any noise, the prayer, " From all danger, rain and hail, deliver us, O Lord!" escaped my trembling lips involuntarily. Thank heaven, the Almighty heard our humble supplication; every day he gave us fine weather, though bitter cold. My greatest fear every morning was that my companion would bring word that our horses were dead of cold or hunger in those bleak and sterile tracts. Had this loss befallen us, our misfortune would have been complete. I put myself and all belonging to me under the special protection of our good and amiable patroness, the Blessed Virgin Immaculate, and I often reminded her, with filial confidence, that we had been committed to her care at the foot of the cross.
From day to day, my guide was the more urgent that we should abandon the lame horse so as not to be frozen for him. We had to lose a good part of the day in unloading and reloading him, because he fell at almost every step on the slippery snow; yet by care, pain, fatigue and patience, we arrived with our two horses at Fort Vermilion. Famished and almost dying as we were (having had nothing to eat for ten days, but a little bread and a prairie-hen that my companion killed by chance), sleepless and wearied to death, we reached Vermilion on the 8th of December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To express the joy that overflowed my soul on that happy day I would need write in tears, not in ink, and you could trace my feelings better than if delineated with a pen. I was at the end of hunger, cold, snow, rain, hail, tramping, and blasphemy that filled me with horror every time my companion vented his wrath on the horse or the evils we experienced. I rebuked him frequently and begged him to refrain, but in vain; the poor man had always the same excuse: " It was a second nature with him, and he meant no harm." Wretched excuse! I suffered more from his troubles and murmurs than from all the other miseries put together. To my prayers of blended hope, and fear, and anguish, succeeded now hymns of gratitude and joy. In-