of being snowed in all winter.
It was not until April that he reached what he called his Mission of the
Immaculate Conception, on the Illinois River, through snow, and water
and mud, hunger and misery. He preached until after Easter, when, his
strength being exhausted, Pierre and Jacques undertook to carry him home
to the Mission of St. Ignace. Marquette had been two years away from his
palisaded station on the north shore, and nine years in the New World.

It was the 19th of May, and Pierre and Jacques were paddling their canoe
along the east side of that great lake known now as Michigan. A creek
parted the rugged coast, and dipping near its shallow mouth they looked
anxiously at each other.

"What shall we do?" whispered Jacques.

"We must get on as fast as we can," answered Pierre.

They were gaunt and weather-beaten themselves from two years' tramping
the wilderness. But their eyes dwelt most piteously on the dying man
stretched in the bottom of the canoe. His thin fingers held a cross.
His white face and bright hair rested on a pile of blankets. Pierre and
Jacques felt that no lovelier, kinder being than this scarcely breathing
missionary would ever float on the blue water under that blue sky.

He opened his eyes and saw the creek they were slipping past, and a
pleasant knoll beside it, and whispered:--

"There is the place of my burial."

"But, Father," pleaded Pierre, "it is yet early in the day. We can take
you farther."

"Carry me ashore here," he whispered again.

So they entered the creek and took him ashore, building a fire and
sheltering him as well as they could. There a few hours afterward he
died, the weeping men holding up his cross before him, while he thanked
the Divine Majesty for letting him die a poor missionary. When he could
no longer speak, they repeated aloud the prayers he had taught them.

They left him buried on that shore with a large cross standing over his
grave. Later his Indians removed his bones to the Mission of St. Ignace,
with a procession of canoes and a priest intoning. They were placed
under the altar of his own chapel. If you go to St. Ignace, you may see
a monument now on that spot, and people have believed they traced the
foundation of the old bark chapel. But the spot where he first lay was
long venerated.

A great fur trader and pioneer named Gurdon Hubbard made this record
about the place, which he visited in 1818:--

"We reached Marquette River, about where