to be a hero
alone and unseen, amid not only danger but every hardship and
discouragement, is quite another matter.

The missionary to New Mexico had of course to come first from Old
Mexico,--or, before that, from Spain. Some of these quiet, gray-robed
men had already seen such wanderings and such dangers as even the
Stanleys of nowadays do not know. They had to furnish their own
vestments and church furniture, and to pay for their own transportation
from Mexico to New Mexico,--for very early a "line" of semi-annual armed
expeditions across the bitter intervening wilderness was arranged. The
fare was $266, which made serious havoc with the good man's salary of
$150 a year (at which figure the salaries remained up to 1665, when they
were raised to $330, payable every three years). It was not much like a
call to a fashionable pulpit in these times. Out of this meagre
pay--which was all the synod itself could afford to give him--he had to
pay all the expenses of himself and his church.

Arriving, after a perilous trip, in perilous New Mexico,--and the
journey and the Territory were still dangerous in the present
generation,--the missionary proceeded first to Santa Fe. His superior
there soon assigned him a parish; and turning his back on the one little
colony of his countrymen, the fray trudged on foot fifty, one hundred,
or three hundred miles, as the case might be, to his new and unknown
post. Sometimes an escort of three or four Spanish soldiers accompanied
him; but often he made that toilsome and perilous walk alone. His new
parishioners received him sometimes with a storm of arrows, and
sometimes in sullen silence. He could not speak to them, nor they to
him; and the very first thing he had to do was to learn from such
unwilling teachers their strange tongue,--a language much more difficult
to acquire than Latin, Greek, French, or German. Entirely alone among
them, he had to depend upon himself and upon the untender mercies of his
flock for life and all its necessities. If they decided to kill him,
there was no possibility of resistance. If they refused him food, he
must starve. If he became sick or crippled, there were no nurses or
doctors for him except these treacherous savages. I do not think there
was ever in history a picture of more absolute loneliness and
helplessness and hopelessness than the lives of these unheard-of
martyrs; and as for mere danger, no man ever faced greater.

The provision made for the