thirty-three, of beardless face--laughed at by his friends in Paris, we
are told, because he was beardless but admired by the Indians for the same
reason--of a delicate nature but of the most valiant spirit.

It was Brebeuf who kept the westernmost outpost for many years. A man of
iron frame and resoluteness, the only complaint of his that I have found,
is one which would furnish a study for a great artist: it was that he had
"no moment to read his breviary, except by moonlight or the fire, when
stretched out to sleep on a bare rock by some savage cataract,--or in a
damp nook of the adjacent forest." There is another picture of him in
action, crouched in a canoe, barefoot, toiling at the paddle, hour after
hour, day after day, week after week, behind the lank hair and brown
shoulders and long, naked arms of his aboriginal companion. Still another
simple "Relation" shows him teaching the Huron children to chant and
repeat the commandments under reward of beads, raisins, or prunes. In
1637, accused of having bewitched the Huron nation and having brought
famine and pest, he was doomed to death; he wrote his farewell letter to
his superior, gave his farewell dinner to his enemies, taking that
opportunity to preach a farewell sermon concerning the Trinity, heaven and
hell, angels and fiends--the only real things to him--and so wrought upon
his guests that he was spared to labor on, though often in peril, until
the Iroquois (1649), still following the Hurons, found him with a brother
priest giving baptism and absolution to the savages dying in that last
struggle this side of the Lakes against their ancient enemies. They tied
him to a stake, hung a collar of "hatchets heated red-hot" about his neck,
baptized him with boiling water, cut strips of flesh from his limbs, drank
his blood as if to inherit of his valiance, and finally tore out and ate
his heart for supreme courage. Such cannibalism seems poetically
justifiable in tribute to such unflinching constancy of devotion.