112 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



says that in a little river to whicli he wished to lead me, he had 

 picked up a quantity of white metal, a portion of which he brought 

 to Father Allouez, a Jesuit, and that brother Griles, a goldsmith 

 who resides at Green Bay (" the bay of the Puans "), having 

 wrought it, made the sun-shaped article [soleil] in which they put 

 the holy bread. He meant the ostensory which this same brother 

 has there made. He says that Father Allouez gave him a good 

 deal of merchandise by way of recompense, and told him to keep 

 the matter secret because [the metal] was a manitou — this is to 

 say a great spirit who was not yet developed." 



ISTor were the most distant fathers altogether at the mercy of 

 savages. A seminary for Huron boys at Quebec was projected in 

 the outset, and was begun in 1636, two years before the building 

 of Harvard College. One reason for founding this educational in- 

 stitution was that the Indian children in this Do-the-Boys Hall, 

 would be hostages for the safety of missionaries, however distant 

 in the interior. 



It is a merciful ordination of Providence that the tragic sug- 

 gests the comic, and all miseries have a ludicrous side. 



The crew of Captain Nares in quest of the North Pole would 

 have died of hypo in a darkness which outlasted a hundred times 

 the space that measures day and night to us, had they not dipped 

 deep in comic theatricals. Nor in the worse than Arctic gloom 

 around them would the Jesuits have fared better, had not their 

 eyes now and then rested on a silver lining of their sable cloud. 

 Burdens, otherwise too heavy, they threw off by sportive notes 

 in their diaries. Thus they must have felt a grim pleasure in 

 writing down skunks as infants of the devil. Father Allouez 

 relates that while publishing the gospel in the midst of Wiscon- 

 sin he found himself in a sort of monkey France. Certain of the 

 sequestered natives having carried beaver to Montreal had there 

 beheld military pomp. "Wishing to pay the missionary fitting 

 honors, they stuck feathers in their hair, and organized the naked 

 braves into a militia company who gravely mimicked every 

 evolution of the governor's guard. The Jesuit discoursed to 

 them of heaven and hell, but the unseasonable parody of French 

 parade did not cease for an instant. The Black Robe could not 



