over them they termed death. The Indians' turn had now come to make the
white strangers die. They dressed their heads and painted their faces A
nok nok, or wonder working spirit possessed them. They came slowly, and
solemnly seated themselves before the whites, then suddenly lifted up
their heads and stared. Their reddened eyes had the desired effect. The
whites died."

Among the Indians of British, Columbia no Protestant Missionary had
laboured prior to 1857. Some Roman Catholic priests, however, had been
in the country, and of them Captain Mayne writes:--[Footnote: "_Four
Years in British Columbia_," p. 305.]

"If the opinion of the Hudson's Bay people of the interior is to be
relied upon, the Roman Catholic priests effected no real change in the
condition of the natives. The sole result of their residence among them
was, that the Indians who had been brought under their influence had
imbibed some notions of the Deity, almost as vague as their own
traditions, and a superstitious respect for the priests themselves,
which they showed by crossing themselves devoutly whenever they met
one. Occasionally, too, might be seen in their lodges, pictures
purporting to represent the roads to Heaven and to Hell, in which there
was no single suggestion of the danger of vice and crime, but a great
deal of the peril of Protestantism. These coloured prints were
certainly curious in their way, and worth a passing notice. They were
large, and gave a pictorial history of the human race, from the time
when Adam and Eve wandered in the garden together, down to the
Reformation. Here the one broad road was split into two, whose courses
diverged more and more painfully. By one way the Roman Catholic portion
of the world were seen trooping to bliss; the other ended in a steep
bottomless precipice over which the Protestants might be seen falling.