LIFE~WORK I 5

he stood before them, filled with a burning desire to give his life to the work, and already acquainted with the language, as a result of more than two and a half years of constant study, that they were all agreed to go on together with the work, and the Micmac Mission was organized on the 12th of November, 1849.

The first missionaries among the Micmacs, as is well known, were Roman Catholics, who had begun work almost as soon as the French first visited Acadian shores. These faithful workers learned the language and reduced it to writing, using for this purpose however, not let/m but c/mmrtw'x. The characters used were partly such as were found in use among the Indians, and partly invented at the time. In this manner a prayer-book was constructed for their use, which was almost their only literature for two hundred years. The book had never been printed, but copied by hand with immense labour, and committed to memory; the characters, each of which represented a word, serving as little more than aids to the memory. As soon as a rival missionary organization appeared in the form of the Micmac Mission, with Dr, Rand translating the Scriptures into Micmac, the Roman Catholic authorities hastened to improve their methods, and, as an offset, had this prayer-book printed at immense labour and cost, as several dies had to be cut, and types formed to represent all the words used. It is the work of a clever German priest, and is a marvel of literary skill and perseverance. I have almost quoted Dr. Rand here, and he adds: " But so far as use is concerned, to say nothing of its theological errors, it is one of the grossest literary blunders that was ever perpetrated.” Dr. Rand did not realize then that some of his own translations into Micmac which were published in Isaac Pitman’s phonetic method might be regarded very much in the same light by many critics of the following genera- tion, critics who also say that as the Indians could not read, it seems absurd to have prepared books for them, especially the Scriptures, since they were all nominally Roman Catholics, and would not be allowed to receive them, much less to learn to read them.

The labour of the next fifteen years was so exacting that few entries were made in the Diary, and these few were noted down hastily in Shorthand. If you, my reader, would know of the weary