Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/319

Rh his professorship of theology at Lyons. The other Acadian Jesuit, Father Enemond Masse, was afterwards a missionary in Canada. The first missionaries to Canada were four of the Franciscan friars who arrived in Quebec in May, 1615. Sagard is their faithful eulogian. His last editor reflects on the Jesuit historians Garneau and Charlevoix for their neglect and light esteem of Sagard's work. The friars appeared in their monkish garb of rope-girdled and hooded robes, and bare feet shod with heavy wooden sandals, — not a very fitting foot-gear for the egg-shell canoes in which they were to pass to their missions. They celebrated the first mass in Canada on June 25, 1615, in a little chapel which they built at Quebec. The first burial there with holy rites Sagard records as that of “Michel Colin,” March 24, 1616. One of the friars, Father Dolbeau, went with a band of the Montagnais up the Saguenay in December. Reduced, after two months, near to blindness and much agony from the smoke of the filthy lodges, he prudently judged, says Sagard, that our Lord did not require of him the loss of his sight, but that he ought carefully to guard what was so essential to him for his great enterprise. Another of the brethren, Father Le Caron, bravely accompanied a band of Hurons returning up the Ottawa, from their voyage down with furs to Montreal. He wisely had a lodge of his own on the outskirts of their village, where he wintered. He celebrated the first mass there Aug. 12, 1615. He wrote frankly to a friend of all the disagreeables, the disgusts, and terrible hardships of his new mode of life. But he cheerily adds: “Abundant consolation I found under all my troubles; for when one sees so many infidels needing nothing but a drop of water to make them children of God, he feels an inexpressible ardor to labor for their conversion, and sacrifice to it his repose and his life.”