Think of what it was that Father Orin and his partner did! They had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over a strip of country which was more than fifty miles wide and little less than four hundred miles long. This lay on both sides of the Ohio River, much of it being the trackless forest, so that Father Orin and Toby used the Shawnee Crossing oftener than the Shawnees themselves. They went unharmed, too, where no other pioneers ever dared go. Some mysterious power seemed to protect them, as the rude cross drawn on a cabin door is said to have saved the inmates from the savages. Father Orin and Toby thus travelled about two hundred miles each week all the year through, without stopping for heat or cold. There was only one church when they first began their labors, and this was the little log chapel; but the members of that small and widely scattered congregation were served with the offices of their religion by the priest at many private houses which were far apart and called "stations." There were about thirty of these in Kentucky, several in Indiana and Illinois, and one or two in Tennessee, and Father Orin and Toby visited them all, some as often as once a month and the others as often as possible. To say Mass and to preach constituted but a part of the duty which called them from place to place. They went wherever the priest was needed to administer baptism to infants or older persons; they went wherever any one, old or young, required instruction in religion; they went wherever the priest was needed to hear confession; they went far and wide, so that the priest might solemnize marriage for Protestants as well as Catholics; they visited the sick, no matter how distant, in summer and in winter alike, and Toy day or by night; they went at any summons to bury the dead; and they tried to go again, so that the priest might do what he could to comfort the living. Yet with all this untiring zeal for the soul's welfare, there was also a ceaseless care for the body's welfare, and a divine disregard of any narrow line of faith; for wherever Toby carried Father Orin that good man's heart was always moved by compassion for any distress of mind, body, or estate, always overflowing with a deep, wide pity infinitely greater and more Christian than any creed.