age in a heart-beat and die.

If I had realized at the start this was to be a chapter on the
outstanding personalities among the missionary priests, I would have
begun differently. I would have said that the Anglo-Saxon hungers for
heroes, but that the heroes were rare--that this was why the raw,
ragged wolf-land lying about the Hudson Bay and along the stretches of
the Mackenzie River was of deep and peculiar interest, in that it had
the distinction of producing crops of heroes and that the breed never
seemed to run out.

I would have said that the story of the northern priest is the story of
a man with an ideal, or, if you will have it so, with a dream; that the
dream is one that disturbs his ease and leads him in perils often.

I would have gone further and shown this boy o' dreams to be at the
same time a supreme realist and, without question, one of the highest
types of human excellence in the last half-century; that he has the
dauntless spirit of the soldier, the enthusiasm of the explorer, the
enterprise of the merchant, and the patriotism of the statesman, and
all for the sole object of helping humanity. In a word, that he is a
special soul and must not be judged as general.

It is to be regretted I did not begin this way, but, to quote the Roman
governor who gave judgment concerning the Nazarene: "What I have
written, I have written."

... Among the missionary priests of the North there is, to-day, no
greater outstanding personality than Bishop Stringer of the diocese of
the Mackenzie River.

I used to know him years agone when he was Isaac Stringer, divinity
student, a lusty young fellow, lean and clean and strong of wind, who
could carry a ball down the field past all antagonists and send it
spinning through the goal. When I say he has grown stout since those
days, you must not make the deduction that he is under-worked and
overfed like other bishops of whom we have heard tell. On the contrary
part, north of 53 deg. it is our profligate custom to starve all
dignitaries. Indeed, it was only last winter that Bishop Stringer, on
his way across the divide from the Mackenzie River to the Yukon, nearly
lost his life from starvation. He and his companion, Charles F.
Johnson, were lost in a mountain fog and missed the trail. Southern
folk who sit in offices and parlours do not grasp the full meaning of
this, and I cannot very well explain except to say that Dante had an
exceedingly fine insight when he