10 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

cannot compare with, what Catholics regard as the
genuine article. How abstruse its reasoning and pro-
found every part of its syllogism building and argu-
mentation! Kant’s and some other like thinkers’
works are almost child’s play in comparison to it.

It was at that time all the harder, as scholars had
to go in one year through what it now takes two years
to learn. Without counting that the whole curricu-
lum, text book, recitations by the pupil and explana-
tions by the professor, are in Latin, English being
inadequate to the task of rendering the psychological
niceties often met with, especially in an author like
Sanseverino, who has remained famous for his provok-
ing abstruseness, consequent on forced conciseness.

Brother Morice not only enjoyed the abstract char-
acter of the subjects to be assimilated, but he managed
to find time for quite a few personal studies and free
readings. In fact, he to-day confesses that he then
spent much of his time on items which were altogether
foreign to the scholastic studies.

To such an extent was this true that a schoolmate
of his, the late Father Grandfils, O.M.I., twenty years
later made him feel quite uneasy in presence of Arch-
bishop Duhamel, of Ottawa, by confiding to that
prelate Brother Morice’s past misdeeds in that line.

‘How often did I wish I had his facility for
learning!’’ he declared. ‘‘Almost to the last five
minutes of the study-time, he would busy himself with
all kinds of other work, then take up his philosophy
book, and . . . he would always know his
lessons. ''**

There may be some little exaggeration in this last
remark, if we are to believe Father Morice himself.
Nevertheless, a little incident which occurred near

15 This was at Hull, P.Q., in the course of 1896.