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Biard's greatest difficulty was with the Micmac language. Young
Biencourt was his best interpreter, and on common occasions served him
well; but the moment that religion was in question he was, as it were,
stricken dumb,--the reason being that the language was totally without
abstract terms. Biard resolutely set himself to the study of it,--a
hard and thorny path, on which he made small progress, and often went
astray. Seated, pencil in hand, before some Indian squatting on the
floor, whom with the bribe of a mouldy biscuit he had lured into the
hut, he plied him with questions which he often neither would nor could
answer. What was the Indian word for Faith, Hope, Charity, Sacrament,
Baptism, Eucharist, Trinity, Incarnation? The perplexed savage, willing
to amuse himself, and impelled, as Biard thinks, by the Devil, gave him
scurrilous and unseemly phrases as the equivalent of things holy, which,
studiously incorporated into the father's Indian catechism, produced on
his pupils an effect the reverse of that intended. Biard's colleague,
Masse, was equally zealous, and still less fortunate. He tried a forest
life among the Indians 'with signal ill success. Hard fare, smoke,
filth, the scolding of squaws, and the cries of children reduced him to
a forlorn condition of body and mind, wore him to a skeleton, and sent
him back to Port Royal without a single convert.
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