Northern summer
simply "intolerable," the tropics and their environs rather allure me.
True, soldiers and old residents speak of places between which and the
lower regions there is but a sheet of non-combustible tissue paper.
Nevertheless, the writer who has lived in both places would rather, as a
matter of choice, summer in the Tropics than winter in New Hampshire.

Though this State, in which my hero passed the greater part of his holy
life, be the Switzerland of America, a grandly beautiful section, full
of picturesque rivers, tall mountains, and dreamy-looking lakes,
attracting more tourists than any other place in America save Niagara,
yet I will pass over its stern and rugged scenery to write of a man
whose titles to our admiration are wholly of the supernatural order.

To me, the finest landscape is but a painted picture unless a human
being enliven it. Just one fisherwoman on a sandy beach, or a lone
shepherd on a bleak hill-side, and fancy can weave a drama of hope and
love and beauty about either. Faith tells of a beautiful immortal soul
imprisoned in forms gaunt and shrunken; a prayer that we may meet again
in heaven surges up in my heart. The landscape is made alive for me in
the twinkling of an eye, and stretches from this lower world to the
better and brighter land above. Father MacDonald was for forty-one years
the light of a manufacturing town. And when I think of its looms and
spindles and fire-engines, and forests of tall, red chimneys, and tens
of thousands of operatives, Father MacDonald is the figure which
illumines for me the weird and grimy spectacle, and casts over it a halo
of the supernatural. Little cared he for the sparkling rivers, or
bewitching lakes, or romantic mountains of the Granite State; his whole
interest was centred in souls.

Some fifty years ago, Irish immigrants began to come timidly, and in
small numbers, to the little manufacturing town of Manchester which
rises on both sides of the laughing waters of the Merrimac. Here, in the
heart of New Hampshire, one of the original thirteen States, and a
stronghold of everything non-Catholic, these poor but industrious aliens
knocked at the gates of the Puritan[6] for work. Strong and willing arms
were wanted; and Bishop Fitzpatrick, of Boston, learning that some
hundreds of Catholics working in the Manchester factories were sighing
for the ministrations of a parish, sent Father MacDonald, in July, 1844,
to take charge of their spiritu