1. Naspich
    2. Very
    3. ne
    4. I
    5. ke
    6. was
    7. muchepimatisin
    8. bad
    9. wāskuch
    10. formerly
    11. numa
    12. not
    13. kākwan
    14. anything
    15. ne
    16. I
    17. kiskāletān
    18. know it
    19. piko
    20. only
    21. Muchemuneto
    22. the devil
    23. ishpish
    24. as long as
    25. ka
    26. I
    27. primatiseyan;
    28. lived
    29. misew ā ililewuk
    30. all the Indians
    31. ne
    32. I
    33. ke wapumowuk
    34. saw them
    35. moshuk
    36. always
    37. ā muchepima.
    38. they being
    39. tisitchik,
    40. wicked
    41. ā notenittochik,
    42. when they fight with each other
    43. ā keshkwāpāchik,
    44. when they get drunk
    45. ā mukoshāchik,
    46. when they feast
    47. ā mitāwitchik,
    48. when they conjure
    49. ā kosapatutik,
    50. when they pretend to prophesy
    51. ā kelaskitchik;
    52. when they lie
    53. muskumāö wewa,
    54. he takes from him by force his wife
    55. nutopowuk,
    56. they ask for liquor
    57. naspich,
    58. much
    59. saketowuk,
    60. they like it
    61. utawāwuk,
    62. they buy it
    63. kimotaskāwuk
    64. they rob (other) people’s lands
    65. kisewahaö
    66. he angers them
    67. weche ililewa,
    68. his fellow Indians,
    69. naspich
    70. very
    71. tapwā
    72. truly
    73. ke muhepimatisewuk.
    74. they were wicked.

These sentences will illustrate the peculiar structure of the Indian tongue, which, with its ‘sesquipedalian compounds,’ as Professor Max Müller calls them, might deter almost any student from the attempt to master it. Bishop Horden, with great patience, perseverance, and thoroughness, compiled a grammar of the Cree language, which appeared about this time, and in which we are, step by step, introduced to a system complete in the mechanism of all its parts. Words that seem all confusion gradually assume their proper forms. Around the verb, which is the most important factor in the formation of those polysyllabic words, cluster all the other ideas. They are glued on to it, so to speak. That which with us would be a whole sentence is accumulated in the Cree into a long compound word; agent, action, object, with adverbial expletives, are all combined.

The bishop, in the midst of all his hard work when in England, now speaking for the Church Missionary Society, now pleading for his own diocese, in the midst of engagements and travel, in the midst even of his very journeyings to and fro, found time to write some of his graphic descriptive papers. We give the following true story of one of the former Coral School children, written by him in the waiting-room of a railway station, whilst expecting a train.

‘Amelia Davey was originally named Amelia Ward, and was one of the children of the Coral Fund. She got on with her learning very well, could read and write English creditably, and spoke English as well as if she had been an English girl, instead of a Cree. At the age of about nineteen she married a young Indian named James Okune Shesh; and, after about three years of married life, lost him through disease and starvation, she herself narrowly escaping death.

‘Some time afterwards she married another Indian, named Solomon Davey, a good steady man, who was to her an excellent husband. Last autumn they left Moose Factory with their children, accompanied by Davey’s old father and mother, for their winter hunting-grounds. For a time all went well, fish and rabbits supplying the daily needs of the family; the food gradually, however, failed, until scarcely any was obtainable. Day after day Solomon went off to seek supplies; evening after evening he returned bringing little or nothing. The party now determined to make their way to Moose; there they knew their wants would be relieved, but Solomon’s strength entirely broke down, and they were obliged to place him on a sledge, which was hauled by his mother; thus they moved painfully forward. The poor fellow was covered up as well as possible. He seemed very quiet; his mother went to him to assure herself that all was right; but the spirit had fled. The brave good Indian, who had done his best to supply the wants of those dependent on him, had perished in the attempt. Fresh trouble came; Amelia’s time had come for the arrival of another baby; camp was made, and a little unsuspecting mortal was ushered into the world.

‘How they lived I know not; but two days after the child’s birth, Amelia, tying up her little one, and placing it on her back, and putting her snow-shoes on her feet, essayed to walk to Moose, still eighteen miles distant. Bravely she stepped out; her own life as well as the lives of those she left behind depended on her reaching it. She slept once; the bitter cold seemed anxious to make her its victim, but the morning still beheld the thin spare form alive, and, asking God to give her the strength she so sorely needed, she struggled on again.

‘Presently the houses of Moose make their appearance, but they are far, far off. Can they be reached? It seems scarcely possible, but the effort is made, the necessary strength is supplied, and she finds herself in a house, with Christian hands and Christian hearts to minister to her necessities.

‘But can this poor wrinkled old woman, apparently sixty years of age, be the bright, well-favoured, cheerful Amelia of thirty? The very same. What you see has been produced by the cold and want; and how about the babe? Well, the dear little baby was well and strong; the Christian mother had preserved it with the greatest imaginable care, and it was to her, doubtless, all the more dear from the terrible circumstances under which it was born.

‘Parties were at once sent off to those left behind, with food and other necessaries, and all were brought to Moose, where they were kindly and abundantly cared for. The last thing Solomon did last autumn was to go to the Rev. J. H. Keen, and purchase for himself a Cree New Testament to take with him to his hunting-grounds.’

Other stories the bishop told or wrote, too many for the size of the present volume. There was David Anderson, one of the many lambs of the Bishop of Rupertsland’s flock, whose arm was shattered by an accidental gunshot, and for whom a false arm was sent out from England. This arm for a time he would not use, because he thought it wrong thus to supplement a limb of which ‘God had seen fit to deprive him!’ There was the devoted wife of the dying hunter (Jacob Matamashkum), who saved him in the last pangs of starvation by applying his lips to her own breast. There was the aged grandmother (good old Widow Charlotte), who took the dead daughter’s babe and nourished it at her bosom thirty years after her own last child had been born. There was Richard, son of the Widow Charlotte, who was ‘a famous fisherwoman’ even after she had become a great grandmother. The son was a delicate young man, who had largely depended on her for subsistence. He married and fell ill. The poor wife on the morning before he died ruptured a blood-vessel in driving in a tent-peg, and was carried to the grave just a month after him. There were the starving parents, who, having lost their two youngest children from hunger, set off with the remaining two for the nearest station, a hundred miles away, to get food. The wife drew the sledge on which the children lay, while the husband walked in front to break a road in the snow for her, till at last his strength failed, and he could go no further. She, however, set up a little tent for him, and hastened on. She might yet get help in time to save him. She reached Albany, and sank unconscious. But friends were at hand—the children, scarcely alive, were taken from the sledge. The mother recovered to say where her husband lay. A party went in search of him; he was dead, and the body was hard frozen.