts among five different tribes. Visits were also made to the Osages and Missouris, in one of which expeditions a father lost his life and another was long retained as a prisoner.

The missions subsisted and flourished until 1812, when they were suppressed by the Spanish government. Even then, the Indians, though deprived of spiritual succor, remained faithful to the religious teachings they had received. Father Diaz was sent to them by the Bishop of Monterey, in 1832, and after laboring for a year at Nacogdoches, was killed by wandering Indians. Soon after this the whites began to pour into Texas, and by 1836 grew powerful enough to declare and to maintain the independence of the state. The demoralization and dispersion of the Indians followed, as a natural consequence. Father Timon, afterwards Bishop of Buffalo, was appointed in 1840 Prefect Apostolic of Texas, and, despatching thither Father Odin as Vice-Prefect, followed him shortly after. By an act of justice, of which modern governments rarely afford so striking an example, the old ecclesiastical property was restored to the church by the Texan legislature. Father Odin was made bishop in 1842, and his see became the diocese of Galveston in 1847, two years after the annexation of Texas to the United States. The biography of this eminent prelate (who subsequently became Archbishop of New Orleans), in Clarke’s _Deceased Bishops_, furnishes much interesting matter regarding the history of the church in Texas. The report of the diocese for 1871 supplies no information in regard to the Indian population, if indeed any Christians are still to be found among them within the limits of the state. Many relics remain of the churches, aqueducts, and other public works erected by the Franciscans and their neophytes during the prosperous period of the missions.

The first expedition to any portion of California, which was accompanied by missionaries, was that under Vizcaino, in 1596, to the peninsula, but no permanent footing was made at the time. In 1601, three Carmelite fathers visited that portion now included in the United States, and made a temporary stay, and no more, at what are now Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. The Jesuits began their missions south of the Gila in 1642, and gradually extended them north, until, in 1697, they had entered the limits of our present territory. The success characteristic of their missions everywhere--for their failure in Florida was something abnormal--followed them here. All was proceeding well, when that extensive conspiracy arose in Europe against the Society which the history of the age subsequently shows to have been directed quite as much against the church as against the Jesuits. The King of Spain, having been drawn into the plot as other sovereigns were, ordered the Jesuits to be torn in a single day from all their missions throughout his wide domains. On the 3d of February, 1768, every Jesuit was carried off from California a prisoner. Accused of no crime, condemned without a trial, the missionaries were dragged from amid their neophytes, who in grief and consternation deplored their loss.

Spain was, however, not yet prepared to cut loose entirely from her religious traditions, and she sent Franciscans to take the place of the banished Jesuits. The vessel that landed the latter at San Blas returned to California with twelve Franciscans, at the head of whom was Father Junipero Serra, an experienced Indian missionary. After placing priests at the vacated missions, Father Serra went on to found others, San Ferdinand, San Bonaventura, and San Diego being established in 1769, that at Monterey in 1770--at the news of which foundations all the bells in the city of Mexico were rung--San Gabriel the same year, St. Anthony of Padua in 1771, San Luis Obispo in 1772, San Juan Capistrano in 1774, San Francisco in 1776, Santa Clara in 1777. In this interval many more of the sons of St. Francis came to join in the labors of their brethren, or to replace those who were worn out with toil. At Monterey, in 1771, when the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with a pomp such as the wilderness had never before seen, twelve priests joined in the sacred procession. The Dominicans, moreover, applied for a share in the work of the missions, and in 1774 were assigned to all those stations formerly served by the Jesuits, the Franciscans retaining only those that had been founded by themselves, except San Ferdinand, which was also given to the Dominicans. As the missions thus transferred were chiefly in Old California (the peninsula), their history does not enter within the scope of this narrative.

In 1775, the mission at San Diego was attacked by a large force of pagan Indians, led on by two apostates of their own race. Father Louis Jayme, one of the two priests stationed here, was awakened by the flames, and, supposing the fire to be accidental, came to the door with his usual salutation, “Love God, my children.” He was immediately seized, dragged off, pierced with arrows, and hacked to death by blows with swords made of hardened wood. The other father happily escaped. When Father Serra heard what had occurred, he exclaimed, “Thank God, that field is watered,” rebuilt the mission, after some opposition from the civil authorities, and went on with his labors in founding others. Father Crespi, the principal assistant of Father Serra, died in 1782, after a missionary career of thirty years, of which fourteen had been spent in California. Father Serra himself expired two years after. Although seventy-one years of age at the time of his death, his zeal was undiminished and his faculties were unimpaired. Under his administration, as Prefect Apostolic of California, ten new missions had been established, and ten thousand Indians baptized. Yet death found him busy with plans of still other foundations.

By a Papal Bull of June 16th, 1774, the power of administering confirmation was granted to the prefect apostolic. This privilege was of course shared by Father Serra’s successors in the same office. The first of these was Father Palou, under whom the following new missions were founded: Santa Barbara in 1786, La Purisima Concepcion, near San Luis Obispo, in 1787, Santa Cruz near Branciforte, and Nuestra Señora de Soledad, near Monterey, in 1791. Father Palou then returned to Mexico, where he became superior of the convent of San Fernando. He was succeeded as prefect by Father Lazven, who remained in office until his death in 1803. In the interval, Father Lazven founded three great missions, San José, San Miguel, and San Fernando, all in the year 1797. San Luis, Rey de Francia, was founded in the following year. St. Louis of France was thus honored in this remote wilderness at a time when the nation over which he had ruled rejected alike his faith, his institutions, and his family. The celebrated Father Peyri, whose portrait is given in Mr. Shea’s _History of the Missions_, superintended the foundation of this greatest of the Californian reductions. In front of the church, which is ninety feet in length, of stone, and rises at one end in a beautiful tower and dome (says Mr. Shea), “extends a colonnade not without architectural beauty, and nearly five hundred feet long, while in depth it is almost of equal proportions.” Three thousand five hundred Indian converts were soon gathered together, occupying twenty ranches around this abode of peace and plenty.

Father Mariano Payeras succeeded Father Lazven as prefect, and founded the mission of Santa Inez in 1804. At this time Spain became unable, amid the distractions which arose from the French Revolution--for which she herself had assisted in preparing the way by the share she took in the persecution of the Jesuits--to extend the aid which new foundations required, and, therefore, none were made. The missions already in existence were not affected to any great extent by the difficulties of the mother country, for they were self-supporting. In 1817, however, it became possible to found the mission of San Rafael, and this proved to be the last foundation under Spanish auspices. Others were projected, but the power of Spain in the western world was already tottering to its fall. In 1821, Iturbide’s short-lived empire replaced the authority of the Spanish crown in Mexico, and two years after, Santa Anna’s successful revolt changed the empire into a republic. Father Sanchez was now prefect, and in 1823 established the mission of San Francisco Solano, the first and last erected under Mexican rule.

Echandia, the governor sent out by the Mexican authorities, arrived in California in 1824. Then began the robbery and destruction of the missions, the first step in which was the substitution of government agents in the temporal rule of the missions for that of the fathers, who had always exercised this authority to the great advantage of the Indians, and without drawing thence any profit for themselves, since they were both by habit of life and by religious vow poor men. Father Peyri was driven from his mission of San Luis Rey which he had founded more than thirty years before, and had directed ever since with admirable skill; nor could the tears and entreaties of his neophytes move the stony-hearted governor to retain him. At this populous mission, many of the Indians had been taught the trades, and were blacksmiths, carpenters, and mechanics in various departments; they also owned sixty thousand head of cattle, and raised thirteen thousand bushels of grain yearly. At San Luis Obispo, Father Martinez had in like manner formed his flock to industry; they wove and dyed ordinary cloth and fine cotton fabrics, and could have always maintained a state of prosperity and happiness had their possessions and their beloved director been left to them, but the former were wrecked, and the latter was brutally expelled.

Five other fathers were driven from their missions, and a regular system of robbery commenced: ranch after ranch was taken, cattle were swept off, and the minds of the Indians were endeavored to be poisoned against the missionaries by Echandia, through wilful representations, so that in one case they attempted to take the life of a priest. Other missionaries, after having spent thirty or forty years in civilizing the Indians, and raising them to a state of comfort and plenty, found themselves obliged, by the ill-treatment they suffered, to leave the country. The prefect, Father Sanchez, was the special object of this persecution on the part of Echandia, and died of grief in 1831, consoled only by the momentary peace which reigned at the time under Echandia’s successor, Don Manuel Victoria, who during the few months he was in office restored the missions so far as he was able; but after his removal the pillage progressed as before.

Father Francisco Garcia Diego was appointed prefect in 1832, and arrived in California in January of the following year, taking up his residence at Santa Clara. The number of missionaries was now so reduced that Father Garcia found it necessary to take with him ten fathers to recruit their ranks. The new prefect did what he could to ward off the ruin which threatened the missions, but they were doomed, and the decree of secularization passed by the Mexican Congress in 1834 and enforced in 1837 only completed their destruction. Thus, this wretched republic, which is and always has been unable amidst the contentions of its rival chiefs, with their ever recurring _pronunciamentos_, to preserve domestic peace, and which has suffered the great public works erected in Mexico by the crown to fall into decay, carried spiritual and temporal ruin to the fair regions which had been consecrated to religion and peace, to industry and innocence, and overthrew the noblest monuments which the zeal and the faith of Spain had bequeathed to her colonies.

Father Garcia’s heart was wrung with anguish at the spectacle of desolation which surrounded him, and to which, with all his efforts, he was able to interpose only a feeble barrier. He repaired to Mexico to intercede with the government in behalf of his oppressed and helpless people. Through his influence the law of secularization was repealed, and an act passed restoring the property of the missions. But the reparation came too late; the plunderers were in full possession of their ill-gotten property, and no power could wrest it from them. Meanwhile, a severe illness at the capital, and the affairs of his order in Zacatecas, retained him in Mexico, where, in 1840, he received notice of his appointment to the bishopric of the Californias. He was consecrated in the same year, but was unable to take possession of his diocese until December, 1841.

On arriving at San Diego, he found the mission and the church in ruins. At San Gabriel, where extensive vineyards had been in full bearing, and to protect which the father was in negotiation with an American house for iron fences, even the vines were pulled up. This mission had loaded ships with its products, which were despatched regularly to San Blas and Lima. Amid its ruins, a traveller (Duflot de Mofras) describes in 1842 seeing the missionary Father Estenega seated in a field before a large table, with his sleeves rolled up kneading clay and teaching his Indians to make bricks. San Luis Obispo was in the same condition, and Father Abella, the oldest missionary in the country, whom La Perouse had seen here in 1787, still survived in 1842. His only bed was a hide, his only food dried beef, and he divided among his poor and plundered Indians the alms he received. At San José, Father Gonzalez, prefect of the northern missions, subsisted on the scanty rations furnished him by the officials. La Soledad, from having been an earthly paradise, was now a wilderness of ruin and desolation. Its missionary, Father Serra, of whom an American says “it was a happiness indeed to have known him,” had died of hunger and wretchedness in 1838 on the spot where thousands had enjoyed his hospitality. He expired in the arms of the Indians whom he had spent thirty years in instructing and protecting, falling at the foot of the altar just as he had begun Mass. At San Francisco Solano, everything had been destroyed, and the materials of the mission-house and chapel sacrilegiously used in building the palace of Don Mariano Vallejo. Santa Barbara still possessed its missions, the residence of the devoted prefect of the southern missions, Father Narcisso Duran, and at San Fernando, Santa Clara, and Santa Inez (where Bishop Garcia afterwards erected a seminary) the missionaries had succeeded in saving much. Everywhere else, ruin and desolation had overtaken the missions.

The Indian population of the missions was reduced from 30,650 to 4,450, their cattle dwindled from 424,000 to 28,000, and their other stock in proportion, for they had owned 62,500 horses and 321,500 sheep besides. They had raised annually 122,500 bushels of wheat and corn.

Their agriculture was now destroyed, and they themselves were mostly scattered and demoralized. “Bishop Garcia Diego y Moreno,” says Mr. Clarke in his _Lives of Deceased Bishops_, “stood in the midst of desolation, and but for his apostolic zeal and robust courage would have despaired.” He saved what he could of the missions, and rescued many souls from crime and barbarism; he made long, difficult journeys throughout his devastated diocese, and addressed the most moving appeals to the Mexican government. At last, after wearing himself out with labors that were far from fruitless, and which certainly stayed for a time the progress of disintegration, he retired to Santa Barbara to die, and there peacefully gave up his soul to God, April 13, 1846.

Thirteen missionaries still survived amidst the relics of the great works of charity and beneficence they had created or sustained, when in 1848 the soil of Upper California changed owners, and became attached to the domains of the United States. A new population overran the land, and the Indians of the missions have entirely disappeared. What is worse, they have been driven by the hostility of the Americans to the mountains, and provoked into acts of reprisal, the result of which will be that at no distant day the career of plunder and outrage of which they have been the victims, will be crowned by their total extermination.

We shall give in a note an account collated from Mr. Shea’s _History of the Catholic Missions in the United States_, of the manner of living followed in the mission establishments of California, by the Indians, under the direction of the fathers.

In the history of the missions of Maryland we are presented with a remarkable example of the influence of pure bigotry in arresting the most beneficent ministrations of religion towards both the white and Indian races. Under the mild and paternal administration of Lord Baltimore, the settlement, made so auspiciously on the feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1634, soon attached to it the native tribes; for they were fairly dealt with, and were paid for whatever lands were required of them. Father Andrew White, an English Jesuit, and a confessor of the faith--for he had suffered exile abroad and imprisonment at home on account of it--was the spiritual director of the mission. Although fifty-five years of age, he had no sooner landed than he applied himself to the study of the Indian tongue. He and his companions then established themselves at the more advanced posts, prepared catechisms, etc., in the Indian language, and made good progress in the conversion of the natives, the principal chief and his family being the first to demand baptism.

In 1644, Claiborne, the persecuting agent of the persecuting colony of Virginia, swooped down upon the peaceful settlements of Maryland, and among other outrages carried off the Jesuits as prisoners to England. Father White was never able to return, but Father Fisher and others did after three years, and resumed the work of the missions. The rise of the Puritan party in 1652 after the usurpation of Cromwell, and the subsequent accession to power of the Anglicans, who in 1692 made their religion the state church, effectually extinguished the Indian missions. What became of the poor Indians, we know not; but, judging from what this class of religionists have done elsewhere, their fate must have been first to be robbed, then demoralized, and finally to be exiled or exterminated.

Thenceforward, not only were the Catholics who had planted the colony and who had invited thither the persecuted of other colonies to share with themselves in all the privileges of government and of perfect freedom of religion--not only were the Catholics deprived of all share in the administration of public affairs, but their religion was proscribed and their priests were hunted down. Grasping and domineering as the Puritans have shown themselves to be everywhere, never did they or their Anglican abettors display a blacker ingratitude than in their transactions on the soil of Maryland, where those who bestowed upon them an exceptional religious liberty were excluded from all share in its benefits.

The faith, though persecuted, was kept alive among the whites by the Maryland Jesuits, who continued to adhere to their flocks. Nor did the suppression of their Society in 1773 dissolve this bond, for by an association among themselves they retained their missions; and as their property was not confiscated here as was everywhere done in Europe, they retained that also. In 1805, Bishop Carroll, himself an ex-Jesuit, obtained from the superior in Russia, where the Society still subsisted, the privilege of affiliation with it for the late members of the order in Maryland. The bishop then confirmed them in the possession of their missions, and thus the Society resumed its footing in Maryland nine years before it had been restored all over the world by Pius VII. Among the young men who joined it in 1806 was the now venerable Father McElroy, who, in his ninetieth year, retains the zeal and energy of younger days. The Jesuit province of Missouri was, as before stated, an offshoot from that of Maryland, and some fathers of the western province are still living who made their novitiate in Maryland. Bishop Vandevelde, of Chicago, and subsequently of Natchez, where he died in 1855, was one of these. The present Vicar Apostolic of Kansas, a Jesuit from Missouri, perpetuates amidst his Indians the traditions of the mother province.

The old Catholic families of Maryland, sustained and encouraged by their pastors, and preserving the faith amidst obloquy and disfranchisement, have contributed their full share to the distinguished laity of their country, to the ranks of the religious of various orders, male and female, the secular clergy, and the episcopate. Their honorable record is too full to admit of a reference to individuals, were this even the place for it; but we might recall, among prelates, the names of Archbishops Carroll and Neale of Baltimore, and Bishops Fenwick of Boston, Fenwick of Cincinnati, and Miles of Nashville. Archbishop Eccleston of Baltimore, although a Marylander by birth, was of Protestant family, and was himself a convert. Bishop Chanche of Natchez was also a Marylander, but the child of refugees from San Domingo. The sees of Wheeling, Natchez, Chicago, and North Carolina are filled by sons of Maryland, the descendants of a later immigration. Even in colonizing other states, the faithful children of Maryland formed a nucleus of Catholicity, as in Kentucky, wherever they went. By a happy dispensation, this colony, grown into a diocese, and governed by a scion of one of these old families, the late eminent and beloved Spalding--gave him back to the archiepiscopal chair of his ancestral state.

In later, as in former times, Maryland has been the “land of the sanctuary” for the oppressed of other lands, and the trials and triumphs in which her own children have borne part have been shared by the strangers who have taken refuge within her borders. When, in 1770, a solitary Jesuit from Whitemarsh in Lower Maryland visited Baltimore, then an insignificant settlement, and so poorly provided as to Catholic worship that the priest brought his own altar-furniture, and had to say Mass in a private house, a large part of the flock in attendance was composed of Acadians who had been cruelly transported from their homes by the British government. Still later, the French Revolution threw upon her shores those devoted clergymen whose virtues and whose labors have shed so much honor on the church of their adopted country. The institutions of religion and of learning which they founded in Maryland have educated for civil life or for the church men who have attained the highest eminence in one or the other. The founders of or the preceptors in these institutions have filled sees in various portions of the country--Dubois at New York, David at Bardstown, Flaget at Louisville, Dubourg at New Orleans, Maréchal at Baltimore, and Bruté at Vincennes, all now deceased, besides the present Bishop of St. Augustine, among living prelates. St. Mary’s Seminary at Baltimore has seen advanced to the mitre, from among her Levites, Bishops Reynolds of Charleston, O’Reilly of Hartford, and Portier of Mobile; while Mount St. Mary’s, the “mother of bishops,” has given to the American hierarchy from among hers, Archbishop Hughes of New York, Bishops Quarter of Chicago, Gartland of Savannah, Carrell of Covington, Young of Erie, and the living archbishops of New York and Cincinnati--probably others.

The subsequent revolution in San Domingo drove hither also whites who escaped with little more than life, and blacks whose fidelity to their masters and to their religion withstood the shock of those terrible times. Among the former were the parents of Bishop Chanche; also, young Joubert, who, after becoming a priest, devoted himself to the blacks, that he might overcome his horror for the race that had massacred his parents; in furtherance of this lofty act of self-renunciation, he formed a community of religious women of color, whose first members were creoles of San Domingo. The Oblate Sisters of Providence still flourish, and impart the blessings of secular and religious education to the young of their sex and color. Finally--for we must hasten to a close--it is a noticeable fact that New England, which sent forth its Puritan colonists to harass the Marylanders and persecute the Jesuits, is now a portion of the Jesuit province of Maryland.

The great length to which this paper has expanded will preclude the possibility of giving any space to the history of the missions of France in Louisiana, and those extending from Canada into what is now New York and into the regions west of that state. This omission will be the more pardonable inasmuch as the history of the French missions is better known to Catholic readers than much of our other remote ecclesiastical history. There is one page, however, in these annals, touching the Christian settlements on our northeastern border, that we cannot pass over without notice. The town in the British Provinces now known as Annapolis was the point where Catholicity made its first foothold in any portion of the region north of us, at least the first since the time of the Northmen. Here, in 1608, two Jesuit missionaries arrived, who in 1613 were to be the pioneers of the Abnaki mission in Maine. The Recollects, a branch of the Franciscans, began their labors in Quebec in 1615. Other religious men, and some communities of pious women, came to their assistance. Notwithstanding wars between the various tribes, in the course of which the once powerful Hurons were almost annihilated, the missionaries had gathered together, by 1685, a number of Christian villages of Indians on the St. Lawrence, of which three still exist. Thence, missionaries were sent to the shores of Lake Superior, to the tribes south of the lakes, to Arkansas, and to the lower Mississippi. The heroic lives, the sufferings, and the death of Jogues, Brébeuf, and Lalemant, and so many other holy men who consecrated their lives to these missions, are almost familiar themes.

Of the Abnaki mission referred to above, and which was established on Mount Desert Island at the mouth of the Penobscot, nothing remained after a few years except a solitary cross guarding the grave of a French lay-brother, who died from wounds received in an attack made on the mission by the English from Virginia. The fathers were carried off by them on this occasion, and narrowly escaped being put to death by the authorities of Virginia. Thus, as Mr. Shea remarks, the first Abnaki mission was crushed in its very cradle by men who founded a colony in which the Gospel was never announced to the aborigines.

In 1642, an Abnaki who had been rescued from death by a Christian Indian, in one of the forays made by the pagan Iroquois on their neighbors, extolled the virtues of the Christians so highly on his return home that his people sent for black-gowns. Father Druillettes was sent to them in 1646, and the wonderful change effected by him in the few months of his stay excited even the admiration of the English, whose countrymen in Massachusetts were at this time enacting cruel laws against the religion and the order to which F. Druillettes belonged. In 1650, he returned to the Abnakis, and was received by them at Norridgewock, their principal village, amidst volleys of firearms, and with every demonstration of delight. A banquet was spread in every cabin, and he was forced to visit all.

“We have thee at last,” they cried; “thou art our father, our patriarch, our countryman. Thou livest like us, thou dwellest with us, thou art an Abnaki like us. Thou bringest back joy to all the country. We had thought of leaving this land to seek thee, for many have died in thy absence. We were losing all hopes of reaching heaven. Those whom thou didst instruct performed all that they had learned, but their heart was weary, for it sought and could not find thee.”

At the same time that Druillettes was planting the faith among the Abnakis--who have preserved to this day the precious legacy bequeathed to them--Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, certainly a well-meaning man and a credit to the times and to the people among whom he lived, was endeavoring to christianize the Indians of Massachusetts--an attempt which the cruelty and rapacity of his countrymen would have rendered abortive, even if his barren theology had been able to affect anything in their behalf. So Drake, the Indian historian, admits that even among Eliot’s nominal disciples there was not the least probability that one-fourth of them were sincere believers in Christianity. Eliot himself said, before his death, “There is a dark cloud upon the work of the Gospel among the poor Indians.” In King Philip’s war even the Indian ministers threw off all disguise and took up arms against their white Christian neighbors. This last struggle against their destroyers resulted in a total ruin of the Indians. The Puritan, imagining himself the chosen of God, and regarding the Indians as Amalekites and Canaanites whom he was to exterminate out of the promised land, fell upon them with fire and sword.

Even the innocent son of King Philip, the last of the family of Massasoit, was sold into slavery to Bermuda by the men whose children have since lifted the finger of scorn at the population of the South, among whom England forced the institution that lately perished amid the throes of civil war--forced it by the aid, in part, of the vessels and the means of the pious fathers of New England. Father Druillettes, strange to say, visited Eliot, by whom he was hospitably received and entertained, and who invited him to pass the winter under his roof. But this visit to New England was probably one of business, and the father was soon with his beloved Indians again.

Father Rale was among the successors of Druillettes. An expedition of New Englanders destroyed his church and village in 1705, but the cession of the territory to England by France in 1713 restored temporary peace to the Abnaki mission. A deputation of their chiefs therefore visited Boston, and called upon the governor to solicit means for the rebuilding of their church. As Protestantism is always ready to interfere with religious enterprises which it could never itself have succeeded in, this exponent of the religion of New England offered to rebuild their church at his own expense if they would dismiss their missionary and take a minister of his own choice. The reply of the indignant spokesman of the Indians is worth quoting:

“When you first came here,” said he, “you saw me long before the French governors, but neither your predecessors nor your ministers ever spoke to me of prayer or the Great Spirit. They saw my furs, my beaver and moose skins, and of this alone they thought; these alone they sought, and so eagerly that I have been unable to supply them with enough. When I had much, they were my friends, and only then. One day my canoe missed the route; I lost my path, and wandered a long way at random, until at last I landed near Quebec, in a great village of the Algonquins, where the black-gowns were teaching. Scarcely had I arrived, when one of them came to see me. I was loaded with furs, but the black-gown of France disdained to look at them; he spoke to me of the Great Spirit, of heaven, of hell, of the prayer which is the only way to reach heaven. I heard him with pleasure, and was so delighted by his words that I remained in the village near him. At last the prayer pleased me, and I asked to be instructed: I solicited baptism, and received it. Then I returned to the lodges of my tribe, and related all that had happened. All envied my happiness, and wished to partake it; they too went to the black-gown to be baptized. Thus have the French acted. Had you spoken to me of the prayer as soon as we met, I should now be so unhappy as to pray like you, for I could not have told whether your prayer was good or bad. Now I hold to the prayer of the French; I agree to it; I shall be faithful to it, even until the earth is burned and destroyed. Keep your men, your gold, and your minister: I will go to my French father.”

In the unsettled condition of the boundaries, the New Englanders continued to make incursions upon the territory of the Abnakis. In one of these expeditions, Father Rale barely escaped capture, but his celebrated Abnaki dictionary was pounced upon and carried off, and now forms one of the treasures of the library of Harvard University. In 1724, he fell a victim to the persistence of his enemies. Notwithstanding these cruelties, the Abnakis, in the war of the Revolution, took part in the defence of the soil against England with the people who had desolated their home and put to death their beloved pastor. Orono, the Penobscot chief, bore a commission throughout the Revolution, and distinguished himself during the war as much by his bravery as by his attachment to his religion, never consenting to frequent Protestant places of worship.

These sketches, grown so much more lengthy than we had expected, and yet restrained with difficulty within their present bounds, must now close. May they be read with the attention the _subject_ deserves, and thus serve to awaken the honest pride of our fellow-Catholics in the past history of their church on the soil of the United States. May our men of culture, stimulated by the appeal that shall be made to them by the reading classes, spread far and wide the affecting story of the church’s triumphs and reverses in our land, with all the glorious details of the lives and deaths of its heroes and martyrs! May this history grow to be a familiar one to the generation that is rising and the generations that shall succeed it. We love our country, and none dare question our love but they who would have the statute-books bristle with laws against us such as the genius of our institutions forbids and the fathers of the Republic rejected. Let us show our love for it by mingling the memories of all that is dear to us in the career of our religion with all that is noble and inspiring in the civil history of our land, our fair heritage of political and religious freedom.

NOTE.

THE MISSION ESTABLISHMENTS OF CALIFORNIA.--The plan of the early missionaries in Florida and New Mexico had been to form the converts into villages near the Spanish settlements, in which they were trained to the usages of civilized life. In the numerous Christian villages thus spread over the country, all civil functions were exercised by the chiefs, the missionaries confining themselves to those of a spiritual nature only. The progress of the Indians under this system was slower than was desirable, and experience led to an improvement in the manner of conducting the missions that were subsequently established in New Mexico and California. In the latter, the missionary went in the first place attended by a small guard, with a colony of Indian converts, herds of cattle, and a plentiful supply of agricultural and other implements. Chiefly through the converted Indians, the surrounding natives were drawn to the mission. The next step was to proceed to the erection of the mission building, a rectangular structure eighty or ninety yards square, with a court-yard in the centre, which was adorned with trees and fountains. The church and the pastor’s residence occupied one side, and galleries surrounded the court, opening upon the rooms of the missionaries, stewards, and travellers, the shops, schools, store-rooms, infirmaries, and the granary.

A part of the buildings entirely separated from the rest, and called the monastery, was reserved for the Indian girls, where they were taught by native women to spin and weave, and received such other instruction as was suited to their sex. The boys learned trades, and those who excelled were promoted to the rank of chiefs, thus giving a dignity to labor which impelled all to embrace it. Once in the mission, the native was instructed in Christianity, and constrained to labor. Many of the missionaries being skilled in mechanical art, the Indians were formed to every trade, and the surplus products of their industry were exported yearly in exchange for necessary European goods. The Indians were apportioned into sections, each under a chief who led his party to church or to labor, and who was not backward in enforcing promptness. Against this the Indian at first rebelled: but, as all his wants were satisfied, he soon became attached to his manner of life, and would draw others of his countrymen in, whom he easily persuaded to submit to the routine.

Many learned Spanish thoroughly, and all acquired a knowledge of the Christian religion, which they faithfully practised. Thus they gained two great benefits--peace and comfort in this life, and means of attaining happiness in the next. Those who visited the missions were amazed to see that with such petty resources--most frequently without the aid of white mechanics--the missionaries accomplished so much, not only in agriculture, but in architecture and mechanics; in mills, machines, bridges, roads, and canals for irrigation; and accomplished it all by transforming hostile and indolent savages into laborious carpenters, masons, coopers, saddlers, shoemakers, weavers, stone-cutters, brickmakers, and lime-burners. Around the mission building arose the houses of the Indians and of a few white settlers; at various distances were ranches or hamlets, each with its chapel. In a little building near the mission-house was a picket of five horsemen, who were at once soldiers and couriers.

The regulations of the mission were uniform. At daybreak, the _Angelus_ summoned all to the church for prayers and Mass, after which they went to breakfast. Then all joined their respective bands, and proceeded to their regular labors. At eleven, they returned to dine, and rested till two, when labor recommenced, and continued until the ringing of the _Angelus_ bell, an hour before sunset. After prayers and beads, they supped, and spent the evening in innocent amusements. Their food was the fresh beef and mutton plentifully supplied by their herds and flocks, cakes of wheat and Indian corn, peas, beans, and such vegetables as they chose to raise. The missionaries themselves, bound by vows of poverty, received only food and clothing. The Indians of a mission were not all of the same tribe, but perfect harmony prevailed, and when the season of work was over, many paid visits to their countrymen, and seldom returned alone. Sometimes a zealous Christian would visit his own tribe as an apostle, to announce the happiness which was attainable under the mild rule of the Gospel. In this way the missions constantly received new accessions, for the good missionaries had the art of making labor attractive. All the men and women in the mission were, moreover, well and completely dressed.

It will be seen that this discipline was strict, and the Spanish government, at the time of the forcible withdrawal of the Jesuits, wished to bring odium upon them in connection with this system of administration of their origination. The Franciscans, however, who succeeded the Jesuits, continued the method of their predecessors, convinced of its expediency. An attempt on the part of the government to alter it, in the establishment of a mission near the mouth of the Colorado, on its own principles, a few years after the expulsion of the Jesuits, only resulted in cruel outrages upon the Indians by those who were placed in the temporal administration in lieu of the Franciscans. These outrages provoked rebellion, and led to the massacre of the civil functionaries, and of the religious as well. The government did not repeat the experiment.

Forbes, the author of a work on California, after commending the labors of the California Jesuits, says of their successors, “The best and most unequivocal proof of the good conduct of the Franciscan fathers is to be found in the unbounded affection and devotion invariably shown towards them by their Indian subjects. They venerate them not merely as friends and fathers, but with a degree of devotedness approaching to adoration.” He adds, “Experience has shown how infinitely more successful the Catholic missionaries have been than the Protestant.” These and many other testimonies from unprejudiced sources might be given to show the state of happiness in which the Indians formerly lived. An American traveller, Bartlett, who in 1854 visited the mission of San Gabriel, to which at one time five thousand Indians were attached, says, “Humanity cannot refrain from wishing that the dilapidated mission of San Gabriel should be renovated and its broken walls be rebuilt, its roofless houses be covered, and its deserted halls be again filled with its ancient industrious, happy, and contented population.”

Two classes of persons, therefore--as Marshal remarks in his _History of Catholic Missions_--“have been instrumental in the irreparable injury inflicted on the Indian tribes: Mexicans who had forfeited their birthright as Catholics, and Protestants who had never possessed it. Affecting to follow the precedents of modern European policy, of which the chief maxim seems to be the exclusion of all ecclesiastical influence in the government of human society, the Mexican civil authorities resolved to secularize all the missions. The result has been as in every land where the same experiment has been tried, a swift relapse into barbarism, from which the church alone has saved the world, the immediate decay of material prosperity, and a vast augmentation of human suffering.

“History might have taught the Mexicans to anticipate these inevitable fruits. When England laid her hand on the possessions of the church, which had been for centuries the patrimony of the poor, she took her first step towards her present social condition. Prisons and workhouses became the dismal substitutes for monasteries, and jailers supplanted monks. England has not profited much by the change. The new institutions are at least ten times more costly than the old, and the benefits derived from them have been in inverse proportion. They now receive only prisoners, and disgorge only criminals; while a whole nation of heathen poor, a burden on the present resources of the country and a menace for her future destiny, have sunk down, as even English writers will tell us, to the level of the most degraded tribes of Africa or America, and are as utterly void of religion or of the knowledge of God as the Sioux, the Carib, or the Dahoman.”

FOOTNOTE:

[200] Those who are curious on this point are referred to the _Mystic City of God_, by the Ven. Maria de Agreda, a Spanish Carmelite nun.

THE PROGRESSIONISTS.

FROM THE GERMAN OF CONRAD VON BOLANDEN.