BENEFACTOR 95

-antly exclaims that he is still alive after thirty years or
_ more.

But he had to quit, very much against his will,

as we shall see later on.

Might not that necessity have also been particularly
due to the imprudences of which he was guilty during
many years of his sojourn at Stuart Lake? We have
just seen what his usual fare was; it is not useless to
add that, in the matter of bodily comfort in winter,
even when at home, he was no better off. In order
to give a faithful idea of how he then passed his nights
after he had so abstemiously and so laboriously spent
his days, we may as well remark that, for the sake of
sparing the price of a stove in his bedroom, he would,
each winter, go through something like three weeks,
that is, over twenty nights (not, of course, strictly in
succession) without any sleep because of the extreme
cold, which no amount of covering would remedy.

With no fire all night except in a little kitchen stove,
which very soon went out, he would get up all be-
numbed in the morning, when the water of his wash
basin was frozen hard to the bottom, and, as he had to
be in the church at a given time, all he could do to
clean himself was to pass his hands over the ice, an
operation which was completed after Mass, when he
had had time to make a fire, and get some water.
Such were the results of his economizing disposition!

All this was for the sake of his Indians, and they
knew it and loved him all the more for it. They had,
however, other reasons to feel attached to him and
think highly of him; namely, his frequent and always
successful interventions on their behalf with the civil
authorities. We could record quite a number of
instances of these, which gained for him such a tre-
mendous power over the whole North that he literally