ted; and
finally did not do it. I found afterwards that there was no post-office
at Green Bay. A carrier, sent by the officers of the fort and villagers,
brought mail from Chicago. He had two hundred miles of wilderness to
traverse, and his blankets and provisions as well as the mail to carry;
and he did this at the risk of his life among wild men and beasts.

The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me. I never ceased
to love the sacrifice of the mass, which was an abomination and an
idolatrous practice to Pastor Storrs. The pageantry of the Roman Church
that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the
Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and
knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England
Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me,
churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at
all.

When the Episcopal Bishop of New York showed me kindness, and Pastor
Storrs warned me against being proselyted, I could not tell him the
charm in the form of worship practiced by the woman I loved. There was
not a conscious minute when I forgot her. Yet nobody in Longmeadow knew
of her existence. In my most remorseful days, comparing myself with
Pastor Storrs, I was never sorry I had clung to her and begged her not
to let me go alone. For some of our sins are so honestly the expression
of nature that justification breaks through them.

On the western border there was trouble with dissatisfied Indians, and
on the sea there was trouble with the British, so that people began to
talk of war long before it was declared, and to blame President Madison
for his over-caution in affairs. A battle was fought at Tippecanoe in
the Indiana Territory, which silenced the Indians for a while. But every
one knew that the English stood behind them. Militia was mustered, the
army recruited, and embargo laid upon shipping in the ports, and all
things were put forward in April of that year, before war was declared
in June.

I had influence with our tribes. The Government offered me a well paid
commission to act as its secret agent. Pastor Storrs and the Williamses,
who had been nurturing a missionary, were smitten with grief to see him
rise and leap into camps and fields, eager for the open world, the
wilderness smell; the council, where the red man's mind, a trembling
balance, could be turned by vivid language; eager, in fac