CHAPTER XXIV.
PICTURES OF SILVER.
Lord Selkirk's Colonists never had, as have seen, a bed of roses.
Adversity had dodged their steps from the time that they put the first foot forward toward the new world--and Stornoway, Fort Churchill, York Factory, Norway House, Pembina and Fort Douglas start, as we speak of them, a train of bitter memories.

Flood and famine, attack and bloodshed, toil and anxiety were the constant atmosphere, in which for a generation they existed.

Higher civilization is impossible when the struggle for shelter and bread is too strenuous.

Though the ministrations of religion were supplied within a few years of the beginning of the Colony, yet the Colonists were not satisfied in this respect till forty years had passed.

It was a generation before the Roman Catholic Church had a Bishop, who held the See of St.Boniface instead of the title "in the parts of the heathen." It was not before the year 1849 that a Church of England Bishop arrived, and it was two years after that date when the first Presbyterian minister came to be the spiritual head of the Selkirk Colonists.