Memoir | Page 5

make with their rattles.
At last having walked over a great portion of these two thousand acres of land during the two weeks that we spent there, we left these solitudes and went down to Philadelphia. [Footnote: It was not deemed advisable to accept this property, it being almost entirely rock or marsh land. Besides which it was not suitable for one of our establishments, communication with other places being too difficult.]
Upon arriving at the town I told the Bishop how well-disposed were the people whom we had seen, and suggested to him to send some missionaries there, but he told me that he had none to send. If I had been free I would have returned at once to labor for the conversion of these poor people.
After a year of crosses and difficulties in the way of our discovering a suitable and convenient place for our establishment, we found ourselves in Maryland, an excellent province, producing all the necessaries of life in abundance. It is near the sea, and near to the Potoxen, and not far from the Potomac, two great rivers that add to its commercial advantages and render it more flourishing. We thought we had at last found the country in which to succeed in establishing our foundation. I consulted His Grace the Archbishop of Baltimore, and the reverend gentlemen of the seminary of St. Sulpice, and in accordance with their advice, I decided to go there and commence the work. Three more brothers sent from France by our Reverend Father Abbot, arrived at this juncture and joined us. We bought the land and set ourselves to work to cultivate it. We built a house for ourselves, which consisted of trees placed one upon another--what is called in this country a loghouse. It was small, being only eighteen feet long, and as many wide. We shortly commenced another which would serve as a chapel. The negroes of the country--who are all Catholics--gave us a helping hand in this work On arriving here we found lodgings in a private house near our clearing, in which we remained until our loghouse was fit to receive us.
Maryland produces an abundance of Indian corn, the cultivation of which is the chief work of the negroes. We subsisted almost entirely upon this food, with potatoes and occasionally bread; wheat, however, and buckwheat grow very well. We arrived there at the beginning of the year 1813, and during the winter we were occupied in cutting down trees and preparing the land for work in the spring, so that when that season arrived we had an acre and a half of land under cultivation. Part of this we planted with potatoes, another part was a garden where we sowed different vegetables, and we also laid out an orchard of young fruit trees. So far everything looked well, but when summer came, and while we were working most zealously we all fell ill with fever, and many of us were attacked with dysentery. I attribute these maladies to many causes,--first to the miasma or poisonous vapors exhaled from newly cleared land, then to the great heat and the bad water that we had to drink, which, though it had been pure enough in the winter and spring, had become bad by reason of a multitude of little insects that were perpetually drowning themselves in it. Another reason that contributed to render us ill was the number of different sorts of flies by which we were devoured day and night. There were among others two species of flies which in this country they call tics. Some of them are large, others are small, they fasten themselves to the skin and so penetrate into the flesh that one can only remove them by pulling them to pieces, even then a part remains and causes an insupportable itching.
We were dying one after another in this place when our Rev. Father Abbot on his way from Martinique, with several religious, arrived at New York. He summoned our community to him, as well as that of the Rev. Father Urbain, which a short time previously had united with ours, so that these three little communities now formed but one, under our chief Superior, who thus in a moment effected a foundation such as we had spent years of fruitless effort endeavoring to establish. Our new monastery was established in the country near New York, and did much good. Thirty-three poor children (almost all of them orphans) were brought up there, and were given all the necessaries of life, even to their clothes. Protestants came to see the good work and two ministers were converted. These gentlemen came sometimes to see us, and assisted at our religious ceremonies. They liked to converse with our Reverend Father Abbot, who won them by his