Thompson. His mind, to his great
perplexity, seemed to turn more upon incongruities than upon his real
mission there. That is, to Thompson they seemed incongruities. The
little things that go to make up a whole were each impinging upon him
with a force he could not understand. He could not, for instance, tell
why he thought only with difficulty, with extreme haziness, of the
great good he desired to accomplish at Lone Moose, and found his
attention focussing sharply upon the people, their manner of speech,
their surroundings, even upon so minor a detail as a smudge of flour
upon the hand that Mrs. Lachlan extended to him. She was a fat,
dusky-skinned woman, apparently regarding Thompson with a feeling akin
to awe. The entire family, which numbered at least nine souls, spoke in
the broad dialect of their paternal ancestors from the heather country
overseas.

Thompson spent an hour there, an hour which was far from conducive to a
cheerful survey of the field wherein his spiritual labors would lie.
Aside from Sam Carr, who appeared to be looked upon as the Nestor of the
village, the Lachlans were the only persons who either spoke or
understood a word of English. And Thompson found himself more or less
tongue-tied with them, unable to find any common ground of intercourse.
They were wholly illiterate. As a natural consequence the world beyond
the Athabasca region was as much of an unknown quantity to them as the
North had been to Thompson before he set foot in it--as much of its
needs and customs were yet, for that matter. The Lachlan virtues of
simplicity and kindliness were overcast by obvious dirt and a general
slackness. In so far as religion went if they were--as Breyette had
stated--fond of preachers, it was manifestly because they looked upon a
preacher as a very superior sort of person, and not because of his
gospel message.

For when Mrs. Lachlan hospitably brewed a cup of tea and Thompson took
the opportunity of making his customary prayer before food an appeal
for divine essence to be showered upon these poor sinful creatures of
earth, the Lachlan family rose from its several knees with an air of
some embarrassing matter well past. And they hastened to converse
volubly upon the weather and the mosquitoes and Sam Carr's garden and a
new canoe that Lachlan's boys were building, and such homely interests.
As to church and service they were utterly dumb, patently unable to
follow Thompson's drift when he spoke of t