750 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 refer- 

 ence 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 convic- 

 tions ; 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. His- 

 tory 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 w^ho 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 serous 

 pris, nous serous bruslez, nous serous massacrez — passe. Je ne voy 

 icy personne baisser la tete ; au contraire — on demande de monter aux 

 Hurons ; et quelques uns protestent que les feux des Ifiroquois sont 

 Vun de leur motifs x>out entreprendre nn voyage si dcmgereux f'' 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 



