In no wise abashed by this flourish, Father Richmond shook hands with the Big Chimney men, smiling, and with a pleasant ease that communicated itself to the entire company.

It was instantly manifest that the scene of this Jesuit’s labours had not been chiefly, or long, beyond the borders of civilization.  In the plain bare room where, for all its hospitality and good cheer, reigned an air of rude simplicity and austerity of life—­into this somewhat rarefied atmosphere Father Richmond brought a whiff from another world.  As he greeted the two strangers, and said simply that he had just arrived, himself, by way of the Anvik portage, the Colonel felt that he must have meant from New York or from Paris instead of the words he added, “from St. Michael’s.”

He claimed instant kinship with the Colonel on the strength of their both being Southerners.

“I’m a Baltimore man,” he said, with an accent no Marylander can purge of pride.

“How long since you’ve been home?”

“Oh, I go back every year.”

“He goes all over ze world, to tell ze people—­”

“—­something of the work being done here by Father Brachet—­and all of them.”  He included the other priests and lay-brothers in a slight circular movement of the grizzled head.

And to collect funds! the Colonel rightly divined, little guessing how triumphantly he achieved that end.

“Alaska is so remote,” said the Travelling Priest, as if in apology for popular ignorance, “and people think of it so... inadequately, shall we say?  In trying to explain the conditions up here, I have my chief difficulty in making them realise the great distances we have to cover.  You tell them that in the Indian tongue Alaska means “the great country,” they smile, and think condescendingly of savage imagery.  It is vain to say we have an area of six hundred thousand square miles.  We talk much in these days of education; but few men and no women can count!  Our Eastern friends get some idea of what we mean, when we tell them Alaska is bigger than all the Atlantic States from Maine to Louisiana with half of great Texas thrown in.  With a coast-line of twenty six thousand miles, this Alaska of ours turns to the sea a greater frontage than all the shores of all the United States combined.  It extends so far out towards Asia that it carries the dominions of the Great Republic as far west of San Francisco as New York is east of it, making California a central state.  I try to give Europeans some idea of it by saying that if you add England, Ireland, and Scotland together, and to that add France, and to that add Italy, you still lack enough to make a country the size of Alaska.  I do not speak of our mountains, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen thousand feet high, and our Yukon, flowing for more than two thousand miles through a country almost virgin still.”

“You travel about up here a good deal?”

“He travels all ze time.  He will not rest,” said Father Brachet as one airing an ancient grievance.