Claire!--the name you gave to
the beautiful strait beyond the "Symplegades" of your voyage, in gratitude
and in honor of the day on which your company reached it--has become
masculine in tribute to an American general. If your later praying to that
patron of seamen, St. Anthony of Padua, had not availed to save you from
the peril of the storm and you had gone to death in unsalted water, you
could hardly have been more completely forgotten. One has spoken now and
then lightly of the vow made by your commander, La Salle, to build a
grateful chapel to St. Anthony if your lives were saved during that storm,
forgetting that so long as the Mississippi runs to the sea there will be a
chapel to St. Anthony (St. Anthony's Falls) in which gratitude will be
continually chanted through ages for the preservation of the ship and its
crew to find haven in quiet waters behind Point St. Ignace.
It was there, at St. Ignace that we have seen La Salle, in scarlet,
kneeling before the altar, where Marquette's bones were doubtless by that
time gathered by his devoted savage followers, and it was thence that they
passed on to an island in Green Bay, the goal of their journey.
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