The invitation was gladly accepted, and Charles Raymbault, with Isaac Jogues as his companion, set out on this long and arduous journey. After crossing Lake Huron, which occupied seventeen days, they arrived at the straits which connect it with Lake Superior, where two thousand persons were met to receive them. Making known, on their part, the religion of Christ, they heard of Indian nations eighteen days’ journey still further to the west—the far-famed Sioux—with fixed abodes, and who cultivated maize and tobacco, but whose race and language were unknown. The chiefs of the Chippewas received the envoys of Christianity with kindness, and invited them to remain. Raymbault, after languishing a year in consumption, returned to Quebec to die. Jogues was ascending the St. Lawrence with Ahasistari and other Huron chiefs, when a war-party of Mohawks, enemies alike to the French and the Hurons, lying in wait for them, attacked them as they approached the shore to land. Jogues might have escaped, but he would not desert his companions, some of whom were unbaptized converts. The brave and noble-hearted Ahasistari had already fled to a secure covert, when seeing Jogues in the hands of the enemy, he came forth, saying, “My brother, I made an oath to thee that I would share thy fortune, whether life or death; here am I to keep my word.” The captives were marched away in triumph to the Mohawk country. In three successive villages Jogues was compelled to run the gauntlet; on one of which dreadful occasions he rejoiced his soul by “a vision of the glory of the Queen of Heaven.” Again, when consumed with hunger and thirst, an ear of Indian corn on the stalk being thrown to him, he found cause of exultation in the few drops of water contained in the curl of the leaf, because they sufficed to baptize two captive neophytes! The brave Ahasistari perished in the flames, having received absolution, “with all the courage of a Christian martyr and the stoicism of an Indian chief.” A young Indian convert too, having marked the sign of the cross on an infant’s brow, was struck with a tomahawk, in the belief that he was aiming to destroy the child by a charm. Jogues expected a similar fate, but his life was spared; and roaming through the forest of the Mohawk, he carved the cross and the name of Christ on the bark of trees; and advancing thus to the confines of the Mohawk country, was ransomed by Van Cuyler, the Dutch commandant of Albany, on the Hudson. To reach Canada again Jogues was obliged to return to France. He was shipwrecked however, on the English coast near Falmouth, and falling into hands as merciless as the Iroquois, was plundered by wreckers even of the clothes from his back. Father Bressani, another Jesuit—who on his way from the Hurons was taken captive by the Iroquois, and having seen his companion furnish a cannibal feast, was stripped and ill-used till his life only was left—was saved also by the humanity of the Dutch.