He towered and glowed; words fell melodiously from his lips; his gestures were compelling, his visage magnetic.

In conclusion he said: "Frenchmen, America is the garden-spot of the world and will one day rule it, as did Rome of old.

Where freedom makes her home, there is the centre of power!" It was in a little log church on the verge of a hummock overlooking a marshy wild meadow.

Westward for two thousand miles stretched the unbroken prairies, woods, mountains, deserts reaching to the Pacific; southward for a thousand miles rolled the green billows of the wilderness to the warm Gulf shore; northward to the pole and eastward to the thin fringe of settlements beyond the mountains, all was houseless solitude.
If the reader should go to Vincennes to-day and walk southward along Second Street to its intersection with Church Street, the spot then under foot would be probably very near where M.Roussillon stood while uttering his great sentence.

Mind you, the present writer does not pretend to know the exact site of old Saint Xavier church.