letter from Versailles, that the king was very indignant at their refusal of absolution to certain persons because they were engaged in the service against the English.1

1 F. Michael Baudoin and Mathurin le Petit. The former afterwards attempted to found a mission among the Choctaws, and the latter became superior of the Jesuits in Louisiana. The letter of the French minister, Ponchartrain, is as follows: "A Versailles, le 8 May, 1694. Je suis obligé de vous dire que Sa Majesté a esté fort indignée de la mauvaise conduitte des Sieurs Beaudoin et Petit, missionnaires de l'Acadie, dans les choses qui ont eu relation à son service, et dans la résistance que Monsieur de Villebon, commandant à l'Acadie, a trouvé en cela de leur part. Elle a aussy apris qu'ils ont refusé l'absolution à des particuliers, à cause qu'ils étoient engagez dans le service contre les Anglois. Sa Majesté auroit donné ses ordres pour les faire retirer, sy elle n'avoit trouvé plus à propos, par considération pour vous, de m'ordonner de vous pryer d'empescher la continuation de ces desordres et que ces ecclésiastiques ne s'ingèrent point des affaires qui concernent le temporel, sy ce n'est pas l'ordre de ceulx auxquels. Sa Majesté a confiè son authorité, affin qu'en cela ils soyent soubmis comme ils doyvent l'estre, et que sy vous ne croyiez par pouvoir vous assurer de leur obéissance, vous les retiriez pour en mettre d'aultres à leur place." Two other missionaries are mentioned by Tibierge, who evidently thought more of teaching the gospel to the savages than inciting them to war against their English neighbors, namely Pères Simon and Elizée. Of the

We know that the reason assigned was not the real cause of their refusal. The cause was a deeper one, involving the manner of conducting the "services," and the names of these two missionaries should be held in grateful remembrance. They were bright lights in a season of deepest gloom, and without doubt there were many others whose names are only recorded in the imperishable archives of a world of love and peace.

When Frontenac sailed from Rochelle in the summer of 1689, he was accompanied by a Jesuit priest, who afterward became famous in the annals of New England, Père Sebastian Ralé, a native of Franche Comté; where he was born on January 28, 1657. As this man for more than thirty years played such an important part in the struggle between the savages and the frontier settlers of New England, he will, of necessity, appear prominently in a considerable portion of the following pages, and that no injustice may be done him, everything thus far discovered which he has written will be re

former he says: "C'est un trés honneste homme qui ne se mesle que des affaires de sa mission," and of the latter, that he is, "un homme assez retiré, ne m'a pas paru jusque à présent se meslee que des fonctions de son ministére." Vide Collection de Manuscrits, etc., vol. 2, pp. 155 et seq. 187.

produced. In his eighteenth year, or according to the register of the society, on September 24, 1675, Ralé entered as a noviciate the Society of Jesus, in the Province of Lyons, and when, during the rule of Denonville, who was a zealous friend of the Jesuits, the call came from the mission of St. Francis for more men, Ralé was an instructor of Greek in the College of Nismes.1 He was a man of heroic courage, of an earnest and self-sacrificing spirit, possessed indeed of qualities, which, in spite of some of his misconceptions of the real spirit of Christianity, entitle him to a measure of respect and admiration. He left France at the time when the feeling against the English colonists was most bitter at the French court, where the cause of James the Second was considered a holy cause, which was to be advanced by every means attainable, and when the air was laden with denunciations of the heretic colonists, traitors to their anointed king, and rebels against the Almighty.

With prejudices, which he could not have failed to imbibe against these, to him misguided people, active in his heart, he landed in Quebec in mid-autumn, and

1 The dates given are from the ancient catalogue of the Jesuits, and differ somewhat from those given by Père Martin in "Les Jesuit Martyrs de Canada."

at once came under the influence of the Bigots, who were at the head of an Abnaki mission largely composed of Indians, whom they had induced to leave Maine after King Philip's war. It was among these people that he passed, as he says, his missionary apprenticeship, and here he learned the Abnaki tongue. This was no easy task, but he applied himself to it with his usual zeal, and by persistent intercourse with the savages in their smoky wigwams, subjected to their rude gibes and disgusting habits of life, he finally acquired facility in uttering their harsh gutturals, and threading the intricacies of their bewildering idioms.

The bold imagery which the savages used, appealed to his poetic instinct, and moved him to admiration. Perhaps transmuted in his own thought, they assumed a beauty not wholly their own, if we may judge from examples he has given.

Their food was vile, and to Ralé, born in a country where cooking was a fine art, it seemed impossible to overcome his repugnance to it, but when a greasy savage shrewdly applied one of his own sinapisms to his sensitive conscience, reminding him, that the savage had to overcome his repugnance to prayer and it was the duty of a praying father to subdue his prejudice to dogmeat, he gracefully succumbed, and

thereafter ate whatever came to the kettle. For two years he lived at the Abnaki mission, learning in summer to traverse with the savages the perilous waters of the St. Lawrence in their birchen canoes, and in winter, the frozen wastes of that desolate region, on their cumbersome snowshoes, which at first he thought it impossible to walk with; then he took up his weary march to the Illinois, where others of his order had worn out their lives in a task seemingly too heavy for human nature to undertake.

It was late in the summer when Ralé set out with his savage guides with their canoes on his long journey; shooting dangerous rapids, paddling across. great lakes, on which storms were as common as on the ocean, and traversing pathless forests beset with difficulties. Often he was ready to faint with hunger and was obliged to scrape the juiceless lichens from the rocks to sustain life.

After many hardships, as winter drew near, the wornout missionary reached Mackinac, about seven hundred miles from Quebec, and somewhat more than half way to his place of destination.

He could go no farther, for winter was creating impassable barriers to farther progress, and he was, therefore, obliged to remain here until spring. Happily he found at Mackinac two brothers of his society,