game they took was devoted to Areskoui, their god, and eaten in his
honor. Jogues would not taste the meat offered to a demon; and thus he
starved in the midst of plenty. At night, when the kettle was slung,
and the savage crew made merry around their fire, he crouched in a
corner of the hut, gnawed by hunger, and pierced to the bone with
cold. They thought his presence unpropitious to their hunting, and the
women especially hated him. His demeanor at once astonished and
incensed his masters. He brought them fire-wood, like a squaw; he did
their bidding without a murmur, and patiently bore their abuse; but
when they mocked at his God, and laughed at his devotions, their slave
assumed an air and tone of authority, and sternly rebuked them.

[Footnote 51: From Chapters XVI and XX of "The Jesuits in North
America." Copyright, 1867, 1895, by Francis Parkman. Published by
Little, Brown & Company. The site of Jogues's martyrdom is near
Auriesville in the Mohawk valley, where a memorial chapel in his honor
is now maintained, the Rev. John J. Wynne, S. J., having been active
in securing and maintaining it.]

He would sometimes escape from "this Babylon," as he calls the hut,
and wander in the forest, telling his beads and repeating passages of
Scripture. In a remote and lonely spot he cut the bark in the form of
the cross from the trunk of a great tree; and here he made his
prayers. This living martyr, half-clad in shaggy furs, kneeling on the
snow among the icicled rocks and beneath the gloomy pines, bowing in
adoration before the emblem of the faith in which was his only
consolation and his only hope, is alike a theme for the pen and a
subject for the pencil....

He remained two days, half-stifled, in this foul lurking-place,[52]
while the Indians, furious at his escape, ransacked the settlement in
vain to find him. They came off to the vessel, and so terrified the
officers that Jogues was sent on shore at night, and led to the fort.
Here he was hidden in the garret of a house occupied by a miserly old
man, to whose charge he was consigned. Food was sent to him; but, as
his host appropriated the larger part to himself, Jogues was nearly
starved. There was a compartment of his garret, separated from the
rest by a partition of boards. Here the old Dutchman, who, like many
others of the settlers, carried on a trade with the Mohawks, kept a
quantity of goods for that purpose; and hither he often brought his
customers. The bo