The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1926, Page 86

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86 THE LUTHERAN PIONEER. |

intense cold also hampers the work of missionaries
greatly, since the thermometer not infrequently
falls to sixty and sixty-five degrees below zero in
the period of darkness. In many respects these
Eskimos are in greater need than any race for
which missionaries are working. ‘Their environ-
ment is very uninviting. Their means of gaining
a livelihood is connected with great danger and is
always most uncertain. In summer missionary
work is hindered because the natives are compelled
to go from place to place to do their hunting and
fishing, while the continuous darkness of winter
makes work among them most difficult. The com-
munal life led by many tribes is not favorable to
morality. Lapses from grace occur quite often, as
the old impulses grow strong again. Progress is
slow, and much happens to discourage the mis-
sionary. But men of spirit and power and deep
consecration will by God’s grace be able to accom-
plish as much among the Eskimos of Alaska as did
Hans Egede and his successors among the Eskimos
of Greenland, where the evangelization of the na-
tives was completed in 1900. F. J. L.

Dying Pierre’s Lament.

Down in picturesque New Orleans, in the very

heart of the old French Quarter, in a narrow alley, -

there stood, some twenty years ago, a two-room
hovel in which lived a poor, crippled Negro woman
with her only son, a lad of twelve. The wontan had
once had a husband, the father of her boy, but he
had left her several years before for a younger and
stronger woman, one better able to provide him
with what he liked in the way of food, since she was
the cook of an old Creole family on Esplanade Ave.,
while the mother of his boy took in washing for
a livelihood.

Little Pierre — that was the name of the boy —

‘had found his way into one of our mission-schools

and had there proved himself ari apt pupil and an
obedient child. His teacher found it a pleasant and
grateful task to teach him. Hearing from his
teacher that our Church had mission-schools
for colored children in the country parishes of
Louisiana and also in other States, he one day
humbly expressed the wish to become a teacher
among his people where the spiritual and bodily
destitution of his race might be particularly great.
His teacher encouraged him in his desire to go out
with the message of God’s love and told the mis-

sionary of Pierre’s wishes. Strange to say, the other
children in the school found it quite natural that
Pierre should want to become a teacher, and not
one had a teasing word to offer him because of his
ambition.

Then, late one afternoon, just as the sun was

“making ready to sink into the green waters of Lake

Pontchartrain behind the screen of the densely
wooded cypress swamp which at that time girded
New Orleans, the missionary received a message,
delivered by an older schoolmate of Pierre’s, that
his immediate presence was greatly desired at the
little hut in the narrow alley, in the old Trench
Quarter. As he came to the door, a neighbor came
out to meet him, and he saw at once that something
serious must have happened. Pierre had been help-
ing the Italian fruit-vender at the corner and, while
handling a bunch of bananas, had been bitten by
a deadly tarantula spider. The old Creole doctor,
who lived near by and who made no professional
distinction between white and black, had just left,
having broken to the poor mother the sad news that
Pierre, her own beloved Pierre, her only worth-
while earthly possession, was dying.

With trembling lips the poor mother told the
missionary how Pierre had come into her drab life
twelve years ago as a ray of sunshine, how he had
grown up at her side to cheer her in her poverty and
sad experience with his father, and of his desire to
become a mission-teacher among poor black children
when he would have grown up, so that he might tell
them of the Savior’s love.

‘The missionary sat down at Pierre’s bedside and
told him once again of the wondrous love of God the
Father, shown in the sending of His Son, our Lord
Jesus Christ, into the world and then waited what
the sick boy might say. And oh! how shall I convey
to you in cold print that little Negro boy’s dying
words, so that they may reach your hearts as they
gripped the heart of the missionary that evening?
What do you suppose Pierre said as he lay dying
there in that hovel? What do you suppose was
Pierre’s chief concern as his heart was about to
cease its beating and his eyes were breaking in
death? This is what he said to the missionary sit-
ting at the side of his death-bed: “Yes, yes; and so
many of my people know nothing of this love of
God; and I was so wishing to tell them!”

For a few moments the missionary was stunned;
words would not come to his lips. Then haltingly,
in broken accents, he made a great promise to that
dying Negro boy. “Pierre,” he said, “I promise you