1642.] THE CORPSE OF GOUPIL. 225 



a storm ; and when, in the gray of the morning, 

 Jogues descended to the brink of the stream, he 

 found it a rolling, turbid flood, and the body was 

 nowhere to be seen. Had the Indians or the tor- 

 rent borne it away? Jogues waded into the cold 

 current ; it was the first of October ; he sounded it 

 with his feet and with his stick ; he searched the 

 rocks, the thicket, the forest; but all in vain. 

 Then, crouched by the pitiless stream, he mingled 

 his tears with its waters, and, in a voice broken 

 with groans, chanted the service of the dead.^ 



The Indians, it proved, and not the flood, had 

 robbed him of the remains of his friend. Early in 

 the spring, when the snows were melting in the 

 woods, he was told by Mohawk children that the 

 body was lying, where it had been flung, in a lonely 

 spot lower down the stream. He went to seek it ; 

 found the scattered bones, stripped by the foxes 

 and the bu'ds; and, tenderly gathering them up, 

 hid them in a hollow tree, hoping that a day might 

 come when he could give them a Christian burial 

 in consecrated ground. 



After the murder of Goupil, Jogues's life hung 

 by a hair. He lived in hourly expectation of the 

 tomahawk, and would have welcomed it as a boon. 

 By signs and words, he was warned that his hour 

 was near ; but, as he never shunned his fate, it fled 

 from him, and each day, with renewed astonish- 

 ment, he found himself still among the living. 



1 Jogues in Tanner, Societas Militans, 519 ; Bressani, 216 ; Lalemant, 

 Relation, 1647, 25, 26 ; Buteux, Narr^, MS. ; Jogues, Notice sur Reni 

 Goupil. 



