their pictures and ornaments through the most arduous of journeys,
where the traveller was often famished from the sheer difficulty of
transporting provisions.

[ 1 The Jesuits on these distant missions were usually attended by
followers who had taken no vows, and could leave their service at will,
but whose motives were religious, and not mercenary. Probably this was
the character of their attendants in the present case. They were known
as _donnes_, or "given men." It appears from a letter of the Jesuit
Du Peron, that twelve hired laborers were soon after sent up to the
mission. ]

A great event had called forth all this preparation. Of the many
baptisms achieved by the Fathers in the course of their indefatigable
ministry, the subjects had all been infants, or adults at the point of
death; but at length a Huron, in full health and manhood, respected and
influential in his tribe, had been won over to the Faith, and was now to
be baptized with solemn ceremonial, in the chapel thus gorgeously
adorned. It was a strange scene. Indians were there in throngs, and the
house was closely packed: warriors, old and young, glistening in grease
and sunflower-oil, with uncouth locks, a trifle less coarse than a
horse's mane, and faces perhaps smeared with paint in honor of the
occasion; wenches in gay attire; hags muffled in a filthy discarded
deer-skin, their leathery visages corrugated with age and malice, and
their hard, glittering eyes riveted on the spectacle before them.
The priests, no longer in their daily garb of black, but radiant in their
surplices, the genuflections, the tinkling of the bell, the swinging of
the censer, the sweet odors so unlike the fumes of the smoky lodge-fires,
the mysterious elevation of the Host, (for a mass followed the baptism,)
and the agitation of the neophyte, whose Indian imperturbability fairly