itskin, Chippewaian, Beaver, Slavis, Dog Rib, and
Loucheux.

Bishop Grouard is an exegete and printer of no mean order, having
translated the service book of the Catholic Church into seven languages
and printed them himself. I do not know if the printing press he
brought into these northern fastnesses was the very first, but if not,
it was assuredly the second, for there is only one other.

What these books have meant to the tribes it is not for mere
terrestrial folk to say, but if the Catholic doctrine of supererogatory
works be a reasonable and true one, of a surety it is a splendid
balance that is laid up to the good bishop's account. In the more
southerly provinces, where people like books, it is an easy matter for
messieurs the publishers to roll out scores of editions to the greedy
public, but up here in the north publishing a book becomes both a joke
and a tragedy. In the first place, people do not care for books; in
the second, the people do not know the alphabet.

This was how Bishop Grouard came to build schools for the children. He
had to teach the Indians to read. If you care to you may go to the
school across the bishop's driveway and see the children. There are
hundreds of them, or even more, but if you wait awhile we will go
together, for they are giving a play to-night, and at this moment are
rehearsing their parts. It was Sister Egbert and Sister Ignatius who
wrote the play; the theme, I have heard, is an incident in the life of
the bishop.

But it takes a long time to learn reading; besides, there are many
distractions. And then the older folk whose eyes are smoke-dimmed by
the tepee fires may never hope to con the letters. It were ill
reasoning to suppose so. For these people who are less literate the
kind bishop painted pictures of angels on the walls and on the ceiling
of the church, and he made one of the Crucifixion, over the altar, a
glowing canvas instinct with living reality. The onlooker may truly
say of this what Ruskin said of Raphael's "Transfiguration": "It goes
directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name."

If you have lived long in the north you will have been wondering this
while back how our workaday ecclesiastic got his materials into
Grouard. How came his printing press, his type, his canvass, and his
paints? Where did this man get the furniture for his schools, his
hospitals, his church? Where did he get the boards for all these
buildings?

The