It was a life, once these men left the mission house of Notre Dame des Anges, that was without the slightest social intercourse, that was beyond the prizes of any earthly ambition, that was frequently in imminence of torture and death, and that was usually in physical discomfort if not in pain. Obscure and constant toil for tender hands, solitude, suffering, privation, death--these made up the portion of the messengers of the faith who turned their faces toward the wilderness, their steps into the gloom of the forests, pathless except for the traces of the feet of savages and wild beasts. For it is twenty-five years after that memorable day when Le Caron first said mass on the shores of one of the Great Lakes (Champlain being present) before the farthermost shore of the farthest lake is reached by these patient and valorous pilgrims of the west. The story of that heroic journey, of the consecration of those forests and waters and clearings by suffering and unselfish ministry, fills many volumes (forty in the French edition and seventy-two in the edition recently published in the United States, the English translation being presented on the pages opposite the Latin or French originals). There is material in them for many chapters of a new-world "Odyssey." To these "Relations," as they were called, we owe the great body of information we have concerning New France, from 1603 in Acadia to the early part of the eighteenth century in the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Valleys; for they who wrote them were not priests alone, they were at the same time explorers, scientists, historical students, ethnologists (the first and best-fitted students of the North American Indian), physicians to the bodies as well as ministers to the souls of those wild creatures. There was a time when these "Relations," as they came from the famous press of Cramoisy, were eagerly awaited and devoured, and were everywhere the themes of enthusiastic discussion in circles of high devotion in Paris and throughout France, where it is doubtless believed by many to-day that the borders of the lakes which the authors of these "Relations" traversed are still possessed by Indians, or at best by half-civilized, half- barbaric peoples who would stand agape in the Louvre as the Goths stood before the temples and the statues of Rome.