Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/784

 Yet is it not evident that the mere desire to make the experiment made even the pain momentarily desirable? But, omitting the petty experiences of our every-day life, let us test the proposition by reference to the highest occasions of choice possible to man. Life is sweet, and yet how poor would be the records of heroism did they not tell us of men who, for the sake of great and noble ends, preferred death! You can not imagine them as choosing it if they did not regard it as the more desirable. We have all seen the picture of the Huguenot lovers, on the eve of St. Bartholomew, and the choice of death which one made even in the arms of her he loved. How many martyrs in silent dungeons have been offered life, liberty, home, and the loving companionship of wife and children, the possibility of long years of happiness and usefulness, at the price of apostasy to their convictions; who chose rather an ignominious death at the stake, prolonged tortures, confiscation of property, beggary of children, execration of friends, a dishonored and forgotten name—and whose faces shone with happiness as the flames kindled around them! But men have chosen more than this—not only to die, but to live a life of torture first. History does not record for us instances of greater self-abnegation, of more intense eagerness to suffer and to die for others, than those of the Jesuit missionaries who labored among the Indians of this country two centuries ago. One of them, writing from the Iroquois country in 1644, said: "This letter is soiled and ill-written, because the writer has only one finger of his right hand left entire, and can not prevent the blood oozing from his wounds, still open, from staining the paper." He had suffered protracted tortures in every form consistent with the preservation of life: given to children to torment; burned with live coals, forced to walk on hot cinders, hung by the feet, lacerated by savage dogs; a finger-nail burned off one day, and the joint burned off the next—a fiendish economy of torture—and finally ransomed by the Dutch, only to save him from the stake; yet, as soon as his health was partially restored, he chose to embark again for the wilderness and its awful possibilities. Turn the yellow pages of the missionary "Relations" and you come upon sentiments like these, expressed in the antiquated orthography of the time: "Nous mourrons, nous serons pris, nous serons bruslez, nous serons massacrez—passe. Je ne voy icy personne baisser la tête; au contraire—on demande de monter aux Hurons; et quelques uns protestent que les feux des Hiroquois sont l'un de leur motifs pour entreprendre un voyage si dangereux!" Of others, their biographer says: "They had borne all that the human frame seems capable of bearing. They had escaped as by miracle from torture and death. Did their zeal flag or their courage fail? A fervor, intense and unquenchable, urged them on to more distant and more deadly ventures. They burned to do, to suffer, to die; and now from out a living martyrdom they turned their heroic gaze toward a horizon dark with perils yet more appalling, and saw in hope the day