Tadoussac with faces variously painted, black and red and yellow, as a
party of "carnival maskers." One cannot well conjecture a more hopeless
undertaking than that of making those half-naked, painted barbarians
understand the mystery of the Trinity, for example, or the significance of
the cross. Think of this gentle, holy father, Le Jeune, seated in a hovel
beside one of these savages, whose language he is trying to learn, bribing
his Indian tutor with a piece of tobacco at every difficulty to make him
more attentive, or with half-frozen fingers writing his Algonquin
exercises, or making translations of prayers for the tongues of his
prospective converts--and you will be able to appreciate the beginnings of
the task to which these men without the slightest question set themselves.

It was a life, once these men left the mission house of Notre Dame des
Anges, that was without the slightest social intercourse, that was beyond
the prizes of any earthly ambition, that was frequently in imminence of
torture and death, and that was usually in physical discomfort if not in
pain. Obscure and constant toil for tender hands, solitude, suffering,
privation, death--these made up the portion of the messengers of the faith
who turned their faces toward the wilderness, their steps into the gloom
of the forests, pathless except for the traces of the feet of savages and
wild beasts.

For it is twenty-five years after that memorable day when Le Caron first
said mass on the shores of one of the Great Lakes (Champlain being
present) before the farthermost shore of the farthest lake is reached by
these patient and valorous pilgrims of the west. The story of that heroic
journey, of the consecration of those forests and waters and clearings by
suffering and unselfish ministry, fills many volumes (forty in the French
edition and seventy-two in the edition recently published in the United
States, the English translation being presented on the pages opposite the