legs creak the heart is good." The steamboat for the upper Missouri is to leave about the middle of next month, etc.
St. Louis University, March 30, 1864.
Reverend and dear Father Murphy:
This, to be sure, is rather waiting too long, to write to your Reverence. I will try no excuse; yourself must have made it already. Immediately at my arrival in St. Louis toward the end of the year, I found the ledger and day book gaping and calling for a closing. In order to appear decently before his Paternal eyes it took me about a month hard labor, cyphering and corresponding all the while, with the brethren scattered far and wide among the Osages and Potawatomies, in Illinois, in Wisconsin, in Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri. Next came my correspondence with Europe which required immediate attention. I wrote a letter of twenty-four pages, on my last journey and mission among the Indians, to Reverend Father-General, according to promise and as requested. I wrote another of twenty-six pages to my near and dear friends in Belgium, who believed that I was dead and buried and I wanted to undeceive them by a long rigmarole of facts and dates. And then came Father Terwecoren, anxious to have some chaff and mixture to feed his Precis Historiques, and I gave him thirty-two pages. You see, dear Father, I have not been idle; and all the time I was sickly, * * * so I have been pretty much kept within doors; and thanks, after all, to these little miseries, being kept in, I was allowed and able to put out and let loose my flying sheets, under the wings of steam, by land and by sea. I hope my poor and little narrations will reach their various destinations and will obtain some prayers and some means, for the poor and destitute Indians and their poor and zealous missionaries.