iled roofs of St.
Michael's loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white,
green-shuttered building as silent as the grave--St. Michael's Mission,
where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway
to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the
mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off
beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr. and Mrs. Day, two of the best
known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the
convent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive
structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and
Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.

And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being
lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother
Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only
we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine
quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work
of Miss Drexel's missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to
the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians
into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians
with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are
to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins
alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to
post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the
Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad
enough for them to expand--14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land--and
against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father
Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or
three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers
among the Navajos. Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are
doing.

You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter
appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard
will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough,
brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine
yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There
is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated
scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made th