48 THEOUGH THE MACKEISTZIE BASIN 



inevitable paths of self-support, and to shield him from the 

 rapacity of the cold incoming world now surging around him. 

 After the presentation, over a good cigar, the Father told 

 some inimitable stories of Indian life on the plains in the 

 old days, which to my great regret are too lengthy for inclu- 

 sion here. One incident, however, being apropos of himself, 

 must find place. Turning the conversation from material- 

 ism, idealism, and the other " isms " into which it had 

 drifted, he spoke of the fears so many have of ghosts, and 

 even of a corpse, and confessed that, from early training, he 

 had shared this fear until he got rid of it in an incident one 

 winter at Lac Ste. Anne. He had been sent for during the 

 night to administer extreme unction to a dying half-breed 

 girl thirteen miles away. Hitching his dogs to their sled he 

 sped on, but too late, for he was met on the trail by the girl's 

 relatives, bringing her dead body wrapped in a buffalo skin, 

 and which they asked him to take back with him and place 

 in his chapel pending service. He tremblingly assented, 

 and the body was duly tied to his sled, the relatives return- 

 ing to their homes. He was alone with the corpse in the 

 dense and dark forest, and felt the old dread, but reflect- 

 ing on his office and its duties, he ran for a long dis- 

 tance behind the sled until, thoroughly tired, he stepped 

 on it to rest. In doing this he slipped and fell upon 

 the corpse in a spasm of fear, which, strange to say, when he 

 recovered from it, he felt no more. The shock cured him, 

 and, reaching home, he placed the girl's body in the chapel 

 with his own hands. It reminded him, he said, of a Com- 

 munity at Marseilles whose Superior had died, but whose 

 money was missing. The new Superior sent a young priest 

 who had a great dread of ghosts down to the crypt below the 

 church to open the coffin and search the pockets of the dead. 

 He did so, and found the money ; but in nailing on the coffin 

 lid again, a part of his soutane was fastened down with it. 

 The priest turned to go, advanced a step, and, being sud- 

 denly held, dropped dead with fright. These gruesome 



