Untitled - Libr@rsi

1651 - 52] RELA TION OF 1650 -57 41
Their willingness was more to me than all that ;
and
the pious dispositions that I found in those poor
true food.
people seemed to me my
On the morrow, seven or eight families came from
another place, and I baptized their children ; the
Christians I prepared for Confession and Com-
m.union. I expected [97] to have much difficulty in
this, because there were a good many who had never
confessed themselves since their baptism, and from
early youth; but one and all of them, at the very
first opportunity, confessed themselves as well as if
they had been taught the Catechism like the French.
All had their rosaries, and knew their prayers very
well, for they had taught them to one another.
Here are some proofs of the firmness of their Christianity
and of their faith. The first is to be found
in their confessions. In order to remember their
sins, they brought various tokens, which served them
instead of writing: some had small sticks of various
lengths, according to the number and grievousness
of their sins ; others marked them upon bark, with
longer or shorter lines, according as they considered
them [98] more or less serious others on some ;
white
and well-dressed Moose or Caribou skin, as they
would have done on paper ; others still made use of
the beads of their rosaries. But those who marked
down their sins every day on their calendars, and
who confessed themselves by thus running over these
for a year, caused me much surprise. A good
woman gave me consolation she had ; gone down five
or six years before to Sillery, where Father Paul le
Jeune then was. She was instructed and baptized
there, and was compelled to follow her pagan husband
to a small tribe in which faith had not yet been