46 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

asked how he could have acquired without any printed
aid all that knowledge; how he could have put down,
classified and clearly defined all those words and
found out and formulated the hundreds upon hundreds
of rules which govern them. Of course, apart from his
facility for learning languages, taste and labour must
have been at the bottom of it all. He had to guess
everything; but he did not do it in one or two, five or
even ten years. After he had made a discovery,
another would suddenly, and often quite unexpectedly,
spring up in front of his wondering mind. It was
mostly a subjective work of deduction on the part of
the scholar.

For, as far as the natives themselves were con-
cerned, few of them could be of any use to him. He
would sometimes ask in broken French or English,
when not in Carrier itself, how to say this or that.
Without really grasping his meaning, the bystander
would give him an expression which the priest would
immediately and gratefully note down with the great-
est care, and then use on the first occasion which
presented itself. A roar of laughter would at times
meet his use of the precious word so carefully recorded.

“What is the matter? Why do you laugh so?”
he would then ask those present, who would answer:
“If you only understood what you say! It’s too
funny for anything. You surely don’t mean that.”’

“But you, Johnny, you gave me that word with
the sense in which I now use it,”’ the priest insisted,
pointing to one of his hearers.

“By no means; you are mistaken. You did not
write it down properly,’’ would rejoin Mr. Indian, who
would never admit his own negligence or ignorance in
the presence of others.

“In this way,’’ remarked Father Morice, ‘I learned