University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE JESUIT.

The morning wore on calmly, brightly, and the sun, whose
long, upward rays had been for above an hour streaming toward
the zenith, above the waving tree-tops, now raised the
upper limb of his bright disk above the rich green foliage, and
poured a flood of golden lustre directly downward into the
woodland channel of the stream, and lighted its translucent
waters down to its depths of gravelly sand, and long river-weeds
fantastically curling in the gentle current. Up to this
time the maiden had sat nearly motionless in her light bark
canoe, scarcely stirring a limb, unless to draw in another and
another of her scaly captives, to renew her bait upon the
barbed steel hook — fresh evidence, by the way, of acquaintance
with the whites — and to cast out her line again into the
little eddy among the branches of the submerged trees in which
the fish appeared to rejoice especially.

Now, however, the sun shooting his beams downward, the
fish began to show themselves indisposed to bite so freely as

before, and very soon refused altogether to take the deceptive
lure, whether that the increase of light enabled them the better
to descry the shining artifice, or that the movements of the
waving shadows on the surface, whenever the fair angler
moved her hand, betrayed her whereabouts, and scared them
from the tempting morsel.

The girl, seeing that for the present there was no more
sport to be had, was already busied in taking apart her light
tackle, winding up her line on a delicately-wrought wooden
reel, and securing her priceless hook; and that task ended, had
already lifted her paddle from the bottom of the canoe in order
to alter her position, when almost simultaneously two widely
different, and, in that deep solitude, most unaccustomed sounds
disturbed the silence of the forest.

The first of these, in point of time, was the near report of
one of the lighter firearms of that day, such as were used in
the most civilized countries of Europe in the chase, and known
as carabines, or birding-pieces, and that the weapon had not
been discharged in vain, was proved by the plunge of a beautiful
summer duck, the handsomest of all the aquatic fowls,
from its perch on the projecting branch of a tall white-oak, into
the water beneath, on the surface of which it struggled impotently
for a moment or two, and then lay motionless and lifeless,
dying the slow ripples with a large patch of dark gore
from its bill, gasping now no longer.

The other sound was the deep, melancholy, silver tone of a
large bell floating down the light air, and down the channel of
the river, from a short distance toward the uplands — a bell
so singularly soft and sweet, so serenely musical and melodious,
that its cadences would have been remarked for their
wild, sonorous swell, and long-drawn fall, even in populous
cities, where all the arts are called into play, to minister not to
the necessaries only, but to the luxuries of life. In that wild

region, therefore, untrodden as one would have been prompt
to believe by any steps save those of the prowling wild beast
or the heathen and untutored savage, how singularly exquisite
seemed that slow and solemn harmony — that harmony peculiarly
the utterance of civilization, of humanity, of the innocent
and pure religion of the white man — he and he only can
judge aright, who, after wandering, after sojourning, far aloof
from the haunts of men, comes suddenly upon the traces of the
ploughshare and the axe, and pausing on the verge of some
small forest-clearing, listens, astonished half, and all enraptured,
to the familiar music, long unheard of, the old villagebells.

There is no sound on earth by which the human soul is rapt
so suddenly away from the present scene, from the present
train of thoughts, yea, from its very self, and all the strongest
of its secret aspirations, to the long past, the long-forgotten, as
the music of a distant bell heard in the wilderness. Oftentimes,
when I, wandering as I have imagined very far from
the nearest settlement among the gigantic pines and venerable
silence of the western Canadian forest, have been surprised
from myself, and charmed away to scenes far beyond the wild-rolling
Atlantic, to the green hills and gentle pastures of my
childhood's home, even by the wild and inharmonious clank
of a cow-bell, gathering I know not what of romance, and even
melody from the accompanying scenery and circumstances,
and wafting back the willing mind from savage solitude to old
civilization.

At the first sound, the long, re-echoing gun-shot, the girl
started, and after gazing earnestly, and with something of
anxiety in her eye toward the direction whence it came,
dropped the blade of her paddle noiselessly into the water,
and by a dexterous turn of the wrist, sent the head of the canoe
gliding swift and easy as a bird through the air into the little

eddy among the boughs of the fallen tree. Another and another
sweep of the light paddle, delivered all so dexterously
that not a plash could be detected as the blade entered or left
the water, forced it out clear into the glassy current above the
obstacle which seemed to bar its way, so that before five seconds
had elapsed from the occurrence of the alarm, if such it
were to be considered, the light vessel had shot with its fair
freight, six times its own length up the stream, and was glancing
over the creeping eddies at a safe distance from the bank,
like a creature endowed with volition and swift self-motion.

At the next instant the deep tone of the bell swelled upon
her ear — again — again — again — clearly the Christian's summons
to the worship of his God.

And yet who would have deemed that in that lonely and remote
corner of the wilderness, at that far-distant period, when
the very discovery of the New World, as men called it, was
but recent, and the most satisfactory attempts at its colonization
as yet but an experiment, who would have deemed it possible
that the God of nature should have been worshipped otherwise
than by the free and natural influences of the outward
world, by the grateful choirs of the rejoicing songsters of the
woodland, by the rich incense of the flowers ascending toward
heaven on the wings of the morning dew, by the instinctive,
vague, and untutored emotions which dwell even in the breast
of the wild native of the wilderness?

Who should have reared a house to the King, Creator,
Savior of the universe, a house raised with hands in the howling
wilderness, or hung aloft that silver-tongued appellant,
summoning all those who are heavy-laden to cast down their
burthens at the foot of that cross by which alone they should
find penitence, and peace, and pardon?

By whom could it, indeed, have been raised, by whom
sanctified, by whom daily administered among toils, and woes,

and perils, such as scarce any of the sons of men, since the
first martyrs of the earliest Christian era, have encountered,
save by the members of that wonderful, that self-denying order,
the policy of which, sacrificing all individuality, all personal
independence, all power, all pleasure, all ambition of the single
man, had exalted the society of Jesus into a unity so complete,
so unassailable, and so puissant, that kings and pontiffs equally
submitted to its dictation, equally shrank from disputing its
gigantic dominion, or holding out against its masterly organization.

The word Jesuit has been used too often in our protestant
language to signify the very embodiment and personification
of bigotry, cruelty, artifice, deception, all, in short, that is
known as priestcraft, and that of the most odious and intolerant
description, until men have forgotten how much of good
mingled with evil there has existed from the beginning in the
history of Jesuitism, and how much the civilized world, and
the world of North America more particularly, is indebted to
these enthusiastic missionaries, these self-denying teachers of
the savage, these undaunted explorers of the wilderness.

“When the Jesuits,” says Macaulay, an authority not to be
doubted or disputed, when he appears as the eulogist either
of the church of England or the church of Rome, to both of
which he bears the genuine hatred of the radical dissenter,
“came to the rescue of the papacy, they found it in extreme
peril; but from that time the tide of battle turned. Protestantism,
which had during a whole generation carried all before it,
was stopped in its progress and rapidly beaten back from the
foot of the Alps to the shores of the Baltic. Before the order
had existed a hundred years, it had filled the whole world with
memorials of great things done and suffered for the faith. No
religious community could produce a list of men so variously
distinguished; none had extended its operations over so vast

a space; yet in none had there ever been such perfect unity
of feeling and action. There was no region of the globe, no
walk of speculative or active life in which jesuits were not to
be found. They guided the councils of kings. They deciphered
Latin inscriptions. They observed the motion of Jupiter's
satellites. They published whole libraries, controversy,
casuistry, history, treatises on optics, alcaic odes, editions of
the fathers, madrigals, catechisms, lampoons. The liberal
education of youth passed almost entirely into their hands, and
was conducted by them with conspicuous ability. They appear
to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual
culture can be carried without risk of intellectual emancipation.
Enmity itself was compelled to own that in the art of
managing and forming the tender mind they had no equals.
Meanwhile they assiduously and successfully cultivated the
eloquence of the pulpit. With still greater assiduity and still
greater success, they applied themselves to the ministry of the
confessional. Throughout catholic Europe the secrets of every
government, and of almost every family of note, were in their
keeping. They glided from one protestant country to another
under innumerable disguises, as gay cavaliers, as simple rustics,
as puritan preachers. They wandered to countries which
neither mercantile avidity nor liberal curiosity had ever impelled
any stranger to explore. They were to be found in the
garb of mandarins superintending the observatory at Pekin.
They were to be found, spade in hand, teaching the rudiments
of agriculture to the savages of Paraguay. Yet, whatever
might be their residence, whatever might be their employment,
their spirit was the same, entire devotion to the common cause,
implicit obedience to the central authority.

“None of them had chosen his dwelling-place, or his avocation
for himself. Whether the Jesuit should live under the
arctic circle, or under the equator, whether he should pass his

life in arranging gems or callating manuscripts in the Vatican,
or in persuading naked barbarians in the southern hemisphere,
not to eat one another, were matters which he left with profound
submission to the decision of others. If he was wanted
at Lima, he was on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If he was
wanted at Bagdad, he was toiling through the desert with the
next caravan. If his ministry was needed in some country
where his life was more insecure than that of the wolf, where
it was a crime to harbor him, where the heads and quarters of
his brethren fixed in the public places, showed him what he
had to expect, he went without remonstrance or hesitation to
his doom. Nor is this heroic spirit yet extinct. When in
our time, a new and terrible pestilence passed round the globe,
when in some great cities fear had dissolved all the ties which
held society together, when the secular clergy had deserted
their flocks, when medical succor was not to be purchased
with gold, when the strongest natural affections had yielded to
the love of life, even then the Jesuit was found by the pallet,
which bishop and curate, physician and nurse, father and mother
had deserted, bending over infected lips to catch the faint
accents of confession, and holding up to the last before the expiring
penitent, the image of the inspiring Redeemer.”

Admirable indeed were the exertions, the virtues, and the
sufferings of many, very many of these great and good men,
and if an over-enthusiasm for the good of their own order,
and for what they honestly believed to be the greater glory of
God, did at times in the Old World — as most assuredly it did
— lead them into tortuous policy, entangle them in the sophistical
casuistries of cabinets, and the perilous intrigues of courts,
if it did lead them too often to regard the expedient rather than
the good, and to permit and sanction of the doing of evil that
haply good might come of it, no such stigma rests upon their
memories in this hemisphere, aloof from court intrigues and

cabinet ambition. Here they were the civilizers only, the discoverers,
the colonists, the fertilizers of the boundless waste —
the friends, the teachers, the Christianizers, and, alas! but too
often the martyrs of the stern and savage red man.

The falls of the farthest western rivers, from Niagara to the
head-waters of the Mississippi and the foaming rapids of the
Sault St. Marie, the forest and the prairie, yea! the ice-bound
piunacles of the Rocky Mountains, were familiar to their wandering
footsteps; and before commerce or agriculture had
begun to hold dominion along the shores of the Atlantic, they
were felling the trees of the wilderness far to the northward
of the great lakes, choosing their stations with rare sagacity
— for there be now but few of them which are not the sites of
great and prosperous cities — and sowing in the breasts of
their Indian neophytes that good seed of faith, which should
lead by grace of the Most High unto eternal life.

They it was, then, who had built their fort, not so much
against human foes, as against the arch-enemy of man, upon
the northern bank of the gentle Wye, who had gathered about
the palisades of their Mission a small but faithful congregation
of the Iroquois or Hurons of the Lakes, and passed their lives
in innocence and peace “in that vast contiguity of shade,”
wresting by degrees orchards, and gardens, and green fields,
from the dominion of the forest; rescuing by degrees, from the
mists and thick darkness of ignorance and belief, the souls of
their dark-skinned brethren.

Their bell it was which now resounded so sadly, solemnly
sweet through the dim aisles of the forest, and over the surface
of the long-resounding waters — truly their silver bell —
its cadences are familiar to my ears, for it has survived those
who brought it hither to proclaim the glad tidings of the Gospel,
it has survived their very destroyers, and now, when the
sons of a different race hold the soil which whilom they cultivated,

when a different language is spoken in their abiding-places,
it still hangs aloft above a Christian place of worship,
though not of their faith who then woke its mellow cadences,
still summons those who believe to the altar of the same God,
one and eternal, and the same for ever, whom the French
Jesuit adored when its first appeal awakened the forest echoes.

As the girl caught the pleasant sounds of the church-bell, a
well-pleased smile lighted up her gentle features, and the uneasy
expression passed away from her, as the shadow of a
cloud is chased from a landscape by the sunny gleam, as she
made her light bark literally almost fly under the measured
strokes of her fairy paddle. She had already doubled the first
bend of the river, and, keeping well in toward the bank by
which she had been fishing, had interposed the wooded point
between herself and any curious eyes, which might be watching
her from below, when a tall young Indian, clad in hunting-shirt,
leggins, and moccasins of dressed deer-skin, and carrying
a long gun in his hand, made his appearance on the same side
of the stream, some ten or twelve yards at most below the
place where the maiden was fishing, when the shot was fired,
and applied himself at once to the recovery of the game he
had killed. This did not occupy him many seconds, as the
current had set the dead bird in shore, and his quick eye detected
it in an instant, as it lay among the outer twigs of a redalder
bush which overhung the stream. As he picked it up,
however, he did not fail to observe that a ripple different in its
character from the regular run of the waters, broke on the
sand-bank at his feet, and turning his glance instinctively up
stream, although it was already fast subsiding into its wonted
stillness, he was not long in satisfying himself that a canoe
had passed up the Wye, and that within a few minutes.

Bounding forward, almost with the speed of a hunted deer,
he gained the point in a moment, and running out upon the

slippery trunk of the fallen oak-tree, by the side of which the
girl's canoe had been made fast, he caught a glimpse of her as
she emerged from the cover of the foliage, and glided steadily
upward across the next reach of the river.

“The Reed-shaken-by-the-wind,” he muttered to himself,
half thoughtfully, while a bright and pleasurable expression
crossed his features, and then tossing up his arm, he uttered a
long whoop to attract her notice, and as she turned her head
to the perhaps unwelcome sound, beckoned her to return and
take him on board.

But the girl, uttering a low cry in return, as soft and harmonious
as his was dissonant and savage, shook her head half-coquettishly,
half-resolutely, and pointing ahead with her paddle
to the quarter whence the chime of the bell now came
faster and more frequent, urged her light vessel ahead with
renewed exertion, and in less than a minute shot round the
turn of the verdurous banks and was lost to his view.

The Indian, who was evidently a chief, from the excellent
condition of his garments and accoutrements, as well as from
his richly-ornamented weapons, was clearly disconcerted; a
gloom fell over his dusky features, and he frowned deeply.
Had he been a white man, he would probably have given vent
to his disappointment in an oath, but it is remarkable that blasphemy
against the Author of his existence is peculiar to the
cultivated and Christian white man, there being no oath or imprecation
to be found in the vocabulary of any Indian tribe,
even of those who pay respect and sacrifice, for the averting
of his wrath, to the Spirit of Evil. He restrained himself for
a moment or two, and stood apparently in thought. “Good!”
he said at length, speaking in his own tongue. “Girl gone
to French fathers. Very much love hear French fathers.
Love too much, maybe. Bald-Eagle go too. Hear what say
— see what do — then know what think, too.” And attaching

the summer-duck to a bunch of several other water-fowl, which
he had slung from his waist-belt, he set off through the open
forest on the upland at the long, loping-trot for which the Indians
are so famous, and which enables them to get over the
ground so rapidly, when on their hunts or on the war-path.

Meanwhile, Ahsahgunushk had kept on her way paddling
swiftly and silently, until she had rounded two more points of
the shore, and had come into view of the Jesuit settlement and
its clearings, lying fair to the long slant beams of the morning
sun, sparkling with the dew-drops of the past night, as they
hung diamond-like on the rustling leaves of the tall maize, or
gemmed the tedded grass of the luxuriant meadows.

The little opening in the forest which had been reclaimed
by the patient industry of the fathers from the solitude and
wildness of the woods, contained about a hundred acres of upland,
on both sides of the river, bounded on the lower side by
the skirts of the primeval woodland, and extending upward to
the edge of a natural wet savanna, which soon degenerated
into rice swamp, through many a mile of which the river
wound its devious way from the distant highlands. It was a
tranquil and a beautiful scene, and one by no means destitute
of refined ornament and the decorations of civilized life. The
buildings of the Mission lay, as it has been stated, on the north
shore of the river, just where a large brook, after running for
some hundred yards directly parallel to the river, turned at
right angles to its former course, and discharges a strong and
rapid stream rushing impetuously through a deep ravine which
forms two sides of a parallelogram. Of this accidental formation
of the soil, the Jesuits, who possessed no slight degree
of knowledge in both military and civil engineering, had taken
advantage for the erection of their post, a bank having been
thrown up along the inner line of this natural foss, with a
strong though irregularly built stone tower in the angle. From

the upper end of the longer limb of the ravine a wide ditch,
with a high interior bank, ran parallel to the outlet of the brook
with a circular bastion or redoubt at the upper angle, where it
again turned westerly until it terminated in a third redoubt at
the junction of the brook with the river, the whole forming a
large, oblong enclosure, with a length of about three hundred
yards to the river face, and a depth of about one third that distance,
the banks all round being garnished by a massive row
of cedar palisades of fifteen feet in height, well braced together,
and looped for musketry, besides being defended at the
top by a strong cheval-de-frize, manufactured in the forge
which the energetic priests had established and maintained
within their guarded precincts.

Each of the redoubts was armed with two small brass swivel-guns,
of the kind at that time known as “grasshoppers,”
something similar to what are now used in India under the
name of wall-pieces, capable of carrying balls only of a pound
or two calibre, but still useful for the defence of slight, irregular
works against tumultuary force, such as Indians, inasmuch as
they could sweep all the curtains with a hail of musket-bullets,
which the red warriors would be most unapt to endure.

Within this rude and rustic fortification, for the cedar-posts,
or trunks of which it was manufactured, were in their natural
rough condition all gnarled and knotted, overgrown with moss,
and in part overrun with ivy and various creepers, were the
buildings of the Mission which consisted of an interior parallelogram,
made of square logs, dove-tailed one into the other,
to the height of two stories, with no windows or apertures of
any kind to the exterior, except one large, two-leaved gate,
giving access to the court within, which opened directly opposite
to the entrance in face of the palisades, under a great
tower, fashioned like a modern block-house, with the upper

floors overhanging substructure and surmounted by the belfry,
whence pealed that sonorous and widely-venerated bell.

The buildings contained a chapel and library, occupying the
whole front of the square opening to the right and left of the
entrance archway, which was protected by strong double-doors
of hewn timber. On the opposite side was the refectory on
the ground-floor, and the dormitory of the father above, while
the two ends of the court were occupied by kitchens and
workshops for the carpenter, the smith, the cooper, with stithy,
and turning-lathe, and tool-chests, and all appliances for useful
labor. Store-houses, and a dormitory for the lay brothers were
above these, and in the centre of the parellelogram was a small
armory, well stocked with the firearms of the day, whether
for hunting or defence—swords, pikes, and some few pieces
of defensive armor not as yet entirely disused, as morions, or
sallets, or gorgets, for the protection of the head and neck.

For it must not be supposed that the Jesuits were of that
drone-like breed of monks who vegetated in the convents of
Italy, or the hill-monasteries of Syria and the Holy Land.
Not they—these were practical, shrewd, able-bodied men,
men of science, men of energy, men of the world—men forbidden
by the rules of the order from no work of industry, of
energy, or of skill, which might tend to the advancement of
science, to the advancement of human happiness, above all to
the advancement of their order. They were the men neither
to be devoured unresisting by the wild beasts of the forest, nor
to be tortured passively by its yet wilder human denizens—
they were navigators, hunters, agriculturists, fishers, antiquarians,
naturalists; they were the tamers of the forest no less
than the teachers of the Indian—and not a few of them had
been soldiers already, and had served with the carnal arm in
the fierce religious wars of Spain and France and the Low
Countries, nor would be apt to withdraw their hands now from

the sword's hilt, should it be necessary to do battle for the protection
of their own lives, the safety of the order, and the defence
of the settlement they had planted for the reclamation
of the heathen, the salvation of souls, and the greater glory
of God.

Without the palisades, however, though all within was strong
and stern, and guarded with powerful mastiffs, chained to their
kennels near the entrance, and a stout lay-brother at all times
on duty as porter, nor ever without arms in reach, there was
much ornament and graceful decoration. On the lower side
of the fort, as it is still termed, for the outlines of the banks
and fosses are still plainly discernible, as well as the ruins of
the casemated stone tower, which was not improbably applied
to more homely purposes in the preservation of their roots and
vegetables from the severe frosts of the Canadian winter, the
undergrowth of the forest grew up close to the farther edge of
the ravine, for although in the first instance a wise precaution
had led the Jesuits to fell the timber, so as to form an open
glacis for some fifty yards beyond their palisades, long security
had in some sort begotten over-confidence, and the brushwood
had been suffered to encroach on that side of the clearing,
so that it was now covered with a dense and tangled
thicket.

In front, however, between the stockade and the river, and
around the upper end of the station extending back so far as to
the brook, was a large and beautifully-kept garden, with espaliers
thickly framed with foreign fruit-trees, and bowery walks
overshadowed by trellices covered with both native and imported
vines, and amid the deep beds of pot-herbs, salads, and
cresses, and leguminous plants, and scarlet French beans and
lentils, was many a plat of flowers, some redeemed from their
wild state by sedulous cultivation, some doubly cherished because
brought from the far and happy France, filling the air

with the rich musky odor of the roses of Provence, and greeting
the eye with the gracious show of the fair lilies, the chosen
flower of France.

Above the garden again was a large orchard, of peach, plum,
apple, and pear, which though not large trees as yet, nor having
in truth had time to become so, were thrifty and in good condition,
and many of them were so heavily laden with fruit, that
there could be no doubt it would be necessary to prop them
up in order to sustain their full weight when in the maturity
of autumn. Rich maize-fields encircled the young orchard,
twinkling in the sunshine and rustling in the breeze, with a
belt of rich emerald verdure, and again beyond these, interspersed
with a few patches of rye, wheat, and barley, the level
green meadows pastured by a small flock of sheep, and two or
three little hardy Norman cows, stretched away to the eastward,
till they were lost to view amid the rank luxuriance of
the rich marshes.

A straight walk led down through the garden from the gate
of the mission to the bank of the river, where a small wharf
or jetty had been erected, at which lay a schooner-rigged pinnace
of some sixteen or eighteen tons, a couple of long, sharp,
clinker-built rowing boats, like those used by smugglers in the
British channel, two or three yawls and fishing-boats, of various
kinds and dimensions, and a whole fleet of birch-canoes
lying balanced like water-birds on the clear surface. A little
shed on the margin of the stream was filled with oars, masts,
sails, and paddles, and all the means and appliances for boating,
fishing, or fowling, as very much of the subsistence both
of the fathers and their Iroquois neophytes depended on one or
other of these pursuits, for such they are even to this day,
rather than sports in that wild region.

On the farther bank of the river the cleared land was of
about the same extent, and with the same general character

of civilization, except that there were neither gardens nor
orchards, while the maize fields were more extensive, and
were intermixed with considerable tracts planted with esculent
roots, and many of the coarser European vegetables. Almost
exactly opposite to the fort, on a grassy table-land, below the
cultivated grounds, and surrounded on two sides by the skirts
of the forest, stood a small Huron village of about sixty lodges,
built of stronger materials, and with a greater view to permanence
than is usual with the dwellings of the aborigines. A
council-lodge stood nearly in the centre of the area, around
which the wigwams were irregularly scattered, but what
seemed a strange and most unlooked-for appendage to a council-lodge
of the rude Iroquois, a large crucifix of wood had
been reared in front of it, supporting an effigy of the dying
Redeemer, rudely but boldly sculptured in the soft wood, demonstrating
that the labors of the good fathers had not been vain,
and that the village was inhabited by neophytes who had inclined
a willing ear to the admonitions of the order, and had
turned their hearts to that meek and gentle faith, through which
alone cometh salvation.

Dogs, children of all ages, canoes, racks for drying fish, and
rude implements of husbandry and agriculture, lay scattered
about, and among these, interspersed with European tools and
instruments of steel and iron, lay many hammers, chisels,
hatchets, and the like, shaped by untutored Indian skill out of
the pure native copper of the lakes, which the aborigines had
long worked and known how to temper to a degree of hardness
unattainable by our utmost science, although, on the introduction
of iron tools and weapons by the French, they speedily
abandoned their use, deserted and blocked up the mouths of
their mines, and concealed them with such care from the
whites, that, although their existence was well ascertained,
their whereabout was never known to the Jesuits, and that it

is in comparatively latter days only that they have been re-discovered.

Such was the scene that had filled so many times before the
eyes of Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng, that it failed now to
awaken any expression in her handsome features, and she exhibited
only an anxiety to reach the dock of the mission, before
the bell had ceased to ring, which it might now be speedily
expected to do, since it had already changed its sweet and solemn
cadence for the quick tremulous chime which precedes
the cessation of the call to worship.

At the jetty, speaking gravely to some of the lay brethren,
and to two or three scattered Indians, who as they left him
hurried up toward the Mission, stood a tall young man, exhibiting
nothing peculiarly clerical in his appearance, for he was
not tonsured, but wore his long black hair falling in straight
uucurled masses down either cheek; nor in his garb, except
that he wore a large, showy crucifix about his neck, for he
was clad in leather hunting-shirt, pantaloons, and moccasins,
with a wood-knife in his belt, and a strong staff with an iron
pike at the extremity in his hand. He was finely proportioned
and of a graceful figure, but so slender and even thin, that he
gave you the idea of having been emaciated by sickness or
privation, and his singularly handsome intellectual features,
with their dark olive hue, were so unnaturally sharpened, that
they naturally conveyed the same impression.

A bright light flashed in the soft hazel eyes of the Reed-shaken-by-the
wind, and a strange, fitful color flushed her dark
cheeks as her eye fell on the commanding figure of the ascetic;
and as her canoe came to land, she flung the deer-skin painter
over one of the posts of the little dock, and hurried up toward
him, with an air singularly blended of consciousness with
timidity.