Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/424

404 French noble, and once a court-page, he had lived in the wilderness twenty-one years. Father Masse, after thirty-five years of service, died the same year of hardships in it, at the age of seventy-two, at Sillery. Father Daniel, twenty years in the Society, pierced with arrows and balls, was flung, in 1648, into the burning ruins of his chapel at St. Joseph's, at the age of forty-eight. The sturdy-framed and the lion-hearted Father Brebeuf, of the race of the English Earls of Arundel, founder of the Huron Mission, in the twenty-fifth year of his service, came to a martyr's death, March 16, 1649. He bore unflinchingly the extremities and barbarities of the tortures which all the revolting ingenuity of his tormentors could devise. They drank his blood, that it might transfuse into their veins his intrepid heroism, while their chief devoured his heart. His skull, in a silver bust of him sent from France, is preserved as a holy relic at Quebec. His companion, Father Jerome Lalemant, met a similar fate on the next day. He had been in the country less than three years, and was thirty-nine years of age. Physically he had the weakness and delicacy of a woman, but he had the soul of a hero. Father Chabanel, in his seventh year of service, to which he had bound himself for life by a solemn vow, was murdered by a renegade Huron catechist, Dec. 8, 1649. Father Garnier after thirteen years of mission life, yielded it under gunshot and the hatchet, while administering the last offices to his disciples slaughtered in a ferocious assault of the Iroquois. He also was of noble blood and gentle nurture. His beardless face, after he was thirty years old, made him an object of ridicule in Paris, but it added a grace to him for the eye of the Indian. Father Buteux was waylaid and killed, in 1652, while on a most arduous and perilous journey, with one companion, from Three Rivers, in a mission to the distant Algonquin nation of the White Fish. Father Marquette, in May, 1675, died at the age of thirty-eight, as he had wished that he might die, on