"The chequered and perilous existence of a Catholic missionary consecrating himself to the cure of souls in the wilds of Texas and Western America, his physical and moral struggles, are here portrayed with a vivid truthfulness well calculated to arrest the sympathy of our readers.... This book requires no further recommendation from as than the analysis here given. Since the perusal of Livingstone's Africa, we have read no traveller's journal with more instruction and pleasure. It is eminently suggestive, too." LEADER. "Domenech's tone throughout is one of profound conviction; and the hardships which he encountered, and which he relates with so much simplicity and modesty as to enforce belief, are proof that he took his mission to heart. In the two journeys he performed to America--journeys that would have supplied a diffuse book-maker with matter for many volumes, the Abbe was almost every day exposed to dangers of his life--sometimes from the climate, sometimes from the privations to which he was subjected, now from the rough character of the country he constantly compelled to traverse in his spiritual journeys, anon from the violence of colonists or Indians.... It will be seen that readers who expect an infinity of enjoyment from these missionary adventures will not be disappointed." DAILY TELEGRAPH. "The good and brave young Abbe Domenech, whose personal narrative we may at once say we have found more readable and more informing than a dozen volumes of ordinary adventure, is not unworthy to be named with Huc in the annals of missionary enterprise; and we know not how to give him higher praise. We speak of personal characteristics, and in these--in the qualifications for a life of self-denying severity, not exercised under the protecting shadow of a cloister, but in hourly conflict with danger and necessity--the one looks to us like a younger brother in likeness to the other. His account of Texas, its physical geography, its earlier and later history, its populations, settled and nomad, and of the history and customs of the Indian tribes and their forms of religious worship, is concisely full and clear; and now that the new destiny of these regions is beginning to unfold itself, we recommend to particular attention the few pages in which all that is worth knowing about their past and present condition is summed up.... To us, the pages in which the Abbe Domenech confesses the trials and sorrows of his own heart are the most interesting of his book. They bear the stamp of a perfect and most touching sincerity; and, as we read them, we are more and more impressed with the truth which they convey to all churches and all sects. It has been well said, that Heaven is a character before it is a place. The lesson which this personal narrative of a poor missionary teaches, stems to us to be that religion is a life before it is a dogma."