How nobly they lived makes the body of the book, how serenely they died forms the end to it.  It is a tale which cannot even now be read without a shudder—­a nightmare of horrors.  Fanaticism may brace a man to hurl himself into oblivion, as the Mahdi’s hordes did before Khartoum, but one feels that it is at least a higher development of such emotion, where men slowly and in cold blood endure so thankless a life, and welcome so dreadful an end.  Every faith can equally boast its martyrs—­a painful thought, since it shows how many thousands must have given their blood for error—­but in testifying to their faith these brave men have testified to something more important still, to the subjugation of the body and to the absolute supremacy of the dominating spirit.

The story of Father Jogue is but one of many, and yet it is worth recounting, as showing the spirit of the men.  He also was on the Iroquois Mission, and was so tortured and mutilated by his sweet parishioners that the very dogs used to howl at his distorted figure.  He made his way back to France, not for any reason of personal rest or recuperation, but because he needed a special dispensation to say Mass.  The Catholic Church has a regulation that a priest shall not be deformed, so that the savages with their knives had wrought better than they knew.  He received his dispensation and was sent for by Louis XIV., who asked him what he could do for him.  No doubt the assembled courtiers expected to hear him ask for the next vacant Bishopric.  What he did actually ask for, as the highest favour, was to be sent back to the Iroquois Mission, where the savages signalized his arrival by burning him alive.

Parkman is worth reading, if it were only for his account of the Indians.  Perhaps the very strangest thing about them, and the most unaccountable, is their small numbers.  The Iroquois were one of the most formidable of tribes.  They were of the Five Nations, whose scalping-parties wandered over an expanse of thousands of square miles.  Yet there is good reason to doubt whether the whole five nations could have put as many thousand warriors in the field.  It was the same with all the other tribes of Northern Americans, both in the east, the north, and the west.  Their numbers were always insignificant.  And yet they had that huge country to themselves, the best of climates, and plenty of food.  Why was it that they did not people it thickly?  It may be taken as a striking example of the purpose and design which run through the affairs of men, that at the very moment when the old world was ready to overflow the new world was empty to receive it.  Had North America been peopled as China is peopled, the Europeans might have founded some settlements, but could never have taken possession of the continent.  Buffon has made the striking remark that the creative power appeared to have never had great vigour in America.  He alluded to the abundance of the flora and fauna as compared with that of other great divisions of