MISSIONARY 25

find therein much land to clear, but work is what you
want. Set out, therefore, to labour with courage and
perseverance. Provide yourself with a good dose of
patience and zeal for the greater glory of God and the
salvation of souls. Break up, sow and cultivate the
best you can and ask the Almighty to bless your
labours.’”!

It was not without reason that Father Morice was
warned to ‘provide himself with a good dose of
patience” if he wanted to succeed; for the Indians
who were entrusted to his care in the beginning of
1883 were then by far the least amenable to Chris-
tianity and civilization of the whole province, though
they were not by any means unknown to the whites.
Indeed, they were but too well-known to them.

In 1863, when the white men were at work upon
the trail between the seacoast and Fort Alexander,
on the middle Fraser, they were assailed by those
aborigines, who killed twenty-one of their party of
twenty-four. A few days only after the first visit
which Father Morice paid them, two of their young
men shot with their rifles two Chinamen who declined
to lodge them for the night. The murderers were
arrested and underwent their trial at Clinton, and,
when the questions usual in such circumstances were
asked, one of the Indians impatiently remarked:

“Why all this questioning? I told you and repeat
that it is I who killed the Chinamen. My father
died by the rope; by the rope I want to die!’”

The brothers of the murderers deserved also to be
arrested for their depredations against the whites.
Moreover, during his interrogatory, one of the two

1 Morice, Au Pays de l’Ours Noir, p. 1; Paris, 1897,

‘ fame was the son of one of those who had to suffer for the massacre
o ‘