FATHER MORICE

1 sera the boy, Adrien Gabriel Mor-
ice, then fifteen years of age, a young
student in the ecclesiastical seminary of the
city of Mayenne, in France, heard the burn-
ing and apostolic words of Mgr. Grandin,
O.M.I., one of the great missionary bishops
cf the Canadian Northwest, who had been
visiting France in the spring of 1874, the
fixed resolution was formed in young Morice
to devote his life to the great and arduous
labor of bearing the Gospel of Christ to the
pagan Indians of Canada, then immersed
in the darkness of spiritual misery and sin.
This was a number of years before our
Dominion was spanned, from Atlantic to
Pacific, by a transcontinental railroad: so
that wnen the young seminarian, Adrien
Gabriel Morice, now twenty-one years of
age and a member of that missionary order
known as Oblates of Mary Immaculate, hav-
ing almost completed his theological studies,
started for his appointed field of labor in
British Columbia, he was obliged to go by
way of New York and San Francisco, thence
by a sea voyage of five days to Victoria, B.C.
This vast territory, with its sea of mountains,

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