What these books have meant to the tribes it is not for mere terrestrial folk to say, but if the Catholic doctrine of supererogatory works be a reasonable and true one, of a surety it is a splendid balance that is laid up to the good bishop's account. In the more southerly provinces, where people like books, it is an easy matter for messieurs the publishers to roll out scores of editions to the greedy public, but up here in the north publishing a book becomes both a joke and a tragedy. In the first place, people do not care for books; in the second, the people do not know the alphabet.
This was how Bishop Grouard came to build schools for the children. He had to teach the Indians to read. If you care to you may go to the school across the bishop's driveway and see the children. There are hundreds of them, or even more, but if you wait awhile we will go together, for they are giving a play to-night, and at this moment are rehearsing their parts. It was Sister Egbert and Sister Ignatius who wrote the play; the theme, I have heard, is an incident in the life of the bishop.
But it takes a long time to learn reading; besides, there are many distractions. And then the older folk whose eyes are smoke-dimmed by the tepee fires may never hope to con the letters. It were ill reasoning to suppose so. For these people who are less literate the kind bishop painted pictures of angels on the walls and on the ceiling of the church, and he made one of the Crucifixion, over the altar, a glowing canvas instinct with living reality. The onlooker may truly say of this what Ruskin said of Raphael's "Transfiguration": "It goes directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name."
If you have lived long in the north you will have been wondering this while back how our workaday ecclesiastic got his materials into Grouard. How came his printing press, his type, his canvass, and his paints? Where did this man get the furniture for his schools, his hospitals, his church? Where did he get the boards for all these buildings?
The boards, curious person, were cut at his own saw-mill, from which boards he fashioned the furniture with his hands. "But how," you persist, "did he bring the machinery for his sawmill?"
That was easy; he brought it here in a steamboat. Any one could tell you that.
"But where did he get the steamboat?"
Oh! he built the boat himself—the first steamboat on the Lesser Slave Lake. In it, if he cared, he could carry his printing press and his canvases also.
It will not be surprising if the historians of the future appraise Bishop Grouard's combination of wisdom and action as something keenly akin to genius. Indeed, they are almost sure to.
I cannot tell you what the anniversary services meant—it cannot be expected of any one who is versed in the Thirty-nine Articles of the English Church instead of the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin—but I came away from them with languorous impressions of golden robes, silver censers, and wavering lights, the odour of lilies and lilacs that wilted in the heat; a suspended cross with an agonized Christ, wan and attenuated; of purple and scarlet cloths, of dark-haired young priests, husky and brown-skinned. There were other things like a shepherd's crook, and smoke of incense, but, most of all, there was a music that mothered you and stayed with you. In some way or other these old plaintive songs of Egypt seem fitted to the boreal regions, but why I cannot explain.