children, with their dogs, crouched, squatted, coiled like hedgehogs,
or lying on their backs, with knees drawn up perpendicularly to keep
their feet out of the fire. Le Jeune, always methodical, arranges the
grievances inseparable from these rough quarters under four chief
heads,--Cold, Heat, Smoke, and Dogs. The bark covering was full of
crevices, through which the icy blasts streamed in upon him from all
sides; and the hole above, at once window and chimney, was so large, that,
as he lay, he could watch the stars as well as in the open air. While
the fire in the midst, fed with fat pine-knots, scorched him on one side,
on the other he had much ado to keep himself from freezing. At times,
however, the crowded hut seemed heated to the temperature of an oven.
But these evils were light, when compared to the intolerable plague of
smoke. During a snow-storm, and often at other times, the wigwam was
filled with fumes so dense, stifling, and acrid, that all its inmates
were forced to lie flat on their faces, breathing through mouths in
contact with the cold earth. Their throats and nostrils felt as if on
fire; their scorched eyes streamed with tears; and when Le Jeune tried to
read, the letters of his breviary seemed printed in blood. The dogs were
not an unmixed evil, for, by sleeping on and around him, they kept him
warm at night; but, as an offset to this good service, they walked, ran,
and jumped over him as he lay, snatched the food from his birchen dish,
or, in a mad rush at some bone or discarded morsel, now and then overset
both dish and missionary.

Sometimes of an evening he would leave the filthy den, to read his
breviary in peace by the light of the moon. In the forest around sounded
the sharp crack of frost-riven trees; and from the horizon to the zenith
shot up the silent meteors of the northern lights, in whose fitful
flashings the awe-struck Indians beheld the dancing of the spirits of the
dead. The cold gnawed him to the bone; and, his devotions over, he