the dialect. Bidding their generous hostess farewell, they journeyed
northward, through the melting snows of spring, and reached Sainte Marie
in safety.

[ Lalemant, in his Relation of 1641, gives the narrative of this mission
at length. His account coincides perfectly with the briefer notice of
Chaumonot in his Autobiography. Chaumonot describes the difficulties of
the journey very graphically in a letter to his friend, Father Nappi,
dated Aug. 3, 1640, preserved in Carayon. See also the next letter,
Brebeuf au T. R. P. Mutio Vitelleschi, 20 Aout, 1641.

The Recollet La Roche Dallion had visited the Neutrals fourteen years
before, (see Introduction, note,) and, like his two successors, had been
seriously endangered by Huron intrigues. ]

The Jesuits had borne all that the human frame seems capable of bearing.
They had escaped as by miracle from torture and death. Did their zeal
flag or their courage fail? A fervor intense and unquenchable urged them
on to more distant and more deadly ventures. The beings, so near to
mortal sympathies, so human, yet so divine, in whom their faith
impersonated and dramatized the great principles of Christian truth,--
virgins, saints, and angels,--hovered over them, and held before their
raptured sight crowns of glory and garlands of immortal bliss. They
burned to do, to suffer, and to die; and now, from out a living martyrdom,
they turned their heroic gaze towards an horizon dark with perils yet
more appalling, and saw in hope the day when they should bear the cross
into the blood-stained dens of the Iroquois. [ This zeal was in no
degree due to success; for in 1641, after seven years of toil, the
mission counted only about fifty living converts,--a falling off from
former years. ]