ning.

At midday he cut a piece of flesh off the horse and ate it.

"A crude diet, Mon Pere," I remark.

"Oui, oui," replies the old Breton. "What you Anglais call a
'sleepshod' dinnaire! What would you, Madame? One must browse where
he is tethered."

The rescue party from Emerson met a man and boy hauling in the stricken
priest on a sledge. They had heard him sobbing in the snow.

The Indians doctored him for six weeks until his limbs threatened to
drop off, and then sent a runner to St. Boniface to ask Father Lestanc
what they would do with him. This happened fifty years ago, but Father
Lestanc must walk to the window and look out into the garden for a
while before he can trust his voice.

For men and dogs it was a round run of one hundred and forty miles from
St. Boniface to Emerson, but in twenty-four hours Goiffon lay in Bishop
Tache's palace at St. Boniface, on the banks of the Red River. Dr.
Bunn, the physician at the Hudson's Bay post across at Fort Garry,
awaited his arrival and amputated the already putrefied members. The
next morning Goiffon was found to be bleeding to death; the stitches
would not hold and the veins were open. Nothing could be done but to
calmly await the end.

Father Lestanc broke the news to the household, whereupon the sorrowing
but withal practical sister in charge of the kitchen placed a caldron
of buffalo tallow on the stove, for, explains my narrator, "a priest's
wake requires many, many candles."

The little serving-maids under the sister, doubtless whispering over
the sad happenings upstairs, forgot to watch the pot, so that it
"swelled much, Madame," over the red-hot stove till all the house was
on fire.

Do not scold the girls, but wait till I tell you. Such a thing was
never heard of. It was really Le Bon Dieu who permitted the house and
cathedral to burn. There is no doubt of it, for, when the priest
carried the dying youth out and laid him on the snow, the frost
congealed the blood so that his veins ceased to empty themselves.

This was fifty years ago, and last summer, Father Goiffon came up from
Petit Canada, near St. Paul, to attend a cathedral service at Winnipeg,
on the site of Old Fort Garry.

"Oui, Madame, oui, I comprehend when you say _similia similibus
curcantur_. Literally, eet ees a frost kills, a frost cures. Eet ees
a well thing the body ees so adaptive."

... And once Bishop Grandin was lost in the snow. It was in 1863, near
Fort Res