the Reverend Father De Smet, whom death, alas ! has just taken from us:
Despite the lustre which his apostolic labors shed over his person, and all the meritorious works which marked his life, this man of God displayed in all his conduct the simplicity of a child; he was kindly, candid, modest, and even showed the timidity of tender years, and the language of Tertullian may be applied to him, which he was wont to use in speaking of the old servants of Christ in his time: "They are old men, but at the same time they have the graces and simplicity of youth. The purity of their lives and the cleanliness and uprightness of their souls enable them to pre-serve to the close of their lives the springtime freshness of their earlier years." Our divine Master, my brethren, signalized this innocence and childlike candor as a characteristic token of the heavenly vocation, saying, " Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven."
Such was our regretted and venerable friend : he was at the evening of his life what he had been at the dawn of his career and at the noonday of manhood. It was- his rare qualities of rectitude and simplicity that won him the confidence,of so many friends, and it was the support of this confidence, with God's help, that enabled him to effect Such great things. Nearly fifty years of his existence were spent in the fulfillment of the mission for which God sent him into the world. Yes, my brethren, this zealous priest busied himself for a half-century, with the most perfect purity of intention, in the service of God, in saving souls, in propagating the glory of the Master of heaven and earth : - what a noble life ! And think that he expended his strength in behalf of the poor savages, those outcast, disinherited children of the desert, and this despite the fact that they were mere strangers to him, wholly unknown to him - he had never seen them, and would naturally feel no sympathy for them.Yet almost the whole of his life was passed in the service of the great cause whose invincible champion he