prisoners were brought in and put beside the Frenchmen: whereupon Father
Jogues began his ministry anew, for when an ear of green corn was thrown
him for food, discovering a few rain-drops clinging to the husks, he
secretly baptized two of his eleventh-hour converts.

This was not the end, but after months of pain and privation, which make
one wonder at what a frail body, fitted with a delicate organism, can
endure, he escaped by the aid of the Dutch at Fort Orange (now the capital
of the State of New York), whither the Iroquois had gone to trade, and
after six weeks in hiding there, was sent to New Amsterdam--then a
"delapidated fort garrisoned by sixty soldiers" and a village of only four
or five hundred inhabitants, but even at that time so cosmopolitan that,
as one of my friends who has recently revived a census of that day shows,
nearly twenty different languages were spoken.

It is thus that a little French father of the wilderness comes from a
thousand miles behind the mountains, from the shores of the farthest lake,
in the middle of the continent, at a time when New York and Boston had
together scarcely more inhabitants than would fill a hall in the Sorbonne.

If only Richelieu (who died in the very year that Jogues was exemplifying
so faithfully the teaching of Him whose brother he called himself) had
permitted the Huguenot who wanted to go, to follow this little priest into
those wilds, instead of trying in vain to persuade those to go who would
not, who shall say that American visitors from that far interior might not
be speaking to-day in a tongue which Richelieu, were he alive, could best
understand.

The little father, who has always seemed to me an old man, though he was
then only thirty-six, was carried back to England, suffering from nature