s yet no
Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton.
The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide
the field between them.

The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure
than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had
two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade
Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the
wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan
scribe merely as "a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the
Portage." In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between
his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago,
only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is
literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world's map has
ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his
sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we
might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from
London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson's
Bay forts, and substituting for Europe's vineyards and pleasant vales an
unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.

We are told that Bishop Bompas's father was Dicken's prototype for
Sergeant Buzfuz. A new vista would open up to the counsel for Mrs.
Bardell could he turn from his chops and tomato-sauce to follow the
forty-years' wandering in the wilderness of this splendid man of God,
who succeeded, if ever man succeeds, in following Paul's advice of
keeping his body under.

Bishops Bompas was one of the greatest linguists the Mother Country ever
produced. Steeped in Hebrew and the classics when he entered the
Northland, he immediately set himself to studying the various native
languages, becoming thoroughly master of the Slavi, Beaver, Dog-Rib, and
Tukudk dialects. When Mrs. Bompas sent him a Syriac testament and
lexicon, he threw himself with characteristic energy into the study of
that tongue. There is something in the picture of this devoted man
writing Gospels in Slavi, primers in Dog-Rib, and a Prayer Book in
syllabic Chipewyan, which brings to mind the figure of Caxton bending
his silvered head over the blocks of the first printing-press in the old
Almonry so many years before. What were the "libraries" in which this
Arctic Apostle did his work? The floor of a scow on t