6 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

according to the stranger, his people were so timid that
the lighting of a match would put them to flight, did
not make an impression on the youth or stimulate
in'him any special zeal.

Things were different when Bishop Vital-Justin
Grandin, O.M.I., the saintly apostle of the Western
Canada Crees and Dénés, spoke to the seminarians.
The evident holiness of the speaker, his unconcealed
love for his twofold flock, and his quite apparent wish
to win some of his hearers over to his poor mission,
nay, the very circumstances that he would not spare
them details of the difficult life in store for those who
would follow him, immediately struck the fancy of
young Mr. Morice."

“That is what I want! To work and suffer for
souls, to battle among, and conquer, the lowly of
America, that is my vocation,” he said to himself.

Whereupon he enquired of the venerable visitor
what he had to do to be one day his disciple. As a
consequence of this inquiry, he prepared himself for
what the Oblates call the Juniorate, an institution of
learning situated just at the opposite extremity of
France, in Lorraine.

The fall of 1874 saw him at Notre-Dame de Sion,
the seat of a famous pilgrimage some thirty miles from
Nancy. Sion is probably so called after the Davidical
mount in Palestine, because its site is an eminence, or
hill, locally called a mountain. Intimately connected
with the former seat of the counts of Vaudémont, two
or three miles off, it has quite a history, while, from a
topographical standpoint, the place is unique.

Mount Sion stands in a plain of Lorraine where-
from, on clear days, one can see the blue hills of Alsace

1” For his Life, see Monseigneur Grandin, by Rev. E. Jonquet,
O.M.1.; Montreal, 1903.