Ego sum Episcopus!

One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath the roof through an opening in a stained window.  It was the face of a mocking fiend, such as the old builders loved to place under the eaves to spout the rain through their open mouths.  It looked at him, as he sat in his mitred chair, with its hideous grin growing broader and broader, until it laughed out aloud,—­ such a hard, stony, mocking laugh, that he awoke out of his second dream through his first into his common consciousness, and shivered, as he turned to the two yellow sermons which he was to pick over and weed of the little thought they might contain, for the next day’s service.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather was too much taken up with his own bodily and spiritual condition to be deeply mindful of others.  He carried the note requesting the prayers of the congregation in his pocket all day; and the soul in distress, which a single tender petition might have soothed, and perhaps have saved from despair or fatal error, found no voice in the temple to plead for it before the Throne of Mercy!

* * * * *

THE GREAT LAKES.

If, as is believed by many statisticians, the census of 1860 should show that the centre of population and power in these United States is steadily advancing westward, and that by the year 1880 it will be at some point on the Great Lakes, then, certainly, the history and resources of those inland seas cannot fail to be interesting to the general reader.

It happens that the Indian traditions of this region possess more of the coherence of history than those of other parts of the country; and, as preserved by Schoolcraft and embalmed in the poetry of Longfellow, they show well enough by the side of the early traditions of other primitive peoples.  The conquest of the Lake-shore region by San-ge-man and his Ojibwas may be as trustworthy a tale as the exploits of Romulus and Remus; and when we emerge into the light of European record, we find the Jesuit missionaries preaching the gospel at St. Ignace and the Sault St. Mary almost as early as the so-called Cavaliers were planting tobacco at Jamestown, or the Pilgrims smiting the heathen at Plymouth.

The first white persons who penetrated into the Upper Lake region were two young fur-traders who left Montreal for that purpose in 1654, and remained two years among the Indian tribes on those shores.  We are not informed of the details of this journey; but it appears that they returned with information relative to Lake Superior, and perhaps Lake Michigan and Green Bay; for in 1659 the fur-traders are known to have extended their traffic to that bay.  The first settlement of Wisconsin may be dated in 1665, when Claude Allouez established a mission at La Pointe on Lake Superior.  This was before Philadelphia was founded by William Penn.