"On account of little Pauline." XVII. NISI DOMINUS. Quebec was the centre of missionary labor for years before our Atlantic coast was thoroughly settled. The church of San Domingo is older, having been founded in 1614. That of Mexico dates from 1524, and that of Havana was established at an earlier epoch still. But none of these can be said to have exercised the same influence which distinguished the city of Champlain. From Quebec came forth nearly all the missionaries who evangelized the west and north-west. The children of Asisi and Loyola, whose names are immortalized in the pages of Bancroft, all set forth on their perilous wanderings under instructions issued from the venerable college whose ruins are still seen beneath the shadow of Cape Diamond. In the list of priests who resided at Quebec on the 1st October, 1674, is found the name of Jacques Marquette. Little did that modest man then dream of the glory which was soon to be attached to his labors and explorations. By the discovery of the Mississippi not only did he add a vast territory to the realms of his King, but he opened an immense field to the zeal of his Bishop, and extended the boundaries of the diocese of Quebec by thousands upon thousands of miles. Thus it happens that Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Louisville, and all our Western cities, though they did not then exist, now occupy ground which was under the jurisdiction of the great Bishop, Francois Laval de Montmorenci, who was first raised to the See of Quebec two hundred years ago. It is no stretch of fancy, but the literal truth--and the picture is a grand one--that when Laval stood on the steps of his high altar, in that venerable fane which has since been raised to the rank of a basilica, he could wave his crozier over a whole continent, from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Red River of the North to the waters of Chesapeake Bay. Time has passed since then, and religion has progressed in such astonishing rates that sixty-two dioceses are at present said to have sprung from the single old diocese of Quebec.