itself here the Indian mission on the Willamette, the centre of so many hopes and prayers, became the seat of an embryo university re-dedicated to the numerous children of incoming whites.
In the midst of this toil and endeavor Jason Lee stood again at the threshold of his bridal chamber; a second wife lay dead, with an infant in her arms but the infant lived.
"' Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him/ "said the anguished missionary as he looked on the cold, white lips of his second love.
He crossed to the Sandwich Islands with the precious, flickering little life so strangely left in his hands; then came another blow, he had been superseded in the superintendency of the Oregon missions.
The waxen face of his child was flushed now with health. Turning, he laid the daintily draped morsel of pink and white in the arms of one who had received her from the bed of death.
"Take her back to Oregon," he said, "and keep her till I return." Then he sailed for Mazatlan, and struck across Mexico for the United States.
They knew he was collecting funds for the projected university that lay so near his heart, they knew that consumption had fixed its fangs upon his giant frame; still he wrote from his old home of the gray gables at Stanstead:
"Wait, brethren, and watch, some day you may see me threading my way up the Willamette in a canoe, as I used to do; "but the hand that penned it fell nerveless, the noble eyes closed in death. With the winged sail came the parting prayer for the little Lucy Anna,
"Brethren, under God I must hold you responsible to train that child for heaven."
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