Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/425

Rh the bare earth of the deep inner wilderness, with two humble attendants carrying his worn and sinking frame to the spot where he was to find release. There he consecrated the holy water for his last needs, and instructed his rude nurses how to keep the crucifix, which he took from under his robe, before his closing eyes; how to prompt his closing lips, in his last agony, with the words Jesus and Mary; how to compose his lifeless form for burial, and then to raise the cross over his grave at the spot which he indicated, at the mouth of the river that now bears his name.

Of the five Récollets who had begun the Canada mission, one, Nicholas Viel, was killed in 1625. The others, as above stated, returned. Of the twenty-five Jesuit missionaries to the Hurons recorded by Father Martin in his “Relation Abregée,” seven were killed, one was frozen to death, one died of his wounds, eight died in service, and eight returned to France after the catastrophe which overwhelmed the Huron mission in the direful fate of the nation. Their field extended over the region between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Lake Superior.

A lively sketch of the inner life and the daily work of the Jesuits in one of their remote residences will be found in the following, translated from Carayon, from a letter of Father Francis Du Peron, at La Conception, among the Hurons, April 27, 1639, to his brother Joseph, a Jesuit in France: