His brother priest, Lalemant, who was tortured to death at the same time,
had thought it no good omen ten years before (1639) that no martyr's blood
had yet furnished seed for the church in that new soil, though consoling
himself with the thought that the daily life amid abuse and threats,
smoke, fleas, filth, and dogs might be "accepted as a living martyrdom."
There was ample seed by now, and still more was soon to be added, for very
soon, the same year, the gentle Garnier is to die the same death
ministering to these same Hurons, whose refugees, flying beyond two lakes
to escape from their murderous foes, are to lure the priests on still
farther westward till, even in their unmundane thoughts, the great,
mysterious river begins to flow toward a longed-for sea.

It was by such a path of danger and suffering, a path which threads gloomy
forests, that the first figures clad in black gowns came and peered over
the edge of the valley of this mysterious stream, even before Radisson and
Groseilliers wandered in that wooded and wet and fertile peninsula which,
beginning at the junction of three lakes, widens to include the whole
northwest of what is now the United States. You may travel in a day and a
night now up the Ottawa River, above Lake Nipissing, around Huron to the
point of that peninsula, from Montreal, and if you go in the season of the
year in which I once made the journey you will find this path (the path on
which Champlain came near losing his life, where Recollet and Jesuit,
coureur de bois and soldier toiled up hundreds of portages) bordered as a
garden path much of the way by wild purple flowers (that doubtless grew
red in the blood-sodden ground of the old Huron country), with here and
there patches of gold.

The first of these was Father Raymbault and with him Father Isaac Jogues,
who was later to knock with mutilated hands for shelter at the Jesuit
college in Rennes. Jogues was born at Orleans; he was of as delicate mould